A panel discussion presented by the MCC Library
In the middle of the day, the Melbourne Cricket Club library presented its traditional panel discussion on sporting books to an enthusiastic audience of 60 people. The panel members were the MCC’s head librarian David Studham, deputy librarian Trevor Ruddell and the official historian of the Melbourne Football Club, Dr. Lynda Carroll.
Among the new acquisitions, David highlighted the illustrated scorecard of the cricket match at the MCG between an All-England Eleven and the 22 men of Victoria in 1862. (Australia could have done with a 22-man team in the recent Ashes finale.) One element of this very rare item is that the All-England Eleven wore individually-coloured shirts to assist with their identification in the field. The key to the colour system was given in the scorecard. It was interesting to see evidence of coloured shirts worn on the cricket field more than 100 years before the advent of Packer’s World Series cricket.
David also alluded to an extremely rare item that the MCC did not manage to acquire. This was one of the earliest books ever published about cricket, William Epp’s 1799 book of scorecards of “A collection of all the grand matches of cricket played in England within twenty years”, which was recently sold by Peter Harrington to an undisclosed buyer for around A$350,000 for donation to the British Library. This rarest of cricket books, one of only five known copies, had been in the library of the well-known cricket writer and commentator John Arlott.
Trevor and Lynda spoke about particular books in the MCC collection which they liked, covering both cricket and football, with a natural leaning to the Melbourne Demons! David also spoke about the recent phenomenon of limited-edition cricket books being published by some of the English county clubs, and showed several examples from the MCC’s collection. This topic led to a lively discussion.