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Cricket Society Latest News and Announcements

• Booking open now for West Indian cricket symposium

Booking is open now for an exciting event that the Society is hosting in partnership with the British Society of Sport History and the Institute of Historical Research. 

On Friday 2nd February the distinguished West Indian cricket historian Clem Seecharan will be in conversation with David Woodhouse at the home of the IHR in Senate House, London. Other prominent West Indian cricket writers are sure to be in attendance for what promises to be a stimulating afternoon of cricket debate.

Tickets are free but you need to register in advance with the IHR here.

• New YouTube interview with Christopher Sandford

Head over to our YouTube channel to see Nigel Hancock interview Christopher Sandiford about his latest book, 'Laker and Lock' on the great spin duo of the 1950s. There are many other events on the channel, including interviews with David Lloyd and Ted Dexter.

• Committee of the ICEC receives the Society's 2023 Ian Jackson Award for service to the spirit of cricket

At the Society's annual National Cricket Awards among the winners were the Committee of the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket. The ICEC's Chair, Cindy Butts, and Committee member Brendan Barber, received the Award and thanked the Society for its support of their landmark report. You can read all about the other award winners by clicking through to our awards page.

• Distinguished historian of cricket Clem Seecharan has today been announced as the winner of the 2023 Howard Milton Award for Cricket Scholarship.

Distinguished historian of cricket Clem Seecharan has today been announced as the winner of the 2023 Howard Milton Award for Cricket Scholarship. The Award is given jointly by The Cricket Society with the British Society of Sport History and recognises a body of work on cricket history.

Professor Seecharan has written extensively on West Indies cricket, as well as histories of his native Guyana, including a major study of its Marxist leader, Cheddi Jagan, ' Cheddi Jagan and the Cold War, 1946-1992'. His 'Muscular Learning: Cricket and Education in the Making of the British West Indies at the End of the Nineteenth Century' (2006) is a landmark in the history of early West Indies cricket and society, and has subsequently become a platform for much scholarship in the field up to the present day.

He is also the author of 'From Ranji to Rohan: Cricket and Indian Identity in Colonial Guyana, 1890s-1960s' (2009). He compiled, edited and annotated 100 essays on sport by the eminent Guyanese poet, public intellectual and Wimbledon player Ian McDonald, 'An Abounding Joy (2019)'.

Clem’s 'Hand-in-Hand History of Cricket in Guyana', an unexampled ongoing chronological history of cricket and its social context, has so far reached two volumes covering 1865-1914. He is working on Volume 3. His latest book, 'Joe Solomon and the Spirit of Port Mourant', is a biography of the oldest living West Indies Test player, and describes his peculiar role in Frank Worrell’s team, in the sporting culture of a turbulent period of change in the last years of colonial Guyana in the early 1960s. The book was awarded the first Guyana Prize for Literature in non-fiction in 2022. Writing in The Cricket Society Journal, Simon Lister (the biographer of Clive Lloyd) says this book ‘confirms Seecharan’s place as the finest interpreter of West Indies cricket writing today.’

Jeremy Poynting of Peepal Tree Press (Leeds), the reputable English publisher of books on the Caribbean, has observed of Professor Seecharan’s work: ‘Quietly (though this is not the immediate word one thinks of with Clem Seecharan), he has become a very significant Caribbean intellectual presence. Who has written better about cricket since C.L.R. James?’

Mike Brearley (the former England captain) reacted to Clem’s first volume of 'Hand-in-Hand History of Cricket in Guyana' thus: ‘A work of scholarship that, in the manner of his mentor, C.L.R James, goes deftly beyond the boundary crafting a superb portrait of Guyana in the late 19th century’.

Mike Atherton considers the same book ‘...a unique scholarly study’.

Clem’s several books on Indo-Caribbean historiography and modern political history include his magisterial 'Sweetening ‘Bitter Sugar’: Jock Campbell, the Booker Reformer in British Guiana, 1934-66'. It was awarded the prestigious Elsa Goveia Prize, 2005, by the Association of Caribbean Historians. He is also the author of ;‘Tiger in the Stars’: The Anatomy of Indian Achievement in British Guiana, 1919-29' and ‘Mother India’s’ Shadow over El Dorado: Indo-Guyanese Politics and Identity, 1890s-1930s'.

The presentation took place during the annual conference of the British Society of Sports History (BSSH), which was held at Manchester Metropolitan University from 24-25 August.

• Indian Tour, 4th to 17th March, 2024

The society will be running a tour to India to take in the 5th Test Match between India and England at Dharamshala with some sightseeing in Delhi and Amritsar

India Tour, March, 2024

• New Exhibition at Lord's: No Foreign field

Society Secretary Geoff Levett recently attended a preview of MCC's latest exhibitionon the history of global cricket, No Foreign Field, with curator Dr Prashant Kidambi and MCC Chief Librarian Neil Robinson. The exhibition will run for the rest of the year, together with exhibitions of portraits of black cricketers and cricket in the Jewish community at the Museum at Lord's. Click through for a sneak preview of his review for the Society's Bulletin.

• An Island’s Eleven, The Story of Sri Lankan Cricket by Nicholas Brookes has won The Cricket Society and MCC Book of the Year Award for 2023.

Books by former and current cricketers Wasim Akram, Moeen Ali and Geoffrey Boycott were among those shortlisted, with all six books which made the shortlist celebrated at the award ceremony at Lord’s this week.

Winning author Brookes said: “I am honoured to be on the shortlist with a group of authors whom I deeply respect and revere”, before going on to pay tribute to those who had helped him as an unknown young writer, including fellow-shortlisted authors Tanya Aldred and Tim Wigmore, and writer and historian Peter Oborne. 

Chair of judges Robert Winder led the evening, with fellow judge Emma John interviewing authors of the shortlisted books, and with broadcaster Daniel Norcross, new to the judging panel, speaking on the judges’ approach and decision-making processes. 

The Stephen Fay Award for 2023 was posthumously made to David Rayvern Allen. The award, which has now been given three times in the name and memory of a distinguished cricket writer, editor and former Book of the Year judge, is for services to cricket writing and publishing.  David Rayvern Allen wrote or edited 40 books and contributed much to the work of both MCC and the Cricket Society. Michael Down, author of David Rayvern Allen: A Man of Many Parts, spoke about the varied life and many accomplishments of ‘DRA’ – interwoven with his twin loves of music and cricket - before the posthumous award was accepted by his widow Rosemary Allen and daughters. 

The Book of the Year Award, run by The Cricket Society since 1970 and in partnership with MCC since 2009, is for books nominated by MCC and Cricket Society Members, and is highly regarded by writers and publishers. The 2022 winner was David Woodhouse’s Who Only Cricket Know, Hutton’s Men in the West Indies 1953/54. 

The six books on the 2023 shortlist were: 

• Sultan, A Memoir, Wasim Akram with Gideon Haigh, Hardie Grant 
•  The Legend of Sparkhill, Moeen Ali and Tanya Aldred, Fairfield Books 
•  Being Geoffrey Boycott, A First and Second Hand Account of 108 Caps, Geoffrey Boycott and Jon Hotten, Fairfield Books 
•  An Island’s Eleven, The Story of Sri Lankan Cricket, Nicholas Brookes, The History Press
•  First of the Summer Wine: George Hirst, Schofield Haigh, Wilfred Rhodes and the Gentle Heart of Yorkshire Cricket, Harry Pearson, Simon & Schuster 
•  Crickonomics: The Anatomy of Modern Cricket, Stefan Szymanski and Tim Wigmore, Bloomsbury Sport