Arthur Langford – A Memoir

Martin Chandler | 9:20am GMT 03 March 2024

Published: 1977
Pages: 8
Author: Rosenwater, Irving
Publisher: Private
Rating: 3 stars

Despite his undoubted ability to antagonise people and fall out with them Irving Rosenwater also managed to maintain some long friendships, and his monographs often dealt with the lives of such people, and this one is certainly an example of that.

This monograph was written as, effectively, an obituary. Langford died at the age of 80 in 1976. He had been involved with The Cricketer almost from its beginning in 1921 and for many years he was the owner, editor and a significant contributor to the magazine. It was in that capacity that Langford gave a teenaged Rosenwater his first opportunities in the world of cricket writing, hence the enduring admiration.

That Rosenwater knew Langford very well is reflected in the warmth which comes shining through in this piece of writing writing, as well as the amount of detail he is able to give about Langford’s life and interests outside of running The Cricketer. Unusually, at one point Rosenwater even gives something of himself to his readers, in stating that one of the character traits of Langford’s that he particularly enjoyed was his lack of interest in politics.

Arthur Langford – A Memoir is an excellent tribute to a man to whom cricket historians today owe a considerable debt given his long and unbroken stewardship of The Cricketer, which continued to appear throughout the Second World War. Rosenwater produced fifty copies of the monograph the contents of which can, in the alternative to tracking down one of those, be read in The Journal of the Cricket Society, Volume 8 Number 2.