Eric Midwinter obituary: cricket statistician

Times

2 days ago

When the great Caribbean writer CLR James in his 1963 book Beyond A Boundary famously asked 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?' he threw down a challenge that few have picked up with greater acuity and enthusiasm than Eric Midwinter.
In a long and eclectic career, his cultural hinterland was as broad as the outfield of The Oval cricket ground, of which he wrote a superb history. As a social historian, policy analyst, community educator, college principal, visiting university professor, gerontologist and social activist, his prolific authorial output included titles on education, football, literary biography, consumer advocacy and the history of British comedy.
For many though, he was at his evocative best when writing about the game he loved most, and there were more than a dozen books about diverse aspects of cricket, the unifying theme of which was the way he set sport in its wider social and historical context.
In his acclaimed 1981 biography of WG Grace — 'egocentric, bumptiously confident, extremely money-minded and paternalistic' — he made a strong case that the great man was 'a more complete and characteristic' representative of his age than Florence Nightingale, General Gordon or any of the other subjects in Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians.
Among his many cricket titles, The Lost Seasons (1987) stands out as a lucid and discursive account of the game in the Second World War and was enlivened by his own childhood recollections, as was Brylcreem Summer (1991), about Denis Compton and Bill Edrich's annus mirabilis of 1947, when between them they scored more than 7,000 runs.
Although his subject matter was sometimes esoteric —His Captain's Hand On His Shoulder Smote was a monograph on 'the incidence and influence of cricket in schoolboy stories' — his writing was never dense and his style always lively. Indeed, in its way His Captain's Hand … was as ripping a yarn as the juvenile stories it analysed from Tom Brown's Schooldays to the exploits of the boys of the Red Circle School in The Hotspur.
Other books had titles such as Class Peace: An Analysis of Social Status and English Cricket 1846-1962 and Cricket's Four Epochs: How Cricket Reflects Civil Society. Both were written when he was in his eighties and if they sounded dry, nothing could be further from the case as with a winning combination of erudition and accessibility he joined up the dots between sport and the social, political and economic milieu in which it was played. There was an elegant, conversational flow to his prose; it was, as Gideon Haigh, the doyen of Australian cricket writers, noted, 'as if he wrote with a fountain pen rather than on a keyboard'.
'No one could outdo me in my firm belief that cricket is so important that its place in the history of Britain is paramount and salient,' Midwinter said. 'All my work has been motivated by that concept.'
If he was occasionally rheumy-eyed, it was invariably done with a wonderfully light touch that never toppled over into sentimentality, such as his evocation in his Illustrated History of County Cricket (1992) of the timeless rapture of the village green 'with the brawny smith bowling fast long hops at the perturbed young clergyman'.
Indeed, the link between cricket and the church that so often overlooked the village pitch was one of his many fascinations. 'If the Church of England was the Conservative Party at prayer, cricket was the Church of England at play,' he once wrote. His final book due to be published in November bears the title Christianity at the Crease.
For several years he was editor of the MCC annual and he served for eight years as president of the Association of Cricket Statisticians, winning the Brooke-Lambert Trophy in 2019 as statistician of the year. The citation described him as 'the doyen of cricket historians and statisticians' but in truth, he was not a member of the 'Oh my God what a bore/ crickets stats by the score' school who could tell you how many bowlers had taken five wickets in an innings at Lord's on a Thursday in September.
Rather, statistics were only used if they supported or illuminated a wider narrative, such as the 'facts and figures' appendix that he attached to his History of County Cricket. As Bernard Whimpress noted in reviewing one of Midwinter's titles in the ACS Journal, he was 'the most distinguished social historian to turn his hand to sports history and one of the pleasures of reading Midwinter is to discover so much from other spheres'.
In accepting the ACS award, which he called 'the Oscar for cricket scholarship', Midwinter described himself as 'a social historian with an interest in cricket rather than a cricket historian' and with characteristic modesty suggested that 'in any gathering of ACS members, I would be like a rather mangy lion flung into a den of sagacious Daniels'.
In turn, he became the subject of a biography when in 2015 Jeremy Hardie published Variety is the Spice of Life: The Worlds of Eric Midwinter.
One of the co-founders in 1981 of the University of the Third Age (u3a), he was passionate about promoting lifelong learning through self-help groups for retired members of the community. 'The starting point was the sense that older age should be looked on more positively, and obviously less negatively,' he said. 'I find it difficult now to believe how bad the imagery of older age was in the 1970s. There was a sense of older age being over the hill and oldness was very much identified as illness.' He also served for more than a decade as director of the Centre for Policy on Ageing. He was appointed OBE in 1992 and is survived by his wife, Margaret, with whom he lived in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, and by their two sons.
Eric Clare Midwinter was born in Sale, Lancashire, in 1932. The son of a fireman, he wrote a warm and witty memoir of his childhood as a working-class grammar school boy that included tales of street battles after Saturday-morning pictures with the rival Wharf Road gang, 'one of whose specialties was arrows tipped with dog dirt'.
Educated at Springfield Council School and Sale Grammar School, in his teens he was a leading member of the Montague Club, based in a local youth centre and which staged concert-style revues, in one of which he played a suffragette.
A scholarship to read history at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, set him on his way to a master's at Liverpool University and he stayed on as an educationalist, directing the city's Education Priority Area (EPA) programme, a government-funded initiative aimed at boosting literacy, numeracy and attendance. He subsequently became principal of the Liverpool Teachers' Centre before moving to London in 1975 to become heads of public affairs at the National Consumer Council.
Having already written books and papers about education, social history and Make 'em Laugh, a study of well-known comedians, he was in his 50th year before he published his first book about cricket, WG Grace: His Life and Times. His choice of subject was in part because there had been no new biography in two decades but also because Billy Midwinter, reputedly his grandfather's cousin, had played with Grace in the Gloucestershire and England teams and to this day holds a record as the only Test cricketer to play for both England and Australia in matches against each other.
In the words of Walt Whitman, he lived a life that 'contained multitudes' but it was cricket that retained a special place in his world and he was never happier than watching a game at Old Trafford or Lord's with pint in hand. As he once wrote, 'The temperance movement could never claim to have exerted a stranglehold on the game which, associated as it is with drowsy summer days, requires the restorative and relaxing qualities of honest beer to complete its pleasure.'
Eric Midwinter, writer, cricket enthusiast and polymath, was born on February 11, 1932. He died after a short illness on August 8, 2025, aged 93