SOUTH AFRICA v. ENGLAND AND AUSTRALIA TEST CRICKET 1888-1928

Second Expanded Edition: 140 pages, green cloth gilt, a very good copy in the dust jacket now preserved in a Brodart protector.

Padwick (E.W.) A Bibliography of Cricket, Second edition 1984, page 447, number 5342.

An early South African cricket bibliography and statistical record, covering the formative Test series played between South Africa, England, and Australia from 1888 to 1928. Compiled by William H. Coleman and introduced by the distinguished cricketer Charles Edmund de Trafford, the work records fixtures, scores, players, and historical commentary from the earliest officially recognised South African Test matches through to the late 1920's. Charles Edmund de Trafford (1864–1951) was noted amateur batsman and captain of Leicestershire County Cricket Club during the 1890s and early Edwardian years; he also played a significant role in early South African cricket administration. The second edition is more complete than the first.

South Africa's first test match was played against England in 1889 took place at St George's Park, Port Elizabeth, on March 12–13, 1889. Major R. G. Warton's English team defeated the South Africans by 8 wickets (and won the subsequent second Test by an innings and 202 runs). The decades that followed tell a story of gradual, uneven, but ultimately decisive development. The great Googly quartet of Vogler, Faulkner, White, and Schwarz, who confounded English and Australian batsmen in the first decade of the twentieth century with a then barely understood leg-spin variation, represented South African cricket's first moment of genuine technical innovation and international prestige.