n/a
1849-04-01
Frederick Lillywhite, son of the Nonpareil, brought out the first edition of his Guide to Cricketers in the spring of 1849. The annual ran for eighteen consecutive editions until 1866, contained fixture lists, club addresses, players' birthdates and laws, and was the model that John Wisden's 1864 almanack was designed to compete with.
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1845-06-01
Alongside Felix on the Bat, the Lillywhite family published the Companion to the Bat in 1845 — a short instructional pamphlet on batting and bowling that ran in successive editions through the 1840s and 1850s and helped to establish the Lillywhite name as the dominant force in cricket publishing before Wisden.
Sussex / All-England
1844-07-01
By the early 1840s William Lillywhite, the Sussex bricklayer who had pushed roundarm bowling into the law book in 1828, was past 50 but still the most accurate bowler in England. Engaged at Lord's as practice bowler from 1844, he played first-class cricket until 1853 and, in his final decade, embodied the bridge between the underarm cricket of the eighteenth century and the overarm game his son John would help bring in.