G. B. Buckley

George Bent Buckley MC MRCS (1885 – 26 April 1962) was an English surgeon and a celebrated cricket historian and an authority on the early days of the game.

Buckley was born in Saddleworth, Yorkshire the son of Arthur and Jane Buckley, his father was a solicitor. A surgeon by profession, he won the Military Cross in 1916 for working under fire when he was serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps in the First World War.[1] He was a senior surgeon at Manchester Royal Infirmary and member of the Manchester Medical Society.[2] Photographs of him as a surgeon and soldier (prisoner of war) are held in the University of Manchester Library Image Collections.[3]

After he retired, he devoted his time to researching early cricket history and travelled all over England to visit local libraries. He collected a mass of cricket historiana from old newspapers and dutifully noted every reference he could find relating to 18th century cricket. His researches were consolidated in his two classic books: Fresh Light on Eighteenth Century Cricket (1935) and Fresh Light on Pre-Victorian Cricket (1937).

He moved to Weston-super-Mare in 1938 and lived in a pleasant Victorian house just a stone's throw from the local cricket ground.

John Arlott states in the 1980 version of Barclay's World of Cricket that Mr Buckley's researches were continued in volumes of photo-reproduced typescript and manuscript, produced under the aegis of Rowland Bowen in 1960.[4] It is probable that even more notes by Buckley still exist unpublished.