Frederick Samuel Ashley-Cooper (born c. 22 March 1877 in

Bermondsey Bermondsey () is a district in southeast London, part of the London Borough of Southwark, England, southeast of Charing Cross. To the west of Bermondsey lies Southwark, to the east Rotherhithe and Deptford, to the south Walworth and Peckham ...

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; died 31 January 1932 in Milford, near Godalming, Surrey) was a

cricket Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players on a field at the centre of which is a pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. The batting side scores runs by str ...

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the st ...

and statistician. According to ''

Wisden ''Wisden Cricketers' Almanack'', or simply ''Wisden'', colloquially the Bible of Cricket, is a cricket reference book published annually in the United Kingdom. The description "bible of cricket" was first used in the 1930s by Alec Waugh in a ...

'', Ashley-Cooper wrote "103 books and pamphlets on the game ... besides a very large amount of matter including 40,000 biographical or obituary notices".Quoted in E.W. Swanton, ''Follow On'', Collins, London, 1977, p. 207. For more than thirty years he was responsible for "Births and Deaths" and "Cricket Records" in ''

''; between 1887 and 1932 the Records section of the Almanack had grown from two pages to sixty-one pages. Frail and short-sighted, he never played cricket, and seldom watched, but his "total involvement in the game almost precluded every other interest".

Books

His most notable works were: * ''Cricket Magazine'' (1900) reproducing notices of known matches played 1742 to 1751 * ''Sussex Cricket and Cricketers'' (1901) * ''Curiosities of First-Class Cricket 1730-1901'' (1901) * ''Nottinghamshire Cricket and Cricketers'' (1923) * ''The Hambledon Cricket Chronicle 1772-1796'' (1924) * ''Cricket Highways and Byways'' (1927) (essays) * ''Kent Cricket Matches 1719-1880'' (1929)

Books

See also

References

Further reading