Among many other things, a cricket book reviewer has to decide what to do about factual errors that they spot, and even grammatical errors and typos. And whether or not to be on a conscientious look-out for them.
In this piece, the full range of philosophies, or attitudes, applied on this site – and elsewhere – are outlined and contrasted. In essence, these reflect varying degrees of protection for the reader on the one hand and for the author/publisher on the other.
The names of the reviewers who are active on this site have been altered to protect the innocent…or guilty, depending on your point of view!
This article, which is divided into two Parts, lays out the different ways in which reviewers handle errors, ranging from those who seek perfection through to those who consider that identifying them is best left to those who acquire the book.
The purpose is not to try to assess their respective merits and drawbacks. After attempting to clearly delineate the varieties of treatment, readers are invited to adjudicate – ie to express their own preferences along the spectrum of options – so that a closer fit to book readers preferences may be created on this website.
Ultimately, no particular approach can be demonstrated to be inherently correct/incorrect or superior to any other: that is, with reference to logic and empirical evidence. This is essentially a matter of personal taste. It may be that readers’ tastes will show a strong concentration on one particular style of reviewing, or possibly reveal a wide spread of preferences.
After a characterisation of different approaches/attitudes – in which this author takes an agnostic position – it culminates in setting out a formal classification system from which readers can make their own choices, and are warmly encouraged to do so.
An initial observation is that very few, if any, book reviewers explicitly declare their hand. This emerges only through scanning a fair number of their respective pieces, although a strong streak of consistency in an individual’s attitude has been detected.
Reader Bias, to different degrees
At one extreme are two now departed reviewers. To introduce them: firstly, the borderline bonkers British army officer, Major Rowland Bowen who lived from 1916-78. Anyone who hacks off the lower part of one of his own healthy legs – doing so at age 52, either out of curiosity or due to a rare mental disorder – can hardly be termed completely sane.
PIC OF BOWEN
Secondly, the hero of the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians, Robert Brooke possessing a “disdain for errors” and AN “intolerance for shortcomings” in his forthright book reviews. The Telegraph newspaper obit referring to them as “famously uncompromising” on his passing in May this year, at age 85. Brooke was, though (like Bowen) a well-informed and perceptive critic (in the classical sense of the term).
PIC OF BROOKE
Brooke jointly founded the ACS organisation, he was the initial chairman for seven years, edited its quarterly journal – The Cricket Statistician – for just over a decade from 1973 through to 1985, and remained its chief book reviewer from inception through to 2004 when standing down in his mid-sixties. Like Bowen, he was a cricket nut’s nut! He simply owed his life to cricket. Brooke is now close to being deified: the ACS’s “father figure”…being “blessed with such a man as our co-founder”. A whole issue of the ACS journal is being dedicated and devoted to him this November.
As with Rowland Bowen, the perfectionist Brooke eventually found that publishers were reluctant to send out review copies to him. He delighted in putting the author right. Even in his warm praise of Peter Wynne-Thomas’ book, The History of Cricket: From the Weald to the World (1997), Brooke went to great lengths to point out various errors, and their context, lest he be thought of as being over-generous or a push-over.
One example of how vehement he could be is captured in reviewing Frank Tyson’s The Centenary Test (1977):
“He is so lacking in knowledge…the England player Emmett [in the first-ever Test match] was really Tom and not George…he is manifestly not qualified to write anything appertaining to cricket history…It is not possible to be tolerant of this appalling effort.”
Brooke was a difficult person to deal with…to tolerate. Many contributors to the ACS journal fell out with him.
Bowen, though, was even more trenchant in his treatments when he was editor of The Cricket Quarterly – the highly regarded scholarly journal that he founded – during its eight year existence (32 issues) from 1963-70. Dismissive strokes of his pen are typified by, “Another needless book”.
In assessing A.A. Thomson’s Cricketers of My Times (1967), Bowen became enraged by the author’s idiosyncratic acronyms, like O.B.L (“ordeal by Laker”):
“It degrades his work from that which could have had a lasting place in cricket literature to the same sort of level as novels read by house-parlour-maids.”
Reviewing Ronald Mason’s book, Sing All A Green Willow (1967):
“We can only consign it to that sadly growing pile of rubbish which the cricket publishers have been so bent on increasing.”
Bowen, with an increasing emphasis on whether a book gave good value for money, went in for sweeping condemnations, while often citing specific instances of errors in detail and asserting how wayward they were – as with Jack Pollard’s Six and Out (1964):
“Pollard cites an alleged total of 1,238 {runs} by Ulster against Macquarie but did he not know that no such total was ever compiled and the whole thing a hoax due almost certainly to F. Ironside…He quotes another piece which refers to the 1856 game between NSW and Victoria as the first inter-colonial, which it was not…A cartoon on p.38 is wrongly dated 1870…” (plus 15 more lines in similar vein)
Here are a couple of Bowen’s acerbic comments on books about the England versus West Indies series in 1963:
“Ian Wooldridge’s Cricket, Lovely Cricket is one of the brashest and most vulgar books on the game it has been the misfortune of this reviewer ever to read.”
On JS Barker’s Summer Spectacular: “…the best of a not very good bunch of books, but in saying that we want to make it quite clear that we are not saying very much.”
Some extracts found are certainly amusing:
“Gibson spoils matters more than once by imitating the snide taste of certain perverted BBC television programmes.”
“Much of John Clarke’s appalling writing in his newspaper has been toned down…though some of it still remains…he seems too ignorant a man for his views to be worth paying any attention to” (in commenting on The Australians in England, published in 1964).
In his review of Charlie Griffith’s autobiography, Chucked Around (1970): “There is not the slightest reason why any reader of The Cricket Quarterly should show any interest in this book, nor why we should in any way recommend it to them. Anyone with the smallest imagination can guess its contents, or could have written it.”
There’s this Bowen gem in considering The History of Kent cricket: Appendix for 1946-63:
“The latest Appendix is shoddily produced, badly laid out, and compiled carelessly by someone evidently too lazy or too ignorant to be able to ascertain the facts properly…It is not worth the money.”
Martin Chandler has written a highly informative, and most entertaining, biographical sketch of Rowland Bowen, published on this website in January 2020, the next month being followed by a detailed probe of his journal.
This article would be remiss without mentioning Peter Wynne-Thomas (1934-2021) and his obsessive desire for accuracy, as well as getting to the truth of some matter, both of which are revealed by much of what he wrote in his Cricket’s Historians survey, published in 2011:
- A Concise History of Cricket by SH Butler (1946) is said to be “depressingly inaccurate”. One of the examples being: “it states that the first overseas reference to the game was in 1670 (in fact, 1676) in Antioch.”
- At page 130: statistics compiler Roy Webber is roundly ticked off for treating matches played by Northamptonshire before 1905 and by Worcestershire before 1899 as possibly being of first-class status, rather than unequivocally not being so. Wynne-Thomas comments, in withering fashion: “One cannot think of any other ‘expert’ who would remotely believe either county were deemed worthy of such status before those seasons”.
PIC OF WYNNE-THOMAS
Wynne-Thomas’ comments on the historical accuracy of a number of works are often made in a vacuum, failing to say whether the errors he has picked up really are significant ones given the theme of the work and the specific context. Such as:
- Ric Sissons’ book, The Players: A Social History of The Professional Cricketer, 1988 (315 pages), commenting: “It is rather let down by a lack of proof-reading”.
- On Michael Melford, the Associate Editor of a large volume, The World of Cricket (1966), edited by EW Swanton: “His ability to ferret out historical errors in the work of the other contributors to it was minimal.”
- Commenting (at page 235) on the first edition of Pelham Cricket Year: “Its compilation was a mammoth undertaking and relatively error-free.”
- And on former cricketer Simon Hughes’ deliberately conversational style of history, published in 2009: “It serves as a gentle introduction to the game’s history, with not too many blunders.”
Directly related to the points just made about accuracy and truth for its own sake is an interesting observation by the Australian political writer and historian, Keith Windschuttle. This appeared in his article in The New Criterion journal of March 1997, titled The Real Stuff of History:
“Those academics who have written in the Rankean mould {following the German historian Leopold von Ranke} are notorious for being boring and soporific. Their focus on getting their facts meticulously right has been at the expense of recreating the grand sweep of the movement of history that less fussy, more literary writers like Gibbon, Macaulay and Michelet managed to achieve.”
Turning to Wolpert Pfeiffer, a reviewer on this site: he has a hound-like keenness for the task of spotting factual errors and, especially, typos which he finds most annoying to come across. He is meticulous in his searches: it is a badge of honour for him to leave no stone unturned.
Pfeiffer has acquired an ingrained habit of pointing out how many typos an author has failed to spot and correct on their manuscript. In the many reviews of his that I have scanned, which are informative and nearly always interesting, he doesn’t note whether or not the typos or factual errors in question are really material – ie whether they distort the intended sense of a sentence or paragraph.
Scanning his reviews going back the last five years, seven of Pfeiffer’s cricket book reviews have contained a reference to typos and/or factual errors. However, he usually draws attention to them in a general way, rather than giving the specifics. For instance:
In looking over one of Peter Lloyd’s biographies:
“Lloyd’s book is painstakingly researched, beautifully written and beyond reproach for presentation. For a tome {of many hundred pages}, I found only two typos and, as regular readers of my reviews will know, I pride myself on finding mistakes.”
And in reviewing the following:
The Test of The Century by Barry Nicholls:
“There were some bugbears. No index, or illustrations, plus some typos and minor factual errors which went through to the ’keeper.”
A Bolt from the Blue: by Pat Rodgers:
“I was considering awarding it four stars; however I noticed a typo, and in a book of just four pages that is almost unforgivable.”
Bradman & Bodyline by Roland Perry:
“The book itself is surprisingly free from typos – although unfortunately there is one faux pas that went through to the keeper. Perry has the two Indian players of the period K.S. Duleepsinhji and the Nawab of Pataudi as one and the same person. Thankfully neither features heavily in the Bodyline saga and I personally didn’t find it a distraction.”
The Pupil and The Master by Cardwell and Cattlin:
“The book is up to the normal high standards of both the publisher and the two authors and is a pleasure to peruse. I only noticed one minor factual error and a couple of typos.”
The Summer of Barry (Barry Richards, playing for South Australia) by Michael Sexton:
“I did notice one or two typos, which is surprising in such a short read.”
(44 pages of text of a little less than A4 size).
Neil Harvey: The Last Invincible by Ashley Mallett:
“Mallett writes in a laidback conversational style and is certainly not afraid to express his own opinions throughout. There are a couple of annoying factual errors that have crept in, but they certainly don’t detract from the quality of the narrative.”
Perhaps medical doctors will come up with a name for a chronic dread of encountering typos. Sir Toby Cook, a prominent screenwriter, has suggested one: Errorphobia Nervosa. Readers might like to offer their own versions for consideration in general usage.
Pfeiffer has had authors contact him and ask for the particulars of the errors found. He usually makes a list of them, which he keeps for a few weeks after a review goes up – just in case.
There have also been some books that he decided not to write a review about because he didn’t want to unduly offend the author.
Turning next to Richard Lawrence, the stalwart book reviewer of the ACS journal. He seems to be on the look-out for factual mistakes, though I have rarely found him identify them in searching a dozen issue going back to the start of 2022. However, I fell foul of him with my biography of the Leicestershire and England batsman, EW (Eddy) Dawson, self-published in 2009. Lawrence stated, baldly:
“The private printing has also allowed the intrusion of a fair number of grammatical and factual errors,” failing to name them or point out where they had occurred.
Whilst this didn’t depress sales, as it was put out as a limited edition of 120 copies (no other biography having been written on him before then, or subsequently), it was highly irritating. So I followed up with Lawrence, eliciting:
“I’ve had another look at my copy of the Dawson book, and found some annotations on page 89. Derbyshire and Hampshire also joined the County Championship in 1895 {I had mentioned only Warwickshire and Essex, along with Leicestershire, joining then}, and the number of sides in the competition is now 18, and has been since 1992” {I had said expanded to 17 counties in 1921 and has been the ruling number since}.
Concluding with: “Perhaps it would have been fairer to have said, a small number of factual errors.”
Hardly satisfactory, though better than receiving no elaboration at all.
