Owzat! Three Centuries of Cricket
Since at least the 18th century, the traditional English summer sport has inspired cartoonists, as Mark Bryant demonstrates.
The year 2009, with its Ashes summer, marks a number of significant anniversaries in the cricketing calendar: the tercentenary of the first ever county match (1709), the first batsman to score a century (1769) and the first Test match between England and New Zealand (1929). Less well known is that this year also marks the anniversaries of the deaths of two cricket cartoonists: George Woodward in 1809 (credited with drawing one of the first cricket caricatures) and ‘Rip’ in 1949 (the first daily newspaper cartoonist to specialise in the sport
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