The Wisden 1916 Obituary Section — Record Length, Record Grief

Wisden had been published annually since 1864. Pardon had been editor since 1891 and would remain so until his death in 1925.

Through 1915 Pardon and his staff received obituary notices in numbers no peacetime year had produced. The 1916 edition was compiled in the winter of 1915-16.

The 1916 Wisden was a publication unlike any other. The almanack had been documenting cricket deaths for half a century, but the 1916 obituary section was on a different scale. Pardon, who had edited Wisden since 1891, devoted page after page to first-class cricketers killed in action — Yorkshire, Kent, Surrey, Middlesex, Australian, South African and Indian cricketers all included. He also recorded the deaths of W.G. Grace (October 1915), Victor Trumper (June 1915) and A.E. Stoddart (April 1915), three of the most famous Test names of the previous quarter-century, in a single year. The combined effect — service obituaries running into the dozens, civilian obituaries including the three biggest names of the era — gave the 1916 Wisden a tone of national mourning that no other cricket publication has matched. Pardon's editorial was uncharacteristically blunt about the war's cost. The 1917 and 1918 Wisdens continued the pattern but the 1916 volume is the one most cited as the documentary monument to cricket's wartime losses.

“Never has cricket suffered as it suffered in 1915.”

The 1917 and 1918 Wisdens continued the long obituary tradition. By 1919 the cumulative total of first-class cricketer deaths reported was over 200.