Frederick Samuel Ashley-Cooper (born c. 22 March 1877 in Bermondsey, London; died 31 January 1932 in Milford, near Godalming, Surrey) was a cricket historian and statistician.
According to Wisden, Ashley-Cooper wrote "103 books and pamphlets on the game ... besides a very large amount of matter including 40,000 biographical or obituary notices".Quoted in E. W. Swanton, Follow On, Collins, London, 1977, p. 207. For more than thirty years he was responsible for "Births and Deaths" and "Cricket Records" in Wisden; between 1887 and 1932 the Records section of the Almanack had grown from two pages to sixty-one pages. Frail and short-sighted, he never played cricket, and seldom watched, but his "total involvement in the game almost precluded every other interest".
Books His most notable works were: At the Sign of the Wicket (1900)—reproducing notices of known matches played 1742 to 1751. Sussex Cricket and Cricketers (1901) Curiosities of First-Class Cricket 1730-1901 (1901) Nottinghamshire Cricket and Cricketers (1923) The Hambledon Cricket Chronicle 1772-1796 (1924) Cricket Highways and Byways (1927) (essays) Kent Cricket Matches 1719-1880 (1929)
See also Variations in first-class cricket statistics
References
Further reading Wynne-Thomas, P., F S Ashley-Cooper - A Biographical Sketch & Bibliography, Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians, 2003