It is happy that Gloucestershire should go into their centenary year after as successful a season as any since they last won the Championship, ninety years ago, and in a year when Bristol will stage the first international representative match in its history.

Cricket is a game of tradition and of nostalgia; no men ever seem so big as the heroes of our youth particularly, for many of us, the cricket heroes of that impressionable age. Thus cricketers, perhaps more than any other sportsmen, suffer constantly from the suggestion-if only by implication-that they are not so good as their predecessors. So it is warming that we can look back over the century of Gloucestershire cricket and say that it never had a better balanced side than that of 1969, with its allpurpose bowling of Procter, Smith, Brown, Allen, Mortimore and Bissex: and that W. G. Grace himself never captained a Gloucestershire team with six Test players in it. Indeed, but for the injuries to Geoff Pullar and David Shepherd-the two top batsmen in the county's averages-Tony Brown and Barry Meyer, the Championship might easily have come to Gloucestershire.

As one grows older, a hundred years does not seem an impossibly long time, certainly not too vast to be seen in perspective. When I first came to the county's grounds, there were men who had played regularly for Gloucestershire under W. G. Grace. There are many who have talked to Jessop, had the fortune to see some of Wally Hammond's finest innings, to watch Charlie Parker and Tom Goddard on their killing days and to relish Bev Lyon's captaincy. Billy Neale, Sam Cook, Andy Wilson and Tom Graveney helped to form the post-war pattern as Arthur Milton, David Allen and John Mortimore have done in later times. All this lies within the knowledge of many of the senior "regulars": and there is always Reg Sinfield to appeal to for first-hand memory.

History is reflected from some unexpected surfaces. We might think the Grace era is most impressively recalled by the gates at Lord's or Bristol, by the Wortley portrait or the Memorial Biography. For me, however, it is most vividly brought home by the County Ground Hotel at Bristol. It is an impressive thought that it was built, with economic confidence, to accommodate the spectators of a few days of cricket: amazing to realize that they came in such numbers as to fill all those many and vast rooms.

There is no longer a captive audience for cricket in Bristol; but the County has more members than it had in W.G.'s day and, when the team pulled to the head of the Championship table in 1969, Gloucestershire men all over the world-as many as ever supported W.G.'s teams-followed them with proud interest through the press and radio. It has been a wonderful hundred years; and there is no good reason Why another equally good and equally changing century should not lie ahead.