The Shorter Wisden 2013 (8 page)

A preparatory sketch from a Ravilious scrapbook has another cricketer in the frame, dressed in top hat, waistcoat and bow tie, with a marquee in the background. Although he wrote many letters to
family and friends, he appears never to have explained the inspiration behind the engraving. One theory is that he gained it from a pub sign in Sussex, the county in which he spent most of his life
and which provided the backdrop to some of his greatest work, including watercolour landscapes of his beloved South Downs. The Cricketers Arms in Berwick, near Firle – a village where he
spent much time – has a top-hatted Victorian batsman on its sign. And the one at the Bat and Ball Inn in Hambledon, admittedly some 60 miles away in Hampshire, also depicts a batsman and
wicketkeeper.

But Anne Ullmann, Ravilious’s daughter (he also had two sons), insists: “My father soaked up ideas for work wherever he went, but
never
copied – and I don’t
believe for one minute that the design was a copy. He may have seen an inn sign with cricketers or, as the sketch suggests, he may have watched a match played in mid-19th century costume. Or he may
just have been playing around with ideas for the engraving. But what remains is one hell of a cracking design, and I pray it may represent
Wisden
for many years to come.”

Whatever the origin, we do know for certain that Ravilious played cricket, if at a lowly level. In 1935, he wrote of turning out for the Double Crown Club, a dining club for printers and book
designers, against the village team at Castle Hedingham in Essex, where he lived for a while. He said the game went on “a bit too long for my liking and I began to get a little absent-minded
in the deep field after tea”. He made one not out in defeat, and bowled a few overs. “It all felt like being back at school, especially the trestle tea with slabs of bread and butter,
and that wicked-looking cheap cake.” He went on to record the comment of the Double Crown captain Francis Meynell that his bowling was “of erratic length, but promising, and that I
should have been put on before. Think of the honour and glory there.”

In another game at Castle Hedingham, with his wife Tirzah (a talented artist herself) “in charge of the strawberries and cream”, Ravilious talked of hitting three sixes. “It
is, you might say, one of the pleasures of life, hitting a six.”

A shy man, but amusing and invariably cheerful, Ravilious enjoyed the Bohemian company of his artistic friends, who talked of his “Pan-like charm” and the sense that he was always
“slightly somewhere else” – no doubt sketching in his head at fine leg, whistling “Better than a Nightingale” below his boater, oblivious to the ball heading his way.
Yet it seems no other cricket theme danced on his easel or wood block. Instead, there is a rich and varied output of beautifully observed landscapes, street scenes, ceramic designs for Wedgwood
– including a mug to commemorate the coronation of King George VI – and, in his last years, images of war. The
Daily Telegraph
called his death “the greatest artistic
loss Britain suffered in the Second World War”. And in 2011, the art critic of
The Observer
, Laura Cumming, called him “the lost genius of British art”.

Ravilious saw only five of the Almanacks to carry his engraving. Yet his work – in many ways a distillation of Englishness – lives on.

Rupert Bates, a sports and property writer, is Eric Ravilious’s great-nephew.

COLLECTING WISDEN

P
ATRICK
K
IDD

Like kisses and cars, everyone remembers their first
Wisden
– and few people stick at just one. Who does not feel the thrill of dipping into an ancient volume
and reading of tales, famous or obscure? I still recall the delight when I bought the 1977 Almanack, looked up what Essex were doing on the day I was born, and saw that, not only did a young G. A.
Gooch, my boyhood hero, make a century, but their opener, who made 40, was my future form tutor, M. S. A. McEvoy.

As a
Wisden
collector, though, I am a rank amateur, with a set going back no further than 1950. I look with envy at those who own eight yards’ worth of Almanacks, from the fragile
early softbacks, through the chocolate hardbacks, the salmon-pink cloth covers and, since 1965, the familiar yellow and brown dust jackets, whose colouring always makes me think of streaks of yeast
extract over the lid of a Marmite jar.

To build a full collection now, especially in good condition, is costly. Tim Knight, of Knight’s Sporting Auctions in Norwich, estimates a complete set would cost £300,000, but could
fluctuate wildly, depending on quality. “Condition is everything,” he says. “I’ve seen 1900 hardbacks differ by a couple of thousand pounds.” Knight says the type of
book also matters: “In 2008 we sold an 1896, the first year
Wisden
was in hardback, for £22,000. Exactly the same book with soft covers can be bought for a few
hundred.”

Sir Tim Rice, the lyricist, bought a complete set from Surrey cricket bookseller John McKenzie in the early 1970s for £750, using what he calls “my ill-gotten gains” from the
musical
Jesus Christ Superstar
. “I was fairly relaxed about such a serious investment,” he says now; the
Sunday Times
described the purchase as “little short of
insanity”.

Few in those days cared about collecting a shelf-load of reference books. McKenzie had bought his own full set at Sotheby’s a year or two earlier for £420. “I keep them out of
sentimentality,” he says. “They’re the only ones I won’t sell.” He was aware of one set around that time, not complete but with every
Wisden
from 1879, going
for just £66.

“People just didn’t want to know about cricket,” McKenzie says. “Booksellers would store them in warehouses.” In 1981, after the
Wisden
market started to
boom, he optimistically tried to sell an entire set for £10,000. “I couldn’t get a bid. Now you can get that for one edition.” His 2012 catalogue featured a rebacked 1869
for £18,000, an 1866 with original soiled wrapper for £12,000, and a 1916, which contains the obituaries of W. G. Grace, Victor Trumper and the poet Rupert Brooke, for £8,000.

The first
Wisden
cost one shilling. The same book would now set you back at least £20,000 – or almost £180 a page. The 1875, which had a shorter print run than
previous years, is also highly cherished. Wartime Almanacks are at a premium, especially 1941, when only 800 hardback copies were printed. Of the post-war years, 1971 can sell for up to £100
because fewer copies were printed: a paper shortage didn’t help, but it was also thought England’s series the previous summer against a Rest of the World XI, who stepped in for the
ostracised South Africans, would entice fewer readers.

The
Wisden
market peaked from 2004 to 2009. “That was very buoyant,” Knight says. “It has maybe dropped a little, but the market is holding up well. If anything is
recession-proof, it may be
Wisdens
.”

The collectors are a curious fraternity: obsessive, pernickety and knowledgable but also, in the main, supportive of each other. Many seasoned collectors mentor newer members of the tribe,
helping them to understand what to pay and where to find rare editions.

Chris Ridler started collecting in earnest in 2005, when a family member gave him a 1950 hardback to supplement a collection he had built back to 1976. Early on, he sold some shares and went to
an auction with £60,000 to spend. “I was outbid on everything but an 1891,” he recalls. After that, he made it his business to study the market properly. “The most important
part about collecting is knowing which books are rare,” he says. He also advises never to buy a hardback after 1965 without a dust jacket: “You’ll only end up buying the original
one day, and then have a spare that no one wants.”

Ridler completed his full set in September 2010 with the purchase of his second 1875 copy. He had sold the first, when there were still a few gaps in his collection, for a record eBay price of
£15,000 to fund a website,
www.wisdenauction.com
, where collectors can seek and trade copies. He upgrades his copies when he finds better-quality
ones. “I went from paperbacks to hardbacks, then to those in top-notch condition,” he says. A lot of the early ones were rebound, and Ridler is ten original covers short. “They
were really fragile,” he says. “The books were only 1cm wide and they fell apart.”

He envies those who started earlier and could get bargains. Ridler, who has studied dealers’ catalogues going back 35 years, says that in the early 1980s one dealer sold a softback 1896
for £65 and a hardback of the same year for £90. “Today a paperback would be worth £400 and the hardback £25,000,” he says. “You wouldn’t want to be
the person who chose to save £25.”

One of his favourite copies is from 1941. He had been bidding on this rarity on eBay but, as the auction neared its end, he had to attend an antenatal class. Asking his mentor to help out,
Ridler instructed him to go up to £650 and was delighted to win the auction for £620. The book was then lost in the post.

Devastated, Ridler did at least get his money back, but for his next birthday his wife, Catherine, found another copy as a surprise present. The record fetched at auction for a 1941 was
£2,300 in 2007, but Ridler will not sell the copy his wife bought, even though he has since acquired a better-condition one for £1,200. Ridler needed a friend again to complete his set:
he was umpiring in a club match as the 1875 edition was auctioned. At tea, he switched on his phone to discover he had paid £12,000. An 1875, rebound without covers, sold in December 2012 for
£22,500.

Sometimes people pay a premium for sets with special provenance. Sir Pelham Warner’s bound set, given to him by Wisden – the company – as a wedding present, sold for
£7,800 at auction in 1980, while W. G. Grace’s set of the first 38
Wisdens
fetched £94,000 in 1996. The set in the MCC library was acquired in 1944 from the estate of Sir
Julien Cahn, the eccentric philanthropist, who had been given the books up to 1931 by cricket historian F. S. Ashley-Cooper.

Occasionally you come across individual Almanacks that once had an important owner. The most famous is E. W. Swanton’s 1939 edition, stamped “not subversive”, that sustained
him for three and a half years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, and is now in the Lord’s museum.

Ridler’s collection includes editions owned by John Arlott (1864) and George Duckworth (1933), a 1936 signed from Wilfrid Brookes to Norman Preston (the seventh and tenth editors), and a
1941 signed from Hubert Preston (the ninth) to a young Reg Hayter, the cricket journalist.

There are
Wisden
collectors all around the world. Darren Harold from New Zealand says the internet has made it possible for him to build a collection, although the postal costs are
immense. “Being overseas, I can’t just pop into a second-hand bookshop to browse, and there are very few
Wisden
collectors in New Zealand, so most of my buying is from the
UK,” he says. Like Ridler, he uses a mentor.

Harold admits that, when he was young and devouring biographies of his favourite cricketers, he had no interest in the Almanacks: “I figured
Wisdens
were bed-time reading for
British anoraks. But one day I flicked through a copy at a book sale. I was hooked – the words brought contests to life.”

He began his collection with a boxful bought off an elderly man who was going into a rest home, and he now has a complete set back to 1921. He is less worried about quality, though.
“It’s about the cricket for me, not the cover,” he says. The oddest volume he owns is a 1963 centenary edition bound in psychedelic pink.

Everyone has their own motivations for building a collection, but perhaps the most important advice Ridler can give a collector is to actually read the books, which he does regularly, even
taking them on flights. “After completing my set, I picked up my 1864 and started to read it,” he says. “It was quite nerve-racking to open a book that cost £11,000, but it
seems a waste just to keep them on the shelves.”

Patrick Kidd writes for
The Times.
He bought his first
Wisden
in 1995.

1864 AND ALL THAT

H
UGH
C
HEVALLIER

The original
Wisden
was an eccentric little volume. Only 85 or so of the book’s 116 pages were devoted solely to cricket. In the main, these contained scorecards
from remarkable matches played over the previous 50 or 60 years. The first card that readers encountered, on page 27, was of a match from 1855 – nine years earlier – in which the Earl
of Winterton’s Shillinglee side dismissed the 2nd Royal Surrey Militia for nought. Also in
Wisden’s
first offering were the Laws of Cricket, dates of various players’
first games at Lord’s, and “long scores” (centuries) hit in “great matches” since 1850.

But the volume’s principal eccentricity lay either side of that crickety core. The first 12 pages were taken up by a calendar of notable dates and phases of the moon, so justifying the
term almanack (in which such information was traditionally found). Some of these calendar entries had a cricketing bent: February 15 recalled a match on ice in 1838, while modesty did not prevent
July 15 celebrating the day “John Wisden bowled all the wickets in the 2d in. of the South, in the match at Lord’s, North v South” – though there was not enough room to
mention it had happened in 1850. Some had little sporting connection: “Papal supremacy destroyed by Act of Parliament, 1559” declared April 8. Sometimes it was hard to tell:
“Israel Haggis, of Cambridge, b. 1811”, read January 23.