Sir Home Gordon, Bart – An Affectionate Retrospect

Martin Chandler | 8:39am GMT 25 February 2024

Published: 2000
Pages: 44
Author: Rosenwater, Irving
Publisher: Private
Rating: 4 stars

Sir Home Gordon was born in 1871, and died in 1956. He had no children so the title of Baronet that he had inherited from his father died with him.

In his best years Home would attend more than one hundred days of cricket in an English summer. Nonetheless he had a career, in publishing, and he was also a cricket writer and statistician, the sort of man with whom Rosenwater seems, unsurprisingly, to have had an affinity.

Home is not remembered as a great writer or statistician, although given that he ghost wrote and published Lord Hawke’s autobiography, and put in many yards on the excellent Memorial Biography of Dr WG Grace that was published in 1919 he should not be disregarded in that respect.

As monographs go Sir Home Gordon, Bart – An Affectionate Retrospect is relatively bulky, and Rosenwater has gone to great lengths to research the life of a man who he never knew and who, even when he was alive, was not an ‘acclaimed’ writer on the game.

I would have liked to have had the opportunity to have asked Rosenwater why he put so much effort into this life of Home Gordon, but I dare say the answer would simply be that he found him to be an interesting man with whom he had a good deal in common, despite also having substantial differences.

In any event Rosenwater has written a fascinating account of the sort of life that could never be repeated today, and indeed even by the mid twentieth century was exceptionally rare, so even if you have no intention of ever reading anything written by Home, and there is no compelling reason why you should, his is still a life worth reading about.