100 books like Six and Out

A book I found second-hand so it may not be widely available online. It is the quintessential anthology on the poetry of cricket dating back over 200 years and was described as a history in verse of the British national summer pastime. This was the book that first led to my interest in cricket literature and gives a meticulous history of cricket in poetry. All forms of cricket (club, village, schools, test, and international) are mentioned just as all forms of verse are used from doggerel, couplets, and single quatrains to longer narrative heroic poems on olden day cricket. The anthology shows Frewin’s great love of cricket and is a labour of love making it a masterpiece at the time it appeared in the 1960s.

The Cricketer’s Companion, edited by Alan Ross, is an indispensable compilation of cricket stories/prose, accounts of great players and the poetry of cricket. Ross was the literary editor of renowned London Magazine and a sports enthusiast. This anthology has something for everyone and is eminently worth dipping into. A rich and wide ranging choice by Ross, he was quoted as saying that “I aimed at two things – the creating of a book that contained the most essential and enjoyable writing on cricket, and one that gave as inclusive a view as possible of the great landmarks.” It was aimed for those shipwrecked on an island perhaps as it includes everything you would need to know about cricket to survive if you couldn’t get to a match.

Bonaventure and the Flashing Blade may not be available online as it’s another one I found second-hand. It’s written by one of the great West Indian cricket players Gary Sobers. Published in the 1960s it reads like a James Bond-Ian Fleming-type spy novel covering a youngster Clyde St Joseph Bonaventure at a computer company called Star Computers which has a cricket team that he plays for. Bonaventure makes headline news for inventing a way of playing cricket using a computer programme to smash over 200 runs and take 6 wickets for less than a hundred runs. Bonaventure finishes his training by completing his new programme for computers. Bonaventure is offered bribes by foreign competitors but refuses and is kidnapped by a “foreign power” but escapes.

Bodyline is a classic cricket novel based on a famous “Ashes” series in Australia during the Don Bradman era. The Ashes series (England v Australia) became legendary because of the bowling which became known as leg trap theory. Bowlers would bowl quick and fast and target the batsmen with short-pitched bowling. Australian batsmen were battered and bruised. The novel gives a blow-by-blow account of the series in Australia and the publicity and fallout generated from leg trap theory. Famously Australian batsman Bill Woodfull stated “There are two teams out there. One is trying to play cricket. The other is not.” It was a delight to find a literary novel on the subject. A must-read for understanding the evolution of the contemporary fast bowler in cricket. 

It’s a small world as they say. And the world of cricket is undoubtedly smaller as I know Gideon. This said, I would defy any serious appraisal of cricket’s historical literature to exclude one of his many excellent books on the game. 

I have, however, chosen his first which covers one of the most momentous events in the game’s global history: the creation of a new competition called World Series Cricket (WSC) by the Australian TV mogul Kerry Packer that, ultimately, led to the game’s renaissance. As much as the story, and the various characters involved, are superbly researched the story of WSC, as Haigh acknowledges himself, "could just as easily be a text on television economics, or marketing, or sociology, even anthropology." It remains, therefore, a very important book.

Although a book that bites off more than it may comfortably chew, Bowen’s masterpiece could not be ignored. As the first (and only) attempt to tell the history of cricket on a global scale, Bowen’s analysis may appear, considering subsequent research, a tad superficial in places. However, as a point of reference, it is a remarkable – unique even – book that has belatedly been recognised as a classic. 

Why the delay? Bowen, as the game’s first maverick historian, was not only adept at exposing the inferior scholarship that then passed for cricket history, he also took great pleasure in baiting the establishment and those who thought they were part of it. As such, it is upon his shoulders, rather than James perhaps, that fellow ‘revisionists’ Birley, Marqusee, and myself stand upon.

I love this book for its twists and jokes.

It’s full of little stories and you think at the beginning of each one that that it’s going to describe an interesting situation from a serious point of view. So you wait for the ending. But it suddenly turns at the last and gives you a totally unexpected comical twist.

I have heard a lot of cricket stories but I hadn’t heard the one about WG Grace before. This book is a diamond mine.

This first of Sassoon’s semi-biographical Sherston trilogy is a nostalgic amble along Edwardian English lanes, across its village greens, and over its hedges, tracing the early years of likeable, witty George Sherston before the Great War. It depicts a bygone era of pearl-clutching maiden aunts, rumbustious village cricket matches, and the rigours of the hunting field, in which enthusiastic recruit George is a terrific observer of the larger-than-life characters he encounters. He is winningly grateful to his horses for being so much better at it than him, from flighty first pony Sheila to trusty hunter Harkaway, and ‘bargain’ point-to-pointer Cockbird who is gifted to the cavalry at the book’s close, just as George accepts his commission to the Flintshire Fusiliers to fight in the Great War, saying farewell to his halcyon childhood. Sassoon, famous for his war poetry, is such a warm and intelligent writer that his affection for characters… show more.

This is a total gem of a book. It is a collection of all the best classic short stories about cricket that there are.

They have the Arthur Conan Doyle one called "The Story of Spedegue’s Dropper". This will always be my favourite. I roared with laughter at the Furniss Drawings in the book –  caricatures of WG Grace reprinted with permission from MCC. But besides these there are little gems collected from obscure sources, each of them brilliant in their own right.

Very rarely do you have anything so good in one volume. 

This is a book about cricket, one of the enduring passions of my life.

Specifically it is about West Indian cricket and life in the author’s home of Trinidad. James was a Marxist intellectual, which is unusual for a cricketer. He writes eloquently and insightfully about cricket and some of its leading characters of 80 years ago. He writes about class and colour in both the Caribbean and England, where he played and reported on cricket for newspapers.

My interest has also been in the British Empire and its impact. The overriding impression this book left with me was the “Britishness” of the people of Trinidad; how much the people had imbibed it. So when many immigrated to Britain in the 1950s it felt like they were going ‘home’, only for many to be ostracised.