“The Evergreen A.M”
Martin Chandler |Published: 2025
Pages: 16
Author: Musk, Stephen
Publisher: Red Rose Books
Rating: 3 stars
Stephen Musk’s Monographs on North American Cricket series from Red Rose Books reaches number seven with this title. The first five all looked at individual matches before the last one, The A-One Bumper and the Beautiful Man, bucked the trend and was, essentially, a short biography of Eddie Cregar.
And “The Evergreen A.M” is another look at a Philadelphian player, this time Arthur Wood. Few will be much the wiser for the reveal of the name, but Wood is perhaps more interesting for what he was rather than what he achieved on the field, albeit he was clearly a competent batsman.
What I hadn’t realised, but probably should have done given the name of the team, Gentlemen of Philadelphia, was that Philadelphian cricket seems to have been run along not dissimilar class lines to those that applied in England. Nowadays many USA cricketers are ex patriates from South Asia or the Caribbean. In Philadelphia’s heyday the Gentlemen of Philadelphia were all amateurs by definition, and they had to be Americans too.
Like in Yorkshire in the old days there was the occasional exception, and Musk touches on all of them, but Wood was a very different case. He was an Englishman, born in Derbyshire and played a couple of First Class matches here before, aged just 18 in 1879, he travelled to Philadelphia to play professionally for one of the leading clubs there, Belmont.
It took a while for Wood to convince the powers that be that he should be allowed to play for the Gentlemen of Philadelphia, but once he had it was to prove a long career, his last First Class appearance being as late as 1909 by which time he was 48, and had played in 69 more First Class fixtures including being a member of all three of the Gentlemen of Philadelphia sides that toured England in 1897, 1903 and 1908. He was 47 at the time of the last of those tours, yet he topped the Philadelphians’ batting averages, albeit at only 24.31.
The story of Arthur Wood is an interesting one, set within a different and long gone cricketing culture and it is a thoroughly worthwhile addition to this series of monographs. It appears in a limited edition of 30 copies, available directly from the publisher.
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