Henry Bentley Begins His Cricket Scorebook — MCC Records, 1802

Cricket scoring before 1802 was haphazard. Match totals were recorded; ball-by-ball detail rarely survived; many fixtures left no written trace at all.

Bentley had begun assembling notes through the late 1790s. By 1802 he was ready to start a continuous record.

Bentley had been hired by the MCC as a ground attendant in the 1790s. He was literate, careful and obsessive about figures. From the opening of the 1802 season he began entering every major match into a calf-bound scorebook: teams, innings, batter-by-batter dismissals and totals. He did so unpaid, on his own initiative, for the next twenty-one summers. In 1823, three years before his death, he published the entire ledger as A Correct Account of All the Cricket Matches Played by the Mary-Le-Bone Club. Almost every score from major cricket between 1802 and 1822 — and many before — survives only because of him.

Bentley's published volume sold modestly but became the standard reference. Arthur Haygarth used it as the foundation of Scores and Biographies thirty years later.