Arthur Haygarth, born 4 August 1825, was a useful cricketer himself, good enough to play for Gentlemen against Players on 16 occasions. However, his incredible contribution to the history of the game was the meticulous compilation of Scores and Biographies, amounting to 15 invaluable volumes. Arunabha Sengupta documents the life and work of this supreme cricket historian.
The early annuals
First there was Bell’s Life, with the workaholic William Denison as the main contributor. By his own admission, he never spent more than four hours in bed on any single night. Denison’s chronicling of cricketing events appeared in The Times too, but it was in Bell’s Life that the national seasonal cricket averages were printed for the first time. That was in 1840. And according to cricket historian GB Buckley, it was Denison himself who compiled it all.
In 1844 he issued the Cricketer’s Companion, which gave match scores and averages for the season of 1843. The first annual since the early renderings of Britcher’s Scores, the Companion was priced at 1s 6d.
In 1844 he also became the founding Hon Secretary of a newly formed county cricket club Surrey. For four years, Denison stretched himself to the full, as the Surrey Secretary, sometimes player and always a prolific reporter. In 1856 he died of bronchitis, but many suggest that it was actually overwork that led to his demise.
In the late 1840s, with Denison getting more and more involved with various activities, a young man succeeded him as the main cricket correspondent at Bell’s Life. This was Frederick Lillywhite. It was as the ‘cricket reporter to Bell’s Life in London that Lillywhite completed Lillywhite’s Guide to Cricketers in 1850. The section on how to play cricket was written by his father, the legendary William Lillywhite.
That was the start of the most popular of cricket annuals, and it continued till 1867 when it was merged with John Lillywhite’s Cricket Companion. There were three pages of ‘The Average Runs etc of Players’ with the batting columns comprising of ‘Matches, Runs, Averages each innings, Number over.’ The bowling columns were, ‘Matches, Wickets, Bowled, no. Caught, Caught from, Stumped from, Leg Before Wicket from, Hit Wicket from, Total, Average, Over.’
Frederick Lilywhite had a portable printing press, usually stationed at The Oval. But it also accompanied him to other grounds during major three day matches. Sales of the cards at matches was one of his main occupations.
In 1859, George Parr’s team travelled to North America. It was the first ever overseas tour by English cricketers. Lillywhite travelled as scorer. He supposedly drove the captain to distraction with his many complaints related to transporting the printing press. However, the result was the ever first tour book The English Cricketers Trip to Canada and The United States.
The collector of scores
It was in 1852 that Lillywhite met the 27-year-old MCC cricketer named Arthur Haygarth. It was supposedly during the publication of The Public School Matches by Lillywhite. The book was a small, hasty volume, full of scores of matches between Eton, Harrow and Winchester, and contained little more. There was no section for the averages.
However, it was scores of matches that Haygarth loved. By 1852, he had collected the scores of a spectacular number of scores of past matches and had taken great pains to keep his own documentation of scores updated.
By the time Lillywhite was producing his book on the tour of America, he had teamed up with Haygarth to plan a colossally ambitious publication. It was to be a multi-volume work containing the detailed scores of every ‘major’ cricket match. And Haygarth was the man with the inclination for this massive project.
Haygarth was born in Hastings in 1825. Educated at Harrow, he appeared in the school XI in 1842 and 1843. From 1844 to 1861 he played First-Class cricket for MCC as well as many of the principal matches at Lord’s. If we look at his records, it seems he was a capable enough batsman, and a decent bowler who did not roll his arm over too often. He was good enough to participate in as many as 16 Gentlemen vs Players matches.
However, his true worth lay outside the field of play.
Born to a wealthy family, Haygarth self-confessedly did not have to ‘enter or follow any profession or occupation’. “I was when young not allowed to pursue the vocation I wished, and the result was none at all, as I would not think of drudging at a profession which was not suitable to me in any way and which, moreover, I detested.”
He therefore spent most of his youth at Lord’s. From time to time he returned to Harrow to coach the boys. The rest of his time was occupied in researching cricket match scores and biographies of early cricketers.
Scores and Biographies
Thus was started the humongous saga of Scores and Biographies. The first one was published in 1862 under the title Frederick Lillywhite’s Cricket Scores and Biographies of Celebrated Cricketers. However, in the third volume, under a Harrow match of 1842 in which Haygarth did take part himself, the addendum was added:
“Mr Haygarth is the entire compiler of this work (F Lillywhite being the publisher), having been engaged solely for his own amusement, several years in collecting and arranging scores of all good matches that could be procured. Has also added all the foot-notes and remarks, which are appended to the various contests throughout the book. The biographical notices of all the famous cricketers (most of whom either had, or would soon have been forgotten, had not some account of them been transmitted to posterity through these pages) have also been written by him.”
The passage went on to explain that to get materials for his work, Haygarth “visited, in 1858, 1859 and 1860, many of the famous cricketing districts and grounds of former days, including Broadhalfpenny and Windmill Dawn at Hambledon, in Hampshire; the Vine at Sevenoaks; Penenden Heath, near Maidstone; Beneden; Bishop-Bourne, near Canterbury; Town Malling etc etc. All Clubs of note throughout the kingdom have been applied to for their scorebooks, and when obtained (most of them however not having been preserved), everything worth recording has been extracted In addition, a very large amount of money has been laid out by the publisher, who now has the opportunity to thank Mr Haygarth for his many years’ laborious and gratuitous task of compiling so much valuable information.”
The third volume was, in fact, published by the Surrey captain FP Miller. So was the fourth volume. By then Lillywhite was going through some serious financial problems. Finally, MCC took on the responsibility of publishing ten more volumes till 1878.
By the time Haygarth published his final volume, his labours had amounted to one of the greatest treasure troves for the cricket historian. The fifteen volumes of Scores and Biographies contain over 4,000 biographies and almost all the matches of any importance in the late 18th and 19th centuries
Volume XIV was published by MCC in 1895. The final volume, containing only biographies and an Index to the rest of the biographies of the previous volumes, was published in 1925, 22 years after Haygarth’s death, during his birth centenary year.
In 2003, to celebrate the death centenary of Arthur Haygarth, Roger Heavens published Volume XVI containing scores of 1879 and a few more biographies
Scrupulous chronicler that he was, Haygarth painstakingly listed a list of his sources for the scores. This was included in the very first volume. The names given were Epps, Bentley and Denison. He also had access to the Britcher annuals from 1793 to 1802, missing the earliest and the last editions. Haygarth also used the Marylebone Match Books from 1791 to 1860, although many up to 1825 were destroyed by a fire in the Lord’s Pavilion. He also used newspaper sources like Hampshire Chronicle (1772 to 1807) and Brighton Gazette (1819 to 1854). Besides, many of the biographies, if possible, were obtained directly from the player himself. Although, as some pointed out later, the professional players were prone to adjust their years of birth
With a sense of occasion, Haygarth used a piece by Rev. Henry Teonge as preface to the first edition. It spoke of cricket in the Antioch in 1676 and had recently appeared in Bell’s Life.
Apart from that Haygarth also reprinted two early versions of the laws of cricket and dwelled on the history and origins of cricket, but they were not nearly as valuable as his work on Scores and Biographies.
And perhaps the only shortcoming of his monumental work was the absence of tabulated records of either the cricketers or the teams. There is no average section in the biographies. One has to go deep into the raw data of matches and try to work up from there.
Haygarth continued to collect scorecards till 1898 before his health failed. His manuscript collection, detailing the old scores, is still in the Lord’s archives. He passed away in London in the early summer of 1903.
The 15 volumes of Scores and Biographies remain one of the most important historical artefacts produced in the game. Very few important matches of the 19th century escaped his attention. So meticulous was he that in later life he also complained once in a while that he had made his task too enormous by including too many matches.
However, the subsequent generation of cricket historians have been eternally grateful that he did so.