Billy Makin – Puzzles Aplenty

Martin Chandler | 9:14am GMT 14 December 2025

Published: 2025
Pages: 52
Author: Rodgers, Pat and Rodgers, James
Publisher: Red Rose Books
Rating: 3.5 stars

There must be hundreds of cricketers like Billy Makin, but none of them have been the subject of a book before. In fact I dare say that one or other of brothers Pat and James Rodgers have looked at the lives of a number of other examples, so hopefully there will be a plenty of similar stories to come.

Makin was born in the Lancashire town of Bolton in 1883, and died in Sydney, Australia in 1962 at the age of 78. In between, in consecutive weeks of the 1910/11 cricket season, he had made two First Class appearances for New South Wales at the Sydney Cricket Ground against Queensland and Tasmania.

So Makin’s story has a beginning, a middle and an end. The problem for the writer/researcher is that whilst there is much information about him to find, there are significant gaps along the way so that a biography is impossible and even a monograph a tricky task.

Unless, that is, you make the missing information the centrepiece of the story, which is exactly what Rodgers and Rodgers do. In all they identify thirteen ‘puzzles’ which form the main chapter headings.

And the mysteries start in Makin’s infancy with the question of why his parents, when Makin was just three years old, decided to leave the North West of England. At the other end of Makin’s life there was divorce, bereavement and litigation. The bare bones of the story are known, but why did events unfold in the way in which they did?

Makin’s cricket also gives rise to many of the puzzles, beginning with how he learnt to play the game at all and culminating in exactly why, after a relatively modest Grade career, he had those two weeks in the First Class game. And it is not as if he was a failure in those, as he top scored with 71 in the first innings against Queensland, but he seems never to have been considered again.

Though the definitive solutions to all of the puzzles will almost certainly never be known in approaching their task in the way in which they do Rodgers and Rodgers give themselves the opportunity to suggest possible answers and weigh up the merits of each one. In a sense therefore the story almost seems complete and even though the reality is it isn’t the result remains a satisfying read.

Billy Makin – Puzzles Aplenty has been published in a limited edition of just 15 hardbacks as well as an unlimited paperback edition. The limited edition has, I regret to advise, sold out pre-publication but the standard edition is available from both the publisher and, in Australia, from Roger Page, who might just have a hardback that doesn’t have a customer’s name on it.