The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) tampered with statistics and erred historically at its peril during Peter Wynne-Thomas’s five decades as the foremost archivist in the game. The governing body once published an estimation for the number of recreational players in the country that he regarded as woefully inaccurate. So he embarked on lengthy research and exploration to unearth the correct figure for himself.
“The ECB said there were something like 290,000 recreational cricketers. I thought this was complete rubbish. We don’t even know how many cricket clubs we have in Nottingham — how could anyone know about all of England? So I started going around Nottinghamshire and noted down the location of the cricket pitches to get an idea of how many people played there,” he said.
“People started coming into the library at Trent Bridge and talked about a ground in so and so village. And often by the time I went there, an apartment building stood in the place. I counted 463 within living memory and 190-odd modern ones. I made drawings of each.
“Then my daughter asked me what I was doing. When I explained, she said it would be the most boring detail in the world. She advised me not to make a list but rather to write the story of my going around Nottinghamshire hunting down grounds. That was how my book on the county’s grounds came about.”
This account was one of about 30 books Wynne-Thomas wrote, all meticulously researched over a number of years. He founded the library at Trent Bridge in Nottingham, one of the most historic cricket venues in the world, as well as becoming a founder member of the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians. Each day he was to be found in a converted squash court on the ground, presiding over 15,000 books, artefacts, cuttings and memorabilia that had piled up over the years.
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He was the epitome of a curator and an archivist. His favourite cricketer was WG Grace, the great Victorian character. Both looked as if they belonged to a cherished past: Grace with his bushy beard and Wynne-Thomas, who was once described as being as tall and thin as a grandfather clock, allowing his snowy-white handlebar moustache to be trimmed only by himself. Braces held up his trousers and he pounded away on an ancient typewriter that would puzzle children who accompanied their parents on visits to his emporium. He would refer to them, affectionately, as “the little horrors”.
Peter Wynne-Thomas was born in Manchester, the son of Daniel Wynne-Thomas, an architect who fought in both world wars, and Melrose (née Booth). She had her own solicitor’s practice in Derby.
Sent as a boarder to Belmont School and then Lancing College in West Sussex, Wynne-Thomas was coached when on holiday by Bill Voce, a great figure at Trent Bridge who had been on the “bodyline” tour of Australia in 1932-33. “Bill was his hero,” said his wife, Edith. “Peter played club cricket but he always said he was no good.”
Wynne-Thomas studied architecture at the University of London and then started work as an architect in the capital before deciding it was not for him. He bought a house in Retford and a shop across the way from his beloved Trent Bridge. The library, which grew larger than any other cricket library in the world apart from the one at Lord’s, was named after him. He conducted tours and served on Nottinghamshire’s committee, becoming the club’s president in 2016.
He was not, however, wedded just to cricket. He married Margaret Barnett, whom he met when living in the same village in Nottinghamshire in 1975. She predeceased him and he remarried, in 2000, Edith North, who worked in Sainsbury’s for more than 30 years. She survives him along with a daughter from his first marriage, Rebecca, who initially worked at Trent Bridge.
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Paid an honorarium by the club, Wynne-Thomas would doubtless have undertaken all his duties for free. He would unearth statistics and detail that might well have remained undiscovered. He found out that the first recorded match in Nottinghamshire, between Nottingham and Sheffield in 1771, ended in a dispute. He also disclosed that a pigeon-shooting match took place at Trent Bridge in 1846, as if to illustrate that gimmickry on cricket grounds is nothing new.
Peter Wynne-Thomas BEM, archivist and statistician, was born on July 30, 1934. He died of bowel cancer on July 15, 2021, aged 86