Some old cricket books have huge reputations. Nyren’s Cricketers of my Time and Felix on the Bat by Nicholas Wanostrocht are two of the very early ones, but the 19th century threw up several others, copies of which are and always have been highly prized by collectors.

Others are much less well known, and an example of that is Cricket Celebrities of 1890, published in Manchester by John Heywood in September of 1890. The author of the book is E Walmsley who, in a very brief preface, gives very little away about himself.

The book does not get a mention in David Rayvern Allen’s Early Books on Cricket, nor in CJ Britton’s 1929 published Cricket Books – The 100 Best. It is listed in bibliographies, but that is about it. I certainly have no recollection of ever reading about the book or its author.

It is also the case that until recently I had never noticed a copy of the book on sale, although one could easily have slipped under my radar. But then I did actually see a copy, in circumstances where I could actually inspect it. Rather disappointingly it had been rebound, and the front wrapper and first four advertising pages were missing. But the book looked interesting, and wasn’t unduly expensive, so I made the purchase.

I have already made mention of Walmsley’s preface, which deserves to be quoted in it’s entirety, albeit piecemeal; So many works appear every year on the game of cricket that there would seem but small need for the birth of “Cricket Celebrities of 1890”. It is certainly true that by 1890 the number of new cricket books published each year had increased markedly from the trickle of them that had appeared in earlier times. The use of the word birth also suggests that Walmsley did not intend his book to be a one-off.

…but I venture to assert that I have endeavoured to throw into its pages matter that is totally different from that contained in any other publication. This is certainly true. By 1890 Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack was, as it has remained, the pre-eminent annual record of the game, and there was also James Lillywhite’s Cricketers’ Annual (the “Red Lilly”). Both sought to review the previous year’s cricket in full but, although Wisden had begun to include what by 1897 became its Five Cricketers of the Year feature, at that time both annuals were more concerned with events on the field than the stories of the men who played the game. In the absence of cricketing biographies, other than ones of WG Grace, the main source of information about the players themselves was the rather more ephemeral Cricket – A Weekly Record of the Game, a periodical which ran from 1883 to 1914.

The portrait sketches are more to embellish its pages than to constitute its burden. I presume that Walmsley is referring to the pencil sketches of some of the players rather than the profiles that accompany his narrative. There are 23 players featured 11 of whom get an essay and a sketch, seven the essay only and another five just a sketch.

I give the resume of the season as its chief attraction, if there be any attraction in the book at all, and I hope I have taken sufficient pains in the compilation of the principal cricket facts of the season as to render this small contribution to sporting literature a reliable reference.

An interesting observation given that this is where Walmsley was competing with his better established rivals. 135 years on whilst I acknowledge that the resume is interesting the real value is, in my opinion, in those profiles.

There were two notable features of the 1890 cricket season in England. First of all there was the County Championship. There had been a champion county for years, but that title was in the gift of the press. 1890 was the first year in which there was a formal organised Championship, with eight counties, Gloucestershire, Kent, Lancashire, Middlesex, Nottinghamshire, Surrey, Sussex and Yorkshire competing in a league arrangement. It was also a summer with an Australian visit, and three Test matches.

At the end of August Surrey were crowned as Champions with Lancashire runners-up. England won the first two Tests and the third, in Walmsley’s native Manchester, was abandoned without a ball being bowled. The last day’s cricket of the tour was 20 September and that is the month that is used to date the preface, although it is not clear when the book actually appeared on the bookstands. It does however seem that Walmsley, very sensibly, was keen to get his book to market as soon as possible after the season’s end.

The resume consists of a look at each of the counties in turn, arranged in the order that they finished in the table. There is a detailed narrative telling the story of their seasons (but no scorecards) followed by their players’ averages. There then follow the averages and results of three other counties, Somerset, Leicestershire and, surprisingly given that it would be 1905 before they joined the Championship and playing just five fixtures (none of them First Class), Northamptonshire.

Those county averages are then combined into two national tables for batting and bowling, a sign of the times being that those were sub-divided into separate tables for amateurs and professionals.

An account of the Australian tour might have been expected as well, but in fact there isn’t any narrative content on that subject at all, although a list of results and the tourists averages do appear at the close of the book. Is this indicative of, to the 1890 cricket lover, the County Championship being more important than a Test series against Australia?

But as I have already indicated the most interesting part of this one are the profiles. They are written in a, to modern eyes, most unusual style, familiar and conversational, particularly in respect of those who play for the northern counties whom, presumably, Walmsley knew personally.

Those featured are a selection of the best known players of the day. There are five Nottinghamshire men, Arthur Shrewsbury, Billy Barnes, William Gunn, William Attewell and Mordecai Sherwin. Perhaps surprisingly there are just two Lancastrians featured, ‘Monkey’ Hornby and Johnny Briggs, and three Yorkshiremen, Joseph Hunter, George Ulyett and Bobby Peel.

Moving south Walmsley writes of Surrey pair George Lohmann and Walter Read, and the Middlesex amateurs Drewy Stoddart and AJ Webbe. The other four are George Hearne of Kent and William Chatterton of Derbyshire and the summer’s two Test captains, WG Grace and Billy Murdoch.

The question that most exercised my mind after reading through this enjoyable little book was just who E. Walmsley was. For a man who had contributed such an interesting book to the literature of the game he seemed completely elusive, the book itself not even referencing his christian name. His name appears nowhere in Padwick other than in relation to this one nor anywhere else in any of the sources I own.

There was however a glimmer of hope in the profile of WG Grace in which Walmsley gives an indication of his age from which it is possible to conclude that he was born in 1851. On that basis the wonders of modern genealogical websites pin him down as Edmund Walmsley, born in Darwen in Lancashire. His family were, unsurprisingly, all employed in the cotton mills as, aged 9 at the time of the 1861 census, was young Edmund.

Compulsory education did not begin until 1871 but, being a member of what is described as a ‘non-conformist’ religion Edmund probably did get an education and piecing together those bits of information that can easily be found it seems that at some point he got a job as a compositor at a printing press and that his career progression to being a writer came from there.

In the 1881 census Walmsley is recorded as being a ‘reporter’ in Darwen and living with his wife and four children. By 1891 he had moved twenty or so miles south to Manchester and now had seven children. His occupation has changed slightly to ‘reporter (paper)’.

What can be said with certainty is that in 1884 John Heywood started to publish The Cricketers’ Herald, Athletic and Football Times. The only copies of that I can locate are the 53 eight page weekly editions that appeared in 1889 by which time the masthead was British Sports and by then Walmsley was described as ‘the proprietor’, something he may well have been from the outset. It is not, covering so many other subjects in the space of those eight pages, something that looks like it would have ever set out to directly challenge Cricket – A Weekly Record of the Game.

The change of name perhaps suggests that as originally titled the paper had not sold well and indeed that may have been part of the motivation for Walmsley adding a further string to his bow with Cricket Celebrities of 1890.

Of course we now know that the book did not appear again, and in May 1895 British Sports had changed name again, this time to Cycler’s News, so presumably a complete departure from cricket and I suspect that by then Walmsley’s connection with the paper was gone.

It seems likely that Walmsley gave up British Sports and had a complete career change as by the time of his early death in 1897, at the age of only 46, he was a publican. An obituary notice states his residence as the Wheatsheaf in Chorlton in Manchester as well mentioning his previous pub, the Eagle and Child in Blackburn. In a nod to his earlier days it mentions also his proprietorship of British Sports and his byline in that, ‘Codger’.