With the death of Brian Croudy on 25 September 2025, the ACS has lost yet another long-serving and highly-valued member.
Brian’s engagement with the ACS began when he joined in 1974, and the following year he began a ten-year period of service on the committee – initially as its only London-based member. He immediately showed his commitment when, to save postage costs, he took a week’s leave from his clerical job with London Transport in order to hand-deliver copies of The Cricket Statistician to members across the whole of Greater London. Richard Streeton’s history of the ACS’s early years described him as ‘always a spontaneous and willing volunteer when things needed doing in practical areas’, and this included taking charge of mailing back numbers of the Journal to destinations at home and abroad. Brian also organised the first London meeting of ACS members in 1976.
For his research on the statistics of the game, Brian was named as our Statistician of the Year in 1999. The citation shows the high regard in which he was held, as well as giving an indication of the scope of the (then) more recent work for which he had deservedly won that accolade.
Sadly, Brian’s work on the Halifax Cup, mentioned in the citation, never reached publication, but his researches and writing did not end there. He was the compiler (or in one case the co-compiler) of five books in our Famous Cricketers series. These included the monumental volume on Wilfred Rhodes, detailing the match-by-match performances of the cricketer who played more first-class games than any other, and also – belying any suggestion that his interests focused only on New Zealand and the USA – those on leading South African players Bruce Mitchell and H.W.Taylor.
Outside his work for the ACS, Brian was a diligent contributor to Cricket Archive, typing up thousands of scorecards, including matches from the USA and Canada. Philip Bailey tells us that he was still typing up matches from the 1917 season of a local league in Victoria, British Columbia, a few days before he died. He also contributed statistics to Wisden and the Benson and Hedges Cricket Year Book.
For his past and continuing contributions in these areas, Brian will be greatly missed by all who knew him.
Philip and our current President have sent us the following tributes and recollections:
From David Kendix, ACS President
Another sad loss. Brian was my first ACS contact when organising the London meeting and then driving me to my first AGM at Edgbaston 40 years ago.
The trip was more eventful than the AGM. We had a puncture on the M1 and the spare tyre in the boot was underneath vast amounts of ACS stock that Brian was taking to the meeting. As we, and fellow-passenger Brian Heald, unloaded the stock on the hard shoulder, a gust of wind threatened to give the ACS output a far wider distribution than we would ever normally achieve. I chased down and lay on the stock while the two Brians changed the tyre. The journey comprised them weighing up the merits of awarding first-class status to any number of obscure matches of which I knew nothing. I realised then that I had joined a rather remarkable community.
Brian gave me encouragement and support for many years, for which I was always grateful. RIP.
From Philip Bailey
Brian was one of the statistical team that worked on the Cricketer International Quarterly Facts and Figures, which I think is when I first met him in person. He then helped me in checking the figures for the first 20 years of the ACS Year Book back in the days when it was done by me on paper and he had his Amstrad.
On one of his trips to America to research the Halifax Cup, he ended up umpiring one of the games in the tournament.
Brian did not seem to have much interest in current cricket but, despite being a Londoner, supported Warwickshire – apparently because he had followed his uncle in becoming an enthusiastic fan of Coventry City FC.