in 1864 to have been "first-class". Nevertheless, Grace's "first-class career" was effectively defined after his death when F. S. Ashley-Cooper compiled a season-by-season record to supplement Grace's obituary in the 1916 edition of Wisden. This record became Grace's "traditional figures" and, as described later, was the statistical basis for the celebrations in 1925 when Jack Hobbs passed the total of 126 career centuries that Ashley-Cooper had attributed to Grace. Playfair Cricket Annual began in 1947, but followed Wisden in statistical terms. In 1951, Roy Webber published his Playfair Book of Cricket Records and, in his introduction, expressed the view that "first-class records should commence in 1864". A number of sources have agreed with this date. Webber then commenced a review of 19th century matches and later published his version of Grace's career record, declaring that Ashley-Cooper had allocated first-class status to a number of minor matches. Bill Frindall published The Kaye Book of Cricket Records in 1968, and subsequently several editions of his Wisden Book of Cricket Records: as he explained in the preface to one of the Wisden editions, he favoured 1815 as the starting point for "proper" first-class cricket, though he conceded that there is a reasonable case for several other years, particularly Webber's 1864. Frindall thus included the entire roundarm era, but also a substantial part of the underarm era. Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, for which Frindall was the chief statistician, also commences its first-class records section in 1815. The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians (ACS) was founded in 1973, with Rowland Bowen among the first to raise doubts in its journal that there could ever be a generally acknowledged list of first-class matches. In 1976, the ACS produced a booklet, A Guide to First-class Cricket Matches played in the British Isles (with a second edition in 1982), outlining its view of the first-class matches played from 1864 to 1946. This was followed by booklets covering other countries and, in 1981, A Guide to Important Cricket Matches played in the British Isles 1709–1863. From 1996, the ACS produced a further series of booklets giving complete scorecards of matches from 1801 that it now considered first-class. The ACS gave in its journal a number of reasons for taking its startpoint back from 1864 to 1801, among them an agreement with Frindall's view that the standard of play during the roundarm era were as high as those in the