Philip Thorn: “Beavering away unseen”

Richard Streeton on The Cricket Statistician—Part V

Philip Thorn, another all-rounder, was a leading contender in the ACS’s premier division from its earliest days. Near the end of his life he wrote slightly less for the journal than he had, preferring to beaver away unseen on worldwide cricketers’ birth and death details before astonishing us all with a booklet on what he had found. Whenever I read his prose pieces (as opposed to his many different lists), they left me wishing there had been many more of them. He must have had so much unused material from his exhaustive research over a lifetime.

In Issue No. 36 you are recommended to read his biographical sketch of the county cricketer who is among the claimants to have broken the bank at Monte Carlo; and in Issue No. 62, under the heading “Tragedy at Doncaster,” the account of how one of only two first-class UK cricketers to have had seven Christian names, George Arthur Adam Septimus Carter Trenchard Sale Pennington, was killed piloting a plane leaving a racecourse. The survivors included jockey Gordon Richards.

Mind you, Thorn’s lists were never dull either: details of cricketers’ wills, an ongoing series first seen in Issue No. 58, was a brilliant idea. His background details on minor counties was another instructive series. Having retired in Devonshire, I very much enjoyed Issue No. 59, in which he dealt with cricket in that country. I dine out on the fact that Devonshire boasts 70+ first-class players, and can cite many of them as the evening progresses! 

This article is adapted from the version which first appeared in the hundredth edition of The Cricket Statistician, published in Winter 1997. To join the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians, and subscribe to the journal, please visit our website: