Post scripts

Obituaries are often the starting point of a man's life. Years later, he may go on to be a victim (or beneficiary) of revisionism as more facts come to light or more logical interpretations grab the imagination. But the obituary is the first summing up, the first attempt by a contemporary to put it all down on paper. There is a fresh-out-of-the-oven feel (if you will pardon the ghoulish analogy) to an assessment of a man's life that appears within minutes of the coffin lid closing on him. That is why - apart from the sheer, often morbid, fascination of learning about other people's lives and deaths - obituaries make for popular reading.

Get your facts right, join the dots, and you have a picture that is consistent and inspiring (or the reverse). Later, others might join the dots in a different order and the picture will look different, but there is something to be said for the first attempt at finding connections.

When John Wisden launched the famous Almanack bearing his name in 1864, he knew he had stumbled upon a good idea - but he was less certain about what the contents ought to be. It had statistics, to be sure, but not all related to cricket. The length of British canals, the dates of the Wars of the Roses, and other tidbits of useless information filled the pages. It was only 28 years later that Wisden had his next good idea - the obituary. This, in the early years, comprised merely dates and places.

The rich vein of anecdote, facts and figures was mined by later writers, well-known names some, for their literary potential. These became so much a part of the Almanack that it was difficult to imagine that annual doorstop without obituaries written with one eye on the past (of the subject) and another on the future (of the writer's reputation). But as Benny Green, who put all these obituaries under one roof in The Wisden Book of Cricketers' Lives says in his introduction to that book, "The old school tended to make great play with the Old School at the expense of professionals who played the game better and achieved more."

This was as a social commentary on England, of course. It is not likely now that the obituary of a well-known modern cricketer would make way for a forgotten Oxbridge type whose claim to fame was that he once walked past a ground where a game was in progress.

Still, one reads the book for two good reasons - for the well-written essays, running into several pages, on the great and good, such as WG Grace and Jack Hobbs, as well as for the pithy single-para dismissals of those like Edward Rae, who "introduced the game into Russian Lapland and died at Birkenhead on June 26, 1923, aged 76". What volumes have been left unsaid!

Cricketers have died, Green informs us, falling from windows, from horses, from express trains and cliffs (Stan McCabe); they have died while shovelling snow (Arthur Carr), or while mounting a bicycle during a tour of France. One unfortunate died of blood poisoning caused by a nail in his cricket boot.

One champion, JWHT Douglas - his batting style was suggested by the play on his initials, "Johnny Won't Hit Today" - drowned while trying to rescue his father in a boating accident, while one of the great families of Australian cricket suffered a double blow when Arthur Gregory died after he fell off a tram while returning from the funeral of his cousin Syd Gregory.

There is, too, the delight of discovering the stories of those who had to solve tricky political problems that arose because of their love for the game. Like George Tubow II, the King of Tonga whose "subjects became so devoted to the game that it was necessary to prohibit it on six days of the week in order to avert famine, the plantations being entirely neglected for the cricket field".

The Almanack, according to Green "has never been slow in appropriating for its columns the famous, distinguished and ennobled". Thus we find here James Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, PG Wodehouse, and those glancingly favoured by fame, like HG Wells' father, Edward Fitzgerald's nephew, and Jane Austen's great nephew.

It is not difficult to guess where the writer's tongue was in relation to his cheek when you read that Arthur McEvoy was "probably the finest bowler in France". Where was that again? And only "probably"? Death, where is thy sting, asked the Bard. We know the answer now; it is in obituaries that damn with faint praise.