Starting with Grace

Short of a Time Machine, nothing transports us back into the past so well as a picture, and the better the picture, the more vividly a bygone age is brought to life.

Starting with Grace is a collection of some 200 astonishing cricket photographs dating from the era of W.G. up to the present day – many of them rarities from the exclusive BBC Hulton picture archives – chosen by Bob Willis and Patrick Murphy for their special magic. Here are the Boys of Summer captured in their pomp on the field and in their privacy away from it. The prodigious Grace, seen peeping boyishly from behind a team-mate; a bored-looking Jim Laker striding off the field at Old Trafford having taken 19 Australian wickets; a dapper Don Bradman strolling down the Strand; a sad Wally Hammond shambling down a back staircase in a rumpled suit; a debonair Compton, a murderous Fred Trueman – every image tells a story, not only of cricket but of character and fortune.

This startling picture gallery, together with Patrick Murphy’s graphic prose, reveals the sport in all its social settings. It shows the yawning gap between amateurs and professionals – Maurice Tate playing shove-há-penny in the pub he bought with his benefit money, compared with Douglas Jardine presiding imperiously at a charity match, well aware where his next penny was coming from. It shows the advent of the rail network and huge crowds, the ravages of war, the post-war frenzy to have fun and the intrusion of politics. From Worcester to the Windies, from blazers and boaters to the pinched faces of ration-book crowds queuing outside the Oval, from a man called Richards demolishing the bowling to a bowler called Boycott producing his feared banana ball – here is a book to refresh the memories of cricket-lovers everywhere.