We love you, Eric Midwinter

Farewell to our former president

Eric Midwinter, the great cricket historian and former President of the ACS, died on August 8. He was ninety-three and had been ill a short time.

A distinguished social historian and policy maker, Professor of Education at Exeter University and co-founder of the University of the Third Age, Eric was also a prolific and varied author, producing over fifty books on education, social reform, consumer advocacy, British comedy, literary history, football and cricket.

His cricket books, stretching back more than forty years, include a biography of WG Grace, a study of cricket during the Second World War, and a history of county cricket.

In recent years, his output for ACS has been remarkably prolific, wide-ranging and erudite, touching on issues of social status and cricket (Class Peace), how cricket has always reflected civil society (Cricket’s Four Epochs), and how the game transformed at pace in the 19th century in line with wider changes in society (Cricket’s Revolution). During the same period he also wrote books on ‘clown cricket’ and The Cricketing Dickens for Max Books.

A further ACS book on cricket and the church (Christianity at the Crease) will be published in November. Articles by Eric have appeared in three of the last four editions of The Cricket Statistician.

Eric became President of the ACS in 1997, holding the post until 2004 and playing the role with distinction. In a note read out at the ACS’s Golden Jubilee lunch in 2023, he spoke of his surprise at being asked to be President and recalled fondly his involvement with the committee and its officers.

In 2019, Eric received the Brooke-Lambert Trophy. Andrew Hignell’s citation—see below—described him as ‘the doyen of cricket historians and statisticians’.

Receiving the award, Eric said that he had always seen himself as a social historian with an interest in cricket, rather than a cricket historian. But for many, it has been his ability to draw on his numerous other interests and see cricket in a wider context which has made his contribution to the game’s historical literature so stimulating and original.

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Below is the citation for the Brooke-Lambert Trophy which Eric won in 2019:

According to the well-known Christmas carol, Midwinter is bleak, anodyne and tundra-like, a monochrome environment where snow has fallen, snow on snow. In contrast, the writings of the Association’s very own Midwinter are the polar opposite—full of warmth, colour and interest.

It is towards Eric Midwinter that I am directing these words in a citation for the Association’s prestigious Brooke-Lambert Trophy, awarded this year to the doyen of cricket historians and statisticians, a man who over the past couple of years has authored two outstanding books in the Cricket Witness series.

Class Peace and His Captain’s Hand on his Shoulder Smote are outstanding examples of the craft of one of the most prolific wordsmiths the Association has known. As statisticians, we have the likes of Ashley-Cooper, Frindall, Wynne-Thomas et al. As historians, we have the writings of a man who is perhaps the polymath’s supreme polymath. Someone who is at complete ease whether it is writing about the round ball or red ball at Old Trafford, the state of the country’s education system, local history, law and order in Liverpool, public transport in and around the London conurbation, the rights of pensioners, conjuring and comedy. The list goes on and on. I warmly recommend Jeremy Hardie’s book, Variety is the Spice of Life: The Worlds of Eric Midwinter, if anyone wants to know more about the diverse range of interests held by this year’s recipient of the Brooke-Lambert Trophy.

Eric Midwinter OBE was born in Sale, Cheshire in 1932. During his distinguished career he has been, in no particular order, a social historian and policy-maker, a professor of Education at Exeter University, and the co-founder of the University of the Third Age. From 1980 to 1991, Eric was Director of the Centre for Policy on Ageing, besides being Head of the Public Affairs Unit at the National Consumers Council. From 1977 to 1996, he was Chair of the London Regional Passengers Committee, as well as Chair of the Health and Social Welfare Board of the Open University.

Eric has written over 50 books on education, social reform, consumer advocacy, British comedy, literary history, football and cricket. For six years, he was Chairman of the judges for The Cricket Society/MCC Book of the Year. As far as our own Association is concerned, he succeeded Richard Streeton in 1997 as our President – a position he filled with typical gravitas and erudition until 2004.

To this outstanding list of achievements, I am delighted to add the words ‘recipient of the Brooke-Lambert Trophy’. In closing, I would like to turn to the recent words of Bernard Whimpress in the Journal of the Australian Society for Sports History. In reviewing Eric’s latest two works for the ACS, Bernard wrote:

‘Eric Midwinter is the most distinguished social historian to turn his hand to sports history… One of the pleasures of reading Midwinter on sport is to discover so much from other spheres. His effortless employment of social and literary scholarship, translated with warm humour. Class Peace and His Captain’s Hand are a brilliant addition to his oeuvre and a sparkling contribution to cricket history and literature.’