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    India deserves to have a cricket museum: MCC curator

    Synopsis

    The book consists of a lot of small stories about the buildings that have been built over the last 200 years, Chadwick said.

    ET Bureau
    Curator of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) Museum at Lord’s for almost a decade, Adam Chadwick is the author of A Portrait of Lord’s: 200 years of Cricket History. Talking to ET in his office at the Lord’s library, Chadwick outlined his vision behind the newly refurbished MCC Cricket Museum, the salient features of his book and the Indian cricket museum project.

    Tell me about your book...

    The book consists of a lot of small stories about the buildings that have been built over the last 200 years, the objects which have been collected, and the people who have played and worked here at this fantastic cricket ground.

    It is a great story and the principal challenge was to decide what to include and what to leave out. I had a great time sifting through 200 years of cricket history and culling out the best to include in the book.

    It’s also the first book about the Lord’s collections for 25 years. Along with new research, it also has contributions by Andrew Strauss, Andy Flower, Glenn McGrath, Angus Fraser and Nick Compton.

    There is also a whole new exhibition on cricket history in the museum...

    We called the exhibition ‘Cricket’s Crown Jewels’, and it’s split into two parts. Overall, it sets out to display the very best of the Lord’s Collections and was the inspiration for an overall refurbishment of the upper gallery made possible by JP Morgan as part of its ongoing partnership with MCC.

    The first part of the celebration explores ten fascinating stories told by early cricket books, and showcases MCC’s historic full set of Wisden, as well as singular books such as the 1939 Almanack kept by EW Swanton while a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the only known example of the Catapulta, the world’s first bowling machine.

    The displays also bring to light many of the hidden treasures included in the MCC Library and Archive, which contains more than 20,000 volumes, the largest collection of cricket books in the public domain.

    What things Indian do you have in the exhibition?

    We have a number of very well-known paintings and portraits, which includes one of Sachin Tendulkar and one of Dilip Vengsarkar, one of the few people to have scored three consecutive hundreds at Lord’s.

    We also have a blazer from the 1952 Indian tour of England, a pocket watch which was used by WG Grace and Ranjitsinhji, a huge number of rare photos of the various Indian touring teams, some of the earliest bats used by legends of Indian cricket like Ranji and CK Nayudu. Let me also tell you that we get a huge number of visitors these days from India.

    Are you still advising the BCCI to set up an Indian cricket museum? Where are we on that front?

    Yes I am. I was in Mumbai last year to talk about progress made on the project and am hopeful India will soon have an excellent cricket museum of its own. India, more than any other country, deserves to have one because the kind of support and following you have in India is comparable to none.


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