Wisden
The Cricket Reporting Agency

Boy! Copy! Telegram!

Murray Hedgcock

No celebration of 150 editions of Wisden would be complete without acknowledging the major role played in its life by the Cricket Reporting Agency. The agency were equally at home in the scullery and at high table, overseeing the Almanack's editorial production from 1887 until 1965, and providing seven editors until 1980. They are Wisden's unsung heroes.

Charles Pardon founded the CRA on April 17, 1880, taking with him staff from the Sporting Press Agency, which had employed him as a reporter but folded following the death a year earlier of the owner, George Kelly King. There were various homes for the new agency. The first reference in Wisden came at the end of the 1891 preface, which placed them at 112 Fleet Street. Later, they moved down the road to No. 85, where they were a tenant of the Press Association at Byron House, until it was demolished in 1935. The new building would be occupied by Reuters, though the CRA (and PA) - after a temporary spell round the corner at 23 St Bride Street - returned to the new premises to rent office space.

Agency reporting is traditionally factual, straightforward and reliable, qualities which were to characterise the early style of Wisden itself. But there was also a financial imperative not to waste words: the length of agency reports determined their cost, and press telegrams were not cheap. The charge was one shilling for every 75 words transmitted between 9am and 6pm, and for every 100 words between 6pm and 9am. Press reports were originally sent from the local post office or, increasingly, from a dedicated telegraph office at the ground itself. A row of small uniformed messenger boys sat at the back of the press box, chattering animatedly as they waited to be despatched with newspaper copy on a stentorian shout of "Boy!", "Copy!" or "Telegram!" But this was no simple task either. Wisden 1893 carried a study of facilities for journalists, written by a future editor, Stewart Caine, who described the shortcomings of some counties: "When telegraph wires were extended to the ground, no effort was made to place the press box and the telegraph office in proximity."

Overseas scores for early Wisdens were taken initially from Australian and other newspapers, arriving in the UK many weeks or months after the games had finished. It was not until 1928-29 that a CRA staff man was sent to cover an MCC tour. The reports by Sydney Southerton, another editor-to-be, on the 4-1 defeat of Australia were well received, lively and forthright, and in 1932-33 Southerton was meant to go again. But after some debate with PA, Reuters insisted on sending their own man: Gilbert Mant, a hard-working 30-year-old Australian on the London staff, who had reported little cricket, and now kept strictly to his brief to refrain from comment.

Sixty years later, Mant wrote of his dilemma over England's tactics. Saying he was "sickened" by Bill Woodfull's injury in the Adelaide Test, he added: "I was in a hopeless catch-22 situation... If I showed the slightest sign of taking sides about Bodyline, or suggesting it was a threat to cricket, my reports would be censored, and I would probably be replaced. That was when I felt that Sydney Southerton should have been there instead of me. Southerton, writing under a byline, would probably have been able to speak his mind about the general atmosphere... So, reluctantly, I joined Jack Hobbs [reporting via a ghostwriter for the News Chronicle and Star] in not rocking the boat... I was to some extent leading the British public astray. It has been on my conscience ever since." Southerton was to make a scathing attack on Bodyline, sight unseen, in his editor's Notes in 1934, which leaves one to wonder how differently the series might have been presented to England had he, not Mant, reported from Australia.

The CRA sent journalists on tour more regularly after the war. In 1955, one of them, Reg Hayter - the agency's chief cricket reporter - went on to launch his own agency, a high-pressure training school for many sportswriters who graduated to Fleet Street. But the CRA sent no one to South Africa in 1964-65 and - with their future in some doubt - they were taken over by PA in 1965. Terry Cooper, who was signed by the CRA in 1962, married one of the agency's secretaries, and later reported on cricket and rugby for PA until his retirement in 1999, explained the takeover: "The penny dropped with PA - they were paying us for something they could do themselves."

But it was the CRA editors who set the firmest stamp on the Almanack, from Charles Pardon in 1887 to Norman Preston in 1980. The only non-CRA Wisden editor in that time was Haddon Whitaker, who presided over four Almanacks during the Second World War. Pardon himself worked on only four editions, but longevity was generally a hallmark: his brother Sydney worked on 39, Caine 47, Southerton at least 32, Wilfrid Brookes 15, Hubert Preston 51 (he missed the 1916-1920 editions while on military service), and his son Norman 47. Between them, the seven CRA men edited 90 Wisdens.

Because of the influence exerted on the agency from their foundation by Charles and his two brothers, the CRA were often known simply as Pardon's. The trio had tackled their new roles with youthful enthusiasm (Charles was 30, Sydney 25, Edgar 20), and were rewarded in 1886 when Wisden's owner, Henry Luff, invited the CRA to compile the following year's Almanack, with Charles as editor. So began the association that would sustain Wisden for nine decades. When Charles died, aged 40 - Edgar would die eight years later - Sydney stepped in and, over the next 35 editions, forged the Almanack's reputation as cricket's most authoritative voice. On his death in 1925, Wisden described him as "the man who shaped the Almanack into the publication it is today".

The CRA also campaigned for a more satisfactory method of deciding the County Championship than simply awarding it to the team suffering fewest defeats - the method used from 1865 to 1886. The agency proposed one point for a win, and half a point for a draw. But this produced its own problems, notably in 1889, when Surrey, Lancashire and Nottinghamshire all finished on 101/2. Reacting promptly, the counties and MCC devised a new system which, with adjustments, still applies today.

After the Pardons came Caine. He had been at the CRA from the word go, was close to the Pardons, and edited Wisden's Rugby Football Almanack for the three years that it ran, from 1924 to 1926. Sydney Southerton was the son of the round-arm slow bowler James Southerton, who was the oldest player to make a Test debut - at 49 years 119 days at Melbourne in 1876-77, in Test cricket's inaugural match - and the first Test cricketer to die, a little over three years later. Sydney was working as a ship's steward when he met Jack Blackham's 1893 Australians aboard the Liguria en route to England. He was engaged as scorer for the tour, and Sydney Pardon, impressed by his work, employed him at the end of the season as the CRA's statistician. Widely known as "Figure Fiend", Southerton later became a partner, editing Wisden in 1934 and 1935. His end was sudden: at the age of 60, he collapsed and died after proposing the toast to "Cricket" at the Ferrets Club dinner at The Oval in 1935.

In fact, five of the seven CRA men to edit Wisden died while still in the job. The exceptions were Wilfrid Brookes, who resigned abruptly after the last of his four Almanacks in 1939, having overseen the major revamp of the 75th edition, and was hardly heard of again until his obituary was published in Wisden 1956; and Hubert Preston, who did not edit the first of his eight Wisdens until he was 74 - comfortably the oldest starting age for any of its editors.

The Preston dynasty had begun in 1944, when Hubert was appointed editor. He learned his trade at the Manchester Guardian's London office and had a brief spell farming in Canada. He joined he CRA in 1895, became a partner in
1920, and did not retire until 1951. By
 then, the CRA had four partners: the
 two Prestons, plus Ebenezer Eden, who
 was credited in 50 Almanacks up to
1975, and Harry Gee, who worked on
 the 1934-1971 editions. Leslie Smith, 
who first contributed to Wisden in 1935,
 was never a partner, but played a central
 role. He died in 2011, aged 97.

Norman Preston, who joined the 
agency in 1933, succeeded his father in
 1952, and would guide Wisden through 
29 editions. Following Hubert's death 
in 1960, Neville Cardus wrote in 
Wisden that he was "with [Sydney] 
Pardon and Stewart Caine, the most 
courteous and best-mannered man ever 
to be seen in a press box on a cricket 
ground". Preston, Eden and Gee all 
accepted positions at PA after the merger in 1965, but when Preston retired in 1968, Wisden's association with PA came to an end, though he continued to edit the Almanack as a freelance until his death in 1980.

Today, the contribution of the agency to cricket reporting is commemorated by the Sydney Pardon press box at The Oval. On the first floor of the new OCS Stand, opened in 2005, it houses up to 70 journalists - all heirs of the pioneers of the Cricket Reporting Agency.

Murray Hedgcock is a London-based Australian journalist who came to England in 1953, hoping to see Australia retain the Ashes. They did not - but he has remained loyal and optimistic at every succeeding series

© John Wisden & Co.