No stone unturned in research for Australian first-class players

A team of Australian cricket statisticians and historians have been scouring their country's archives on a project that will be an outstanding contribution to the game's already impressive database.

They have been attempting to find the life details of every cricketer to have played at first-class level in Australian cricket history. It is a massive task but the first volume of their efforts, covering the letters A-D is due to go on sale next year.

Heading the team compiling the books are: Ray Webster, Warwick Franks, Ken Williams and Ric Smith. They have been helped out by various contacts around the country including: Warwick Torrens (Brisbane), Jeff Sando (Adelaide), Bill Reynolds (Perth), Alf James (Sydney), Ric Finlay (Hobart) and Tony McCarron (Canberra).

Franks told Wisden CricInfo that the project arose after he and Webster had been involved in producing the Oxford Companion to Australian Cricket in 1996. And as Franks put it, "In a moment of foolishness afterwards Ray and I were talking and said to ourselves why not do the whole thing properly."

They decided to create what could best be described as an Australian dictionary of cricket biography for every first-class player since 1851, excluding touring teams of Australia.

"We want to provide a research tool for cricket historians, other scholars and families. What we are attempting to do is keep the cricket in focus but also to keep it in context with their lives. We include their education, qualifications, work history, their family connections, whether they served in the military, their involvement in things like politics, religion, other sports," he said.

"It is a labour of love, we will be self-publishing and doing only a small print run. The market for this sort of thing is limited."

Attempting to find players spread over such a wide spectrum creates its own problems but the group have been relentless in their hunt and have had their rewards in detailing information, or correcting information in some cases, of long lost players.

A typical example concerns Bill Abell, a wicketkeeper who played one game for Queensland in 1902. He had served in the Boer War and would later serve in World War One. He had come out from Yorkshire and there had been no birth date available for him. He was later registered on an electoral roll as living in Warwick and his address was "camped under Fitzroy Street bridge". He was a swaggie (swagman) and later lived in a hut on Slade Park and the hut became a local landmark.

However, a birth date was tracked down for him and a fuller picture of his life after cricket had been found.

There is still some research being done on a former Queensland captain A A Atkins, who led the side in the early 1900s. He had moved to Queensland from New South Wales and inquiries are under way with people who it is thought might be able to fill in more information about him.

Another concerned Roger Hartigan. He played two Tests for Australia against England in 1907/08 scoring a century on debut. But it turned out that Roger wasn't his first name at all. He was Michael Joseph Hartigan.

Anyone is able to be known by a different name than their registered name, as long as it is not for an illegal purpose. Such a situation is where life can get difficult in trying to identify players long since deceased.

Franks said some 19th Century players were proving hard to find and they are struggling for information on two players known only as J Burrows and E Brown. But even as recently as the 1950s there is nothing known of a fast-medium bowler Arthur Fagan who played four games for New South Wales and then disappeared. "The Marie Celestes of cricket" is Franks' description of such players.

But for every frustration there is delight when learning about the achievements of other players and Franks highlighted Eric Barbour, who played 23 times for New South Wales between 1908-09 and 1924-25.

"He was from an absolutely brilliant family and the more you find out about him, the more in awe of him you stand. He was probably in that category of being among the best players never to play for Australia. He was a medical practitioner but died of colon cancer, aged 42. He had a brother who was a Rhodes Scholar and who played for Queensland, he had a daughter who was a famous radio and stage actress, a son who became a New South Wales Supreme Court Judge, and Eric also wrote a book in the 1920s called, 'The Making of a Cricketer'.

"Another one we talked to was Warren Bardsley's nephew whose father Raymond (Mick) Bardsley played a few times for New South Wales in the 1920s. He was a dentist so that prevented him from chasing a place in the side as often as he would have liked, but he was Bradman's dentist and the honorary dentist for New South Wales Cricket and was the dentist for the Royal Tour of 1954."

The group have been working on the project for five or six years, Franks said, and with the resources they each had, especially Webster, who had published two volumes of Australian first-class scores, they did not have to start from scratch.

"We're going to do it in four volumes and we are determined to do it properly. There has been a great deal of interest and fascination in what we are doing and in the Australian cricket world people have been quite excited about it. It is reasonably ground-breaking stuff," Franks said.