No fuss, no frills

It is tempting to see the 1930s as the golden age of cricket writing in England. Neville Cardus had, according to "Crusoe", "made cricket readers of many who would not walk across the road to see a stump fly". In the Manchester Guardian, Cardus "cut his sharp epigrams from the most amorphous material". Crusoe himself - Raymond Robertson-Glasgow, a "miniaturist, and a master of compression", in the words of Alan Ross - had settled down at the Morning Post. In the Evening Standard you could read CB Fry, a classicist who focused on technique.

The land between poetry and geometry was the preserve of Yorkshire's JM Kilburn, who began his career in 1934 at the Yorkshire Post; Don Bradman was then the greatest batsman in the world, and Jack Hobbs made his 197th first-class century in his farewell year at the age of 51. In a tribute to the latter, Kilburn wrote, "When the sun shone and the runs came merely for the asking, [Hobbs] took them with a thankfulness beyond mere acceptance. Sometimes rain fell, and spin bowlers snapped their fingers in glee. Into their hutches the rabbits went tumbling, but Hobbs, amazing the world, remained firm at his end." The prose is spare, the details are visual, and the player is placed in his context with minimum fuss.

Kilburn was 25 then, and had already found his voice; he had done a stint at University, taught in a school, written some articles for Finland's Post, and was not unknown when he applied at the Yorkshire Post for a job. His name appeared regularly in the newspaper for his exploits as an offspinner and useful batsman in the Bradford League. The editor was a cricket fan, and that was that.

Kilburn remained with the Yorkshire Post till 1976. For 42 years he was the voice of Yorkshire cricket; he wrote two books on the county and a biography of its greatest batsman, Len Hutton. Overthrows and Thanks to Cricket were two volumes of autobiography. A collection of his pieces appeared in Sweet Summers and In Search of Cricket.

Yorkshire cricketers were not renowned for their lightness of touch or flights of fancy. Neither was their finest writer. Kilburn's writing evoked Sutcliffe, Hutton and Boycott - sound, hard, correct, rather than flamboyant. Yet, like them he was capable of evoking the occasional gasp of surprise. His description of Maurice Leyland's bowling is sheer joy: "Leyland's bowling is mostly a joke, but it is an extremely practical joke."

Above all, he was a pure cricket writer, interested only in reporting the action on the field of play. No masala for him, no keyhole journalism, even when his bosses tried to get him to indulge in it to counter the stories appearing in the rival Daily Mail.

"Wherever a pilgrimage through the cricketer's England may begin, it must surely end, if the traveller has any sense of the appropriate, at the Scarborough in Festival time," he wrote in the final essay in his 1937 book In Search of Cricket. For Kilburn, that year meant more than cricket, for he married a family friend, Mary Robinson. "The annual Scarborough Cricket Festival had something to do with it," the Post noted coyly. Mary's father was an allrounder and president of the Scarborough Cricket Club. In later years, as Kilburn's eyesight began to fail, she took over his correspondence and wrote articles he dictated.

In an introduction to one of Kilburn's books, Matthew Engel captured the man and his methods: "He developed a punctilious method of writing, which he stuck to with exceptional determination. He wrote with a fountain pen very neatly on Press Telegram forms... after the War, the telephone came in, but that was not for Kilburn. He asked for - and carried enough clout to be given - a telephonist on each ground to dictate his words for him. Towards the end of his career, the quality of the Yorkshire Post-issue copy paper deteriorated and he gave up the fountain pen in favour of a ball-point. That was just about his only concession."

Cardus and, to a lesser extent, Crusoe continue to be read. Fry, whose work on batsmanship is a classic, is today almost a mythical figure for his all-round sporting, academic and intellectual accomplishments. Kilburn, more down to earth, and often more perceptive than the others is available in reprints. Thank God for that.