History via poetry

Robert Peel, the legendary Yorkshire left-arm spinner, was banished from cricket by Lord Hawke. Peel's drinking had reached legendary proportions - and in time so has the story of his final moments on a first-class field. Not to put too fine a point upon it, he was thoroughly inebriated when he decided to urinate on the pitch in the presence of his captain, Hawke. The cricket historian David Frith put it thus in The Slow Men: "His bladder may well have reached the point of painfully emphatic discomfort, which condition may have been coupled with a desire to recreate the awkward batting conditions at Sydney two or three years before."

Most writers slip into the humorous mode when embarrassed by something they are narrating. Others write with a subtlety that is so delicate that only those who already know the story understand what is being talked about. Here's GD Martineau on Peel: "It was all the sadder that his career with the county should have concluded with a celebration, which, being continued in a singular performance on the cricket field, brought about his dismissal from the club." The reference here is to what went in, not what came out, but there is enough there to stoke the curiosity of the casual reader; he would want to know more.

The two styles above speak as much for the writers as for the times they wrote in. Frith's book was written about a decade after Neville Cardus died. By then the less romantic but more truthful newspaper reporter had begun to set the tone, wrenching cricket writing from the hands of the self-consciously literary writer. The reporter brought precision and verifiability to his accounts without disregarding anecdote. But the reader was conscious of a hovering asterisk. In Frith's account, for example, he says, "the story may have been coloured up over the years". Not letting facts interfere with a good story was Cardusian; pointing out the difference was the burden of the next generation.

A modern writer might say, "Peel pissed on the pitch," a sentence of remarkable brevity, with shock value, and the added advantage of being alliterative. Headline writers love this.

But it is Martineau we shall discuss here. Wisden's obituary damned him with faint praise, saying: "In general his books were not works of much original research. Pleasantly written, they were calculated to arouse the interest of the reader and spur him on…" Much like the example quoted about Peel.

Cricket reporting, according to Martineau in They Made Cricket, began with a William Goldwin in the early 18th century. Goldwin was a headmaster of Bristol Grammar School. It is useful to know that the first reports were written in Latin verse. Later researches show that the match he reported was probably played on 30 April 1705.

"As a report of a cricket match, it can hardly be described as satisfactory in the practical sense," Martineau writes. "We are not told where it was played nor what sides were playing. Scores are not mentioned, and all we know of the result is that the visiting team won easily." Clearly - if you read some of today's reports - things have come full circle. Much of modern reporting may not be in Latin, but it might as well be for all the light it sheds on a match.

They Made Cricket is one of the most useful histories of the game because it goes into areas other histories do not consider important. Women's cricket, for instance, or writing on the game, or broadcasting. The chapters are hardly exhaustive, but they make you want to know more - and what higher praise is there for a writer?

Gerard Durani Martineau was born in 1897, eight years after Cardus, but being born in the final years of the 19th century was perhaps the only thing they had in common. Martineau was also a decent club cricketer who coached occasionally at the Faulkner School of Cricket.

John Arlott said of him that he wrote "with the craftsmanship of a poet". That, from someone who did likewise, puts Martineau in perspective for those who read him after 1976, the year he died.

His is not the first name that jumps to mind when cricket writing is discussed; he was a historian rather than a describer of current events. He was a signpost rather than a destination, and in that lies his importance as both professional historian and chronicler of cricket.