HARRY ALTHAM
In 1988, Peter Wynne-Thomas wrote The History of Hampshire County Cricket Club one of a series on all the counties. Peter Wynne-Thomas BEM (1934-2021) was the Librarian and Historian at Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club, a founder of the Association of Cricket Statisticians & Historians (ACS) and one of the most important English cricket historians in the past fifty years. He was not a ‘Hampshire historian’ per se having taken on our club somewhat by default when John Arlott offered a personal view but declined the bigger task and he was a leading example of those cricket record-keepers who were specialists in their work but not necessarily players themselves and perhaps not involved significantly in other cricketing activities.
This month’s historian HS, Harry – and he was a ‘real’ Harry – Altham (1888-1965) was quite the opposite, a man who involved himself in so many aspects of the world of cricket for around half-a century from his time as a schoolboy cricketer in the Repton side 1905-1908, sometimes described as the finest school side of all time. From there he went to Oxford University and played quite regularly winning his ‘Blue’ in 1911 (scoring 47) and 1912. A month after the latter game, he made his Championship debut as an amateur for his native county Surrey and pre-war he played 10 matches for them, scoring just one half-century until, as with so many others, war intervened during which Major Altham was awarded the DSO and MC.
The Hampshire connection came after the war with his appointment as a classics master at Winchester College where in addition to his teaching, he devoted long hours to cricket coaching. Qualified by living in the county, he made his Hampshire Championship debut in 1919 at Lord’s but then waited until late July 1921, once the summer term had ended, to play against Gloucestershire after which he went with the team to Canterbury where he top-scored in the second innings with 141. It was a promising start but he never reached three figures again and his county career was that of a typical amateur schoolmaster, playing 21 Championship matches from 1921-1923, all of them in August, and ending with 713 runs for Hampshire at 22.28.
It was however from this time that his impact on cricket became increasingly important. As a public school master he was invited by editor Pelham Warner to contribute regular reports on public school cricket to the recently launched Cricketer magazine and he compiled extensive annual reports on the same subject for Wisden at a time when the subject was considered more important than it is today. His involvement at the Cricketer led to an invitation to write a series of articles about the history of the game which he began in May 1922 (still available online on Cricket Archive). In his opening paragraph he observed,
The more I talk with cricketers of every age the more I am struck with the fact that for the vast majority their knowledge of the game’s history is little more than contemporary with their own generation, their familiarity with its vast literature confined to a mere half-dozen of more or less modern books (10). He added, revealing something of his teaching specialisms, “Homeric or mediaeval is dormant only because it has never been stimulated”. Since that time, a little over a century ago, Altham devoted himself to adding to the “vast literature” and making available the “game’s history” to all who might want that. The Cricketer series was well received and in 1926 it was published in book form as the first of what would be two volumes (the second with EW Swanton) and published again with a foreword by Sir Donald Bradman in 1962.
Unlike the players he referred to, Altham drew extensively on other historians for this great work – not merely the statistical records in Lillywhite or Wisden (etc.) but also authors including Nyren, Ashley-Cooper, Waghorn, and PF Thomas who apparently Altham described as cricket’s “Venerable Bede”. Thomas is perhaps less well-known today than many historians of the early years of the game but under the authorial name HP-T and rather like Altham, he published six pamphlets (1/9d each) which were then collected together (1929) as Old English Cricket: A Collection of Evidences concerning the Game prior to the days of Hambledon.
In a recent consideration in Wisden Cricket Monthly of the first volume of his two histories under the broad title “The Story of Cricket in 50 Books”, David Woodhouse (issue 88, 2025) cited John Arlott’s praise of Altham’s attributes as an historian. His writing had always the discipline expected of a classical scholar, the scope of a student of history and the graces of one who read with appreciation in the poets”.
Altham was a member of MCC’s Committee from 1941 and was Treasurer from 1949-1963 with one year ‘resting’ in 1959/60 when he was President at Lord’s. He was Chairman of England’s Test Selectors in 1954, the only one who neither captained his county (David Graveney) nor played Test cricket. He served on the Hampshire Committee for more than 40 years, and was President from 1946 until his sudden death shortly after a speaking event in Yorkshire. He coached at Winchester throughout his time there, was Chairman of MCC Youth Cricket Association, President of the English Schools Cricket Association and the author of the first MCC Cricket Coaching Book in 1952. He was awarded the CBE for services to youth cricket in 1957.
With Desmond Eagar and John Arlott, he was one of the three principal authors of Hampshire’s first major history in 1957 and he wrote regularly for the Hampshire Handbook:
Cricket for Boys, A Talk on Technique, 1950 Handbook
Grace WG: The Greatest of them all, 1951
The Childhood of Cricket, 1953
Some Milestones in South Africa’s Cricket History, 1955
1955: A Great Season, 1956
Australians: Cricket Enemy Number One, 1956
A Match to Remember (school cricket), 1958
1863: Annus Mirabilis, 1963
Cricket and Music, 1965
John Nyren, 1966 (also separately published)
In 1963, Hampshire County Cricket Club’s centenary, Altham collaborated with John Arlott on two celebratory booklets, one with a set of aquatints by artist Kenneth New. ‘Some cricket principles’ was privately printed and also ‘Cricket Coaching’ through the Southampton sportsmen and sports shop proprietors Arthur Holt & Reg Haskell. With John Arlott he published a Pictorial History of Lord’s and MCC.
Until the mid-1960s, there were two mostly identical pavilions at Northlands Road which were then joined together. Downstairs this added dining space beyond the main bar area but upstairs the new room was occupied by the Committee and guests and was named ‘The Altham Room’ – it was an appropriate tribute to a very remarkable cricketing ‘all-rounder’ and important historian for Hampshire and beyond. In 1967 the former Sussex and England cricketer GHG Doggart and a former pupil and teaching colleague of Altham, edited an extensive anthology tribute entitled The Heart of Cricket: A Memoir of H.S. Altham.
Dave Allen
July 2025