Way it Was

For ten years Stephen Chalke wrote a monthly column for Wisden Cricket Monthly and The Wisden Cricketer, and he has also written for The Times and The Independent. This book collects more than 100 of these articles, with an extra 14 in this paperback edition. The majority of the pieces focus on county cricket in the years between 1946 and 1969, but there are also lively accounts of great Ashes victories as well as a handful of portraits of the pre-war game. He writes of Geoff Edrich returning to cricket after a spell as a Japanese prisoner-of-war, of Arthur Milton the double international delivering newspapers on the Bristol Downs and of Alan Rayment running a ballroom dancing studio next to the county ground at Southampton. There is the bizarre tale of the ground next to the steel works in Margam in South Wales, the bowler whose lost action led to hypnosis and the 12-year-old boy who cycled 65 miles each way to see Bradman at Headingley. There are eight obituaries, including David Sheppard and Fred Trueman, a moving profile of Hedley Verity as remembered by his son and interviews with the last two survivors of county cricket in the 1920s. It is a book full of unexpected delights, a treasure trove for all lovers of cricket history, full of atmospheres, rich with the voices of the players themselves.