ERIC CLARE MIDWINTER, 1932 TO 2025
It was typical of our distinguished member Eric Midwinter, who died on 8 August aged 93, that he arranged for the family’s notification of his passing to be accompanied by his Chrissy Chrossy Number Fifty-two CROSS-WORD, a form of the art requiring the solver to reach answers by first thinking of two separate but joinable words. Like mid and winter for example. Down to earth and warm-hearted, Eric became a strong and supportive friend and mentor to many. He saw the best in others and was encouraging of those of us with lesser talents.
Eric had a brilliant and restless mind and an extraordinary work ethic. A grammar school boy from Sale, he won a half day holiday for his fellows when becoming the school’s first to go to Cambridge University. His early and lifetime addictions included Manchester United football and Lancashire cricket. He was a polymath: a policy-maker in social care; a force in education not least as co-founder of the University of the Third Age: a man of ideas and convictions freely shared; and an author with a prolific output across multiple subject-matters. His books, some 60 at the last count, included social history, politics, education, consumerism, literature, music hall, comedy and – luckily for us - cricket and football.
It was to cricket’s benefit that Eric turned his mind and pen to the sport and its wider contexts, and the Cricket Society’s great fortune that Eric worked with us, notably by contributing seemingly endless streams of articles to successive Journal editors and speaking from time to time at member meetings. His last evening with us was in 2022 at the Civil Service Club about his book Lords of Mischief: Clown Cricket and Dan Leno. Eric and our former Chair David Allsop were both keen members of The Savage Club - an irreverential gentlemen’s club dating from the nineteenth century – and until health issues took their toll they hosted cheese and red wine lunches at which cricket was invariably to the fore with opportunities taken to promote our Society.
Eric chaired the judges of The Cricket Society’s book competition for six years up to 2009 when it became The Cricket Society and MCC Book of the Year (BOTY). I met him properly in 2006 when I took over as the BOTY administrator. The year before he had stepped adroitly aside when his Red Shirts and Roses: The Tale of the Two Old Traffords came in strongly on the rails to win the prize. His The Cricketer’s Progress: Meadowland to Mumbai was Wisden 2011’s choice.
Eric was President of The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians between 1997 and 2004 and the ACS has published several of Eric’s shorter volumes. Working to the last, Eric’s final book – Christianity at the Crease – is expected in November. A fuller piece about Eric Midwinter and his work will appear in our Autumn Journal, and I would be pleased to hear from members wishing to share memories of him.
Nigel Hancock
