Author: Stephen Saunders
Published: 1 January 1997
Review by Dr. D Allen, HCCC Archivist:
Very comprehensive and clearly organised bibliography which updates the earlier work by Desmond Eagar. Lists all significant county publications plus much smaller and privately published ones including a section on Hambledon and Club Cricket. An updated version was published some years later.
Introduction (from publication):
“Having been born and bred in Hampshire and been a member of the County Cricket Club since my school days, I have always maintained a keen interest in Hampshire cricket.
“My collecting habit started with the issue by the Post Office of a set of stamps to commemorate the centenary of the County Championship in 1973 which led me to research which other countries had issued stamps featuring cricket. This was before the days of specialist thematic dealers producing lists of all known cricket stamps and involved thumbing through catalogues in public libraries and trawling dealers to find the items identified The challenge of researching and achieving a full collection was extremely satisfying.
“After this I started to collect cricket prints. However, being a far more extensive field, the subject matter narrowed as I became more involved and knowledgeable, due firstly to the volume of material and secondly financial constraints. During my research, I noticed that very few prints related to Hampshire or theCounty’s players and I eventually restricted myself to collecting these. Details of these can be found in the Appendix.
“The logical follow-on from prints was books.
“Despite having moved house several times, I still had the Hampshire Handbooks from my early membership days. Reading through these I came again to Desmond Eager’s articles in 1964 and 1965 on the Hampshire Handbooks and decided to try to accumulate a complete series. This proved to be a real challenge and one which, currently, has not quite been achieved.
“Desmond Eager also wrote an article in the 1951 Handbook entitled, ‘A Cricket Library’ which was updated by a ‘Reader’s Guide to Hampshire Cricket’ in 1964. These formed the basis of expanding from a series of Handbooks to a Hampshire Cricket Library and were supplemented by scrutinising numerous catalogues and following up on references given in various publications as they were added to the collection. This library now contains in excess of two hundred items and as it grew I made lists of those items on the shelves and those identified but not located. As there has not been any update to Desmond Eager’s Guide of 30 years ago, I decided to formalise these lists into a ‘Bibliography of Cricket in Hampshire’.
“It is extremely difficult to draw the line between publications that can be considered to be directly relevant to cricket in Hampshire and those where its mention is either incidental or for completeness of the volume. In this context those publications on the history of the game, or generally on the County, where passing reference is made to Hampshire or Hambledon cricket, have been excluded. Similarly excluded are statistical annuals and other publications covering all counties or schools.
“One particular area that has been excluded is ‘services’ cricket. With the Royal Navy at Portsmouth and the Army at Aldershot, this may appear to be a notable oversight but I have considered that, although the services were not, the players were transient.”
