Ernest Parker: Not a Love Story
ACS Book of the Week
Each week we spotlight a fascinating title from the vast collection catalogued in the Cricket Bibliography project, drawing on insightful (but not necessarily positive!) reviews from the archives of our journal. Today we bring you Ernest Parker: Not a Love Story (2024) by Max Bonnell and Andrew Sproul, reviewed by Roger Heavens.
The Howard Milton Award for Cricket Scholarship is a collaboration between The Cricket Society and the British Society of Sports History and was this year won by the ACS. The annual award, named after the long-time librarian of The Cricket Society, seeks to ‘recognise good cricket writing and research whether of an academic or popular nature’ and the winner is decided by a panel drawn from officers of both organisations.
This book is a fine example of why the ACS has won this award. Most cricketers and historians will never have heard of Ernest Parker, an outstanding Australian sportsman who was killed in the First World War. Parker was born in 1883 and was only 34 when he died in 1918. Sadly, he had not been called up to serve his country because of deteriorating eyesight, but presumably felt he should do his bit. Parker’s contribution to Perth cricket in particular was immense. At the end of his career, he held every meaningful batting record in Perth cricket – the most runs, the most runs in a season, the highest score, and the most centuries. He was the first player to hit a first-class century (116 v. South Australia) for Western Australia, the first to score a double hundred (246) in the Perth competition, the first to score two double hundreds, and the first to score one thousand runs (1902-3) in a Perth season. In addition, he was a fine tennis player, winning in 1913 what is now termed the Australian Open.
In keeping with the modern trend to laud sporting achievements in dedicated ‘Halls of Fame’, Parker was in 1992 inducted into the Western Australia Hall of Champions. 2019 saw him included in the Tennis West Hall of Champions and the Western Australian Cricket Association Gallery of Greats in 2012. Your reviewer is not sure that Mr. Parker himself would have been comfortable with this level of recognition because it seems he was a very reserved individual, but it is good that his contribution to the game has been thus celebrated.
That he did not ever feature in Australian Test teams is something of a mystery but a combination of living in the wrong part of the country, having a domineering father who tried to restrict his movements, and possibly even his eyesight problems might have played a part in this. This volume, the 60th in the ACS’s Lives in Cricket series, explores these thoughts in more detail and the reader cannot fail to be intrigued by this fascinating individual. A book to make you think!
Details of his first-class statistics are provided in the format of the ACS Famous Cricketers Series and are included in an appendix that also contains details of his achievements in Perth cricket and Australian tennis tournaments. Surrey cricket enthusiasts will notice that he played four matches for Surrey Club and Ground in 1908, once scoring 137 not out for them against Richmond.