Peter Wynne-Thomas: Half a century and more of researching cricket

 
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by Mayukh Ghosh

One day the door opened and an elderly man who introduced himself as a relative of Shrewsbury came in. I asked him, " Have you got any old letters in the attic? "

He said, "Yes!""

Peter Wynne-Thomas was waiting for two years. He did everything to find someone who could help him with information about Arthur Shrewsbury's family.

Wynne-Thomas capitalised on the letters by a determined digging out of all the other surviving relatives, enabling the construction of the definitive Shrewsbury family tree in his book 'Give Me Arthur'.

He has always been intensely dedicated to cricket history with rigorous and scholarly standards.

In 1970, he was all set to take the editorship of 'Cricket Quarterly' from Rowalnd Bowen.

But then Bowen wrote his book on cricket history and suddenly thought that the journal was too personal a project to be given to someone else.

In the free time Wynne-Thomas conducted a Haygarth-esque survey to find more about old Nottinghamshire cricketers. He made a book out of the material and it won the Cricket Society award in 1971.

In 1973, he, along with Robert Brooke and Dennis Lambert, played a huge role in the founding of the Association of the Cricket Statisticians. The impact the ACS has on cricket research all over the world is huge. Wynne-Thomas deserves a lot of credit for that.

He has been a cricket researcher for over fifty years and one of the very few who have been able to support themselves and their family by doing nothing else.

And for all these years he has been the go-to man for anything related to Nottinghamshire's rich cricket history.

Eric Midwinter once told me a bit about Wynne-Thomas:

" I was at Trent Bridge watching England getting battered by the W.Indies (1995). I saw all of a gloriously classic attacking century by Brian Lara. Then I went in search of Peter. There he was, tucked away in his library, preparing an index of the Cricketer magazine with never a thought for the cricket happening a few yards away...."

Peter Wynne-Thomas was born on 30 July 1934.