Brockbank Cricket Collection

Medium: Printed

Number of items: 1,200 items.

This important collection of cricket books was bequeathed to the Library by Dr William Brockbank (1900–84), a Manchester physician.

The collection is representative rather than comprehensive, but includes many rare items and early statistical works, for example a virtually complete set of Wisden (Wisden Cricketers' Almanack), including some facsimile editions. There is also a fine series of Samuel Britcher’s A Complete List of All the Grand Matches of Cricket, 1793–1804/5. Known as ‘Britchers’ this publication is important to the study of the early development of cricket.

There are also early classics of the game in numerous editions, such as Nyren’s The Young Cricketer’s Tutor, and early tour books such as Frederick Lillywhite’s The English Cricketers’ Trip to Canada and the United States, 1860. A more recent addition to the collection is C. F. Pardon’s The Australians in England: a complete record of the cricket tour of 1882, which details the tour in which Australia beat England on an English ground for the first time and established the legend of the Ashes.

Further information:

• Recorded in Library Search.
• John P. Tuck, 'Some Sources for the History of Popular Culture in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester', Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, vol. 71, no. 2 (1989), pp. 164-7.
• John P. Tuck, The Game of Cricket: an Exhibition of Books Based on the Brockbank Cricket Collection (Manchester, 1986).

Location:

• The John Rylands Library, Deansgate  [Map]
• Find out how to use the reading rooms in the John Rylands Research Institute and Library