Richard Whitington

Richard Smallpeice Whitington was an Australian first-class cricketer who played for South Australia and after serving in World War II, represented the Australian Services cricket team, which played in the Victory Tests.

He began his state cricketing career at 19 under captain Victor Richardson as an opening batsman for South Australia.

Whitington was also a prominent journalist and writer, and he balanced this with his playing career until his retirement. He was known for his collaborations with Services XI team-mate Keith Miller; the pair wrote many books together, with Whitington acting as the ghost-writer. Whitington, usually writing as 'R.S. Whitington', was famous for his books and had a strong relationship with Miller, the 1948 Invincible. Whitington wrote for the Sydney Sun. He was sports editor and roving Test reporter for Consolidated Press, owned and managed by the Packer family. He wrote some thirty or so books on cricket, many of them prefaced by Sir Robert Menzies, and in later years, the official biography of Sir Frank Packer, and a history of Australian cricket.

Other books Whitington collaborated with Miller are Cricket Caravan, Catch, Fours Galore, Straight Hit, Bumper, Gods or Flannelled Fools, Cricket Typhoon, The Golden Nugget and The Keith Miller Companion. He released books by himself, including Simpson's Safari, The Quiet Australian: The Lindsay Hassett Story, John Reid's Kiwis and Bradman, Benaud and Goddard's Cinderellas. Whitington and John Waite combined to release Perchance to Bowl. He and Lindsay Hassett (his former captain of the Australian Services XI) collaborated on a book about Hassett's captaincy of the 1945 Australian side that toured England, India and then Ceylon, before returning to play in each state of Australia.