Forty Seasons of First-Class Cricket

This is cricket as it was played in a vanished world: before helmets, before limited overs, before the game became a global industry. Richard Gorton Barlow played for Lancashire and England across four decades of the late nineteenth century, and his memoir is a beautifully detailed account of an era when the sport was still largely the domain of amateurs and gentlemen. Barlow opens with his partnerships alongside A. N. Hornby, the great Lancashire and England batsman, describing the rhythms of batting at the top of the order and the art of 'stonewalling' - of wearing down the opposition through sheer concentration. He writes with particular pride of his bowling, and allows himself the satisfaction of noting that he dismissed W. G. Grace more often than most of his contemporaries. The three chapters on Barlow's Australian tours with the England team are particularly vivid, capturing the long sea voyages, the alien pitches, and the fierce but sporting rivalries that defined early Test cricket. The book closes with Francis Thompson's poem 'At Lords', a tender elegy to Barlow and Hornby written by a Manchester poet who understood that this kind of cricket - patient, principled, rooted in place and partnership - was already becoming a thing of the past. For anyone who loves cricket, or who wants to understand what the sport meant to those who played it when it was still a gentleman's game, this memoir is an essential window into a world that has largely disappeared.