A History of Cricket at King Edward's School, BIrmingham

PREFACE The difficulties involved in writing a work such as this, as indeed any history of a localised or specialist nature, are twofold. First, for all but a mere half-dozen years, I have written of events that I have not experienced at first hand, but have only learnt about by reading. Second, I have written on a topic that is only of interest to a very few persons. My task has been to surmount these two obstacles and produce a history of KES cricket which is, above all, interesting to Edwardians – and I hope others – who have any interest in cricket. There are comparatively few sources of information available to me. Even information of the most basic kind is scarce. Scorebooks have not been kept, but have disappeared annually with the captains, or otherwise; the only season-by-season records are in the School Chronicle, and are not uniform in their consistency. Certain other records are available in the Old Edwardians Gazette and in Wisden. These provide the bare bones in the form of records and statistics; but other, more useful details are harder to come by. Some are to be found in the School Chronicle and in the School History by TW Hutton, and may be supplemented by oral information. The problem is to convert all this second-hand information into history, and this I have tried to do. Readers will be able to judge how far I have succeeded. PRH Solihull, 12 April 1967 As will be evident, this work was originally written more than fifty years ago, based on research that I did while at School. Since then, I have returned to this subject twice, first to overhaul and update the records and statistics that were originally included with it (now appearing in a separate document), and more recently after I discovered that the Cricket Archive website (cricketarchive.com) contained many scores of KES matches that I had not seen before because they had not appeared in the School Chronicle, most likely having been contributed by our opponents. I have now added to this database all the scores of KES matches that I have found in the Chronicle or discovered from other sources. I could not have done this without the assistance of the digitised version of the Chronicle supplied to me by the KES Foundation’s archivist, Alison Wheatley. Two documents that resulted from this exercise – a list of matches played between 1846 and 2016, and records and statistics for the same period – are now in the Foundation’s Archives. Thinking that my History might also usefully be added to the Archives, I have now produced this new edition, which has allowed me an opportunity to correct errors that appeared in the original version. I have also been able to expand the text here and there, in the light of the extra match scores now available and the consequent revision and elaboration of the records and statistics that I have undertaken. However, subject to one qualification stated below, I have not attempted to update it in any other way. My interpretation of what happened remains much as it was in 1967. Nor have I attempted to