Description:
This work offers an intriguing and important analysis of the role played by three prestigious grammar schools - Combermere School, Harrison College and the Loge School- in establishing the cricket cult in Barbados and ultimately throughout the Caribbean. It goes far towards explaining why Barbadians have traditionally played such excellent cricket.
This book is the first to make such extensive use of Barbadian school magazines as primary sources for the study of social history. The author stresses the statistical first class records of about 200 alumni of the three schools and in so doing furnishes sport sociologists with a considerable new body of empirical data for future use.
Although it focuses on a Barbadian situation, the book should interest cricket enthusiasts everywhere with its many photographs and its lucid and candid treatment of some of the most important personalities in regional and world cricket, a few of whom are still actively involved in the sport today.
Brief description: Keith A.P. Standiford is the Professor of History at the University of Manitoba where he has served since 1966. He is the author of the much acclaimed Cricket and the Victorians (Scolar Press, 1994). With Earle H. Newton he co-authored Combermere School and the Barbadian Society which was published by The Press UWI (1995).