G. B. Buckley

George Bent Buckley MC MRCS (1885 – 26 April 1962) was an English surgeon and a celebrated cricket historian and an authority on the early days of the game.

Buckley was born in Saddleworth, Yorkshire the son of Arthur and Jane Buckley, his father was a solicitor. A surgeon by profession, he won the Military Cross in 1916 for working under fire when he was serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps in the First World War. After he retired, he devoted his time to researching early cricket history and travelled all over England to visit local libraries. He collected a mass of cricket historiana from old newspapers and dutifully noted every reference he could find relating to 18th century cricket. His researches were consolidated in his two classic books: Fresh Light on Eighteenth Century Cricket (1935) and Fresh Light on Pre-Victorian Cricket (1937).

He moved to Weston-super-Mare in 1938 and lived in a pleasant Victorian house just a stone's throw from the local cricket ground.

John Arlott states in the 1980 version of Barclay's World of Cricket that Mr Buckley's researches were continued in volumes of photo-reproduced typescript and manuscript, produced under the aegis of Rowland Bowen in 1960.^[1] It is probable that even more notes by Buckley still exist unpublished.

References

1. ↑ Barclay's World of Cricket - 2nd Edition, 1980, Collins Publishers, ISBN 0-00-216349-7, p. 575.

External sources

• Obituary from 1963 edition of Wisden

Further reading

• G. B. Buckley, Fresh Light on 18th Century Cricket, Cotterell, 1935.
• G. B. Buckley, Fresh Light on Pre-Victorian Cricket, Cotterell, 1937.