A plea for archives

Mark Rowe on preserving our heritage

by Mark Rowe 

Much of the basic material of English cricket history is, I fear, being left to rot, because county cricket clubs are not looking after their records. Never mind what becomes of the digital things that any of us produce.

I came to this conclusion in the autumn of 2017 after a less-than-systematic trawl of county council archives around England and Wales for my research into anti-apartheid protests and the cancelled South African tour of 1970. To go, roughly, from north to south: Yorkshire CCC’s records are with the West Yorkshire archives at Morley, as I knew when I used them for my biography of Brian Sellers. I don’t pretend that minutes of meetings make the best historical evidence; they certainly didn’t for the politics of the Yorkshire boardroom of Sellers’ time. Yet at least I could give the committee’s side of Brian Close’s sacking as captain in 1970—a fuller story than was in the press at the time, which nearly entirely took Close’s side. 

Nottinghamshire is an honourable exception, thanks to the nonpareil Peter Wynne-Thomas. In the Trent Bridge library, he not only let me read the county committee minutes; if I asked who a committee man was, Peter could provide details from memory or from newspaper cuttings that otherwise would have taken me hours of searching.

Leicestershire has deposited its records with its county record office, only allowing access before 1945. Glamorgan’s are at the Glamorgan county council archives in a new building next door to Cardiff City FC. (I had to take two trains across the city to view the South Wales old newspapers at a branch library, which I accepted as a quirk of local government.) As new is The Keep, between Brighton and Lewes, which houses Sussex CCC’s records.

Last, but not least, is the MCC library at Lord’s. You (or at least me, not an MCC member) have to mail beforehand to set a day to attend, yet frankly I am surprised that MCC lets researchers browse its old business. A cynic would say that about anything controversial—bodyline, for example—the MCC made sure it left no traces. A more practical criticism was that researchers could not access the online catalogue and had to rely on the librarian to say what the holdings were. If that was a way for the MCC to keep control of what it let researchers see, it’s no longer the case, as the catalogue is now on the MCC website.

The ACS committee has, rightly in my view, refused (politely) to accept collected papers of members. Without going over the arguments, the ACS does not have premises to store papers, let alone catalogue them and open doors to researchers; it would cost too much. Besides, county council archivists are professionals, paid by your taxes and mine. Why do county cricket clubs, or anyone with historical stuff they can’t look after properly, not use them?

You may already be asking: Why isn’t Lord’s the obvious site for the nation’s old cricketing stuff? It is. It has letters, bats, books, EW Swanton’s battered wartime Wisden—you name it. But I would direct you to the end of Richard Tomlinson’s biography of WG Grace, which points out that Lord’s lacks the space for such things. In fairness, so does the British Library, hence most of its stock is out of the way at Boston Spa in Yorkshire (quite near Geoffrey Boycott’s home, as an aside). You have to ask, as Tomlinson does, whether Lord’s has the budget or frankly the appetite to act up to its reputation as the steward of the game. 

My complaint is that too many county clubs are squandering their archives. They are literally letting the rats gnaw away at their files. When a staffer at The Keep handed me a Sussex CCC file, he told me it had been nibbled at by rats. It did look like it. We may assume that the average Sussex committee man of the 1970s was not the type to chew paper.

I see a double reason for county clubs to hand over their old documents, and scorebooks to their local council archive. First, that’s what the archives are for. They have shelving at the right humidity—and, I presume, something to repel the rats. They are open, although in recent years councils have drastically cut the opening hours. And they are good allies to clubs’ promotional efforts come anniversary time. County clubs, in contrast, are there supposedly for the interests of members; in practice, for the playing of professional cricket. 

I may have unfairly implied that all the counties are not looking after their heritage. I gladly name Lancashire and Somerset as two where volunteers are hard at work, preserving their club’s history. A drawback of such volunteer bodies (including, indeed, the ACS) is that they rely on the work of relatively few people of goodwill.

Let me tell you a story from 2009, when I was researching the Victory Tests. I heard about a Derbyshire scorebook of a local match against an eleven gathered by the Australian flying instructor and later Victory Tests ever-present Reg Ellis. I emailed the man holding the scorebook, near Derby. Because I did not answer his emails quickly enough—I work full time—he took offence and broke contact. No doubt he would tell a different story; his sort always do.

Contrast his attitude with Julian Lawton-Smith, the historian of Oxfordshire cricket, next to whom I sat at the ACS AGM lunch in 2017. I got talking about Brian Sellers’ debut as Yorkshire captain (and first-team player) at Oxford in 1932. Julian offered to look out the scorebook pages. Usually people offer such things in good faith and don’t get round to providing. Julian did. It so happens that the scorer’s work was not detailed enough to allow me to answer the intriguing and career-defining question of whether or how Sellers stamped on a challenge to his authority by the bowler George Macaulay and ordered him to bowl after lunch until he dropped. It could well be that the 1943 Derbyshire scorebook would have been no use to me either. Yet the study of history is more than words and numbers on paper. It is the experience of looking at those things, as a window to the past, and the sharing of such things with others with the same interest, even if we disagree in opinion. 

I query whether volunteers have enough time, money and expertise to look after their clubs’ records. Can they meet the British Standard for conservation of archive collections? Do they even know that such a thing as BS 4971 exists? Why, in any case, should county clubs, multi-million pound businesses, leave their archival work to volunteers (unpaid, I presume)? I am not saying council archives are perfect; but if anything county clubs are going backwards in how they treat their own past. Take Warwickshire: I have not been to Edgbaston for years. Once it had a large room open in breaks on match days, full of ground memorabilia. Where did that room go after the multi-million pound redevelopment? Where are the bats, the trophies, the photos? 

Yorkshire has the ideal. Headingley has a ground-floor museum, busy enough on match days, with cricketana, besides the bats and the like on the wall in the pavilion. Its documents it gave to Morley. Access isn’t ideal; you have to book days in advance for the council to fetch them from storage. No different from Lord’s, come to think of it. Once cricket records are inside a council archive, volunteers can do something with them; the record offices will probably be glad of the help.

This article first appeared in the letters pages of The Cricket Statistician for Winter 2018. Since hearing of our intention of publishing his letter here, Mark has favoured us with a postscript:

I am no longer a member of the ACS, and I have lost my appetite for study of cricket history. Even my interest in the game is not what it was. Hence I can only make general points and presume that the logic in my argument of six (!?) years ago is unchanged.

Local government in general and their archive services in particular are in financial crisis. Professional cricket, like other sports, is a business, and most businesses are profoundly uninterested in the past and their museum or archive materials unless they can see some way of making money out of them. Where does that leave the ACS?

It’s a compliment to the ACS that people should want to leave material to it. Either it does DIY archives (in a member’s garage?) or deposits stuff in a commercial self-storage unit (at a cost). Either way, what if someone wants to view the material (because what’s the point of keeping it and doing nothing with it)? Let’s imagine an ideal, that a member has a grand shed, with electric light, heat, and no damp or mice, and is agreeable to take anything. It requires shelves, and cataloguing. Opening hours must be set, if only ‘by appointment’. Any visitor will want a place to park, a desk, and a toilet (how happy would you be about letting a stranger into your bathroom?). The visitor will need watching, because what if afterwards stuff has gone missing? That’s why any archive has staff, a security camera system, written policies, a cloakroom—in short, all the facilities of an archive.

You may say, “Digitise things, as archives do do,” except that too requires equipment, and someone to do the scanning (either a volunteer’s time or paying someone commercially). Even if you then throw away the paper materials (because any archive or museum will tell you, they are running out of room) and offer only digital material, there too is outlay (expect to renew your IT system every five years) and risk (ask the British Library about cyber attacks). ACS members will see endless scope for a shambles. The ACS I knew either did things well or not at all.

To join the ACS (which still does what it does very well indeed), please visit our website.