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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I OWE three people a huge debt for their part in the writing of this book. To my wife, Angela Levin, I owe the idea in the first place, despite her admitted dislike of cricket. She also put up nobly with my absences while I was researching the book and with the many evenings and weekends when I shut myself in my study to write it. Tom Chesshyre carried out a great deal of valuable research for me; without him I could never have met my deadline, nor included so much detail about W.G.’s life.

I must also thank John Blake for re-issuing the book; my agent Jonathan Lloyd, managing director of Curtis Brown; Stephen Green, former curator of the Lord’s Library and Museum, and his assistant, Michael Wolton, for allowing me to use their facilities and for their courteous help and advice; Roger Mann for many of the photographs used in this book and for allowing me to see letters in his magnificent collection of cricket memorabilia at Torquay; Bert Avery, curator of Gloucestershire County Cricket Club’s museum; Clive Ward, formerly chief librarian, the University of my Bristol Medical Library; Pat Chetwyn, Barbara Ellis and Mark Hanks for their editing; Wendy Wimbush, for compiling the index; and Alan Watkins. I also used the British Library; the British Newspaper Library; the London Library; and Bristol Public Library’s Newspaper Archive.

I dedicate this book to my parents: to my mother, Agnes Low, who washed my cricket whites more times than I care to remember and has always been a stalwart supporter of my professional and sporting activities; and my late father, Walter Low, who instilled in me a lifelong passion for cricket and, like W.G.’s father, put up a net on the lawn so that he, my brother and I could practise to our hearts’ content all summer long. It gave me quite a jolt to realise that as W.G. lay dying in September 1915 at home in Mottingham, near Eltham, where London peters out and Kent begins, my father, then aged four, was living just up the road in Belvedere. I wondered if the little boy was awoken by the noise of the bombs dropped by a Zeppelin on Woolwich barracks which so upset cricket’s old warrior; and surely my grandfather, a keen club cricketer, must have taken the odd afternoon off to watch the ageing W.G. playing for his London County side at the Crystal Palace? The thought of grandfather enjoying a few of the twilight hours of the greatest cricketer this country has ever produced gave me a deep satisfaction.

Drawings of W.G. by Harry Furniss