Professor G. Derek West, whose whole life (apart from military service) has been spent in academic circles, is by profession a specialist in Medieval French Arthurian Literature and the author of two books and several articles on the subject. He has also published articles on American military and frontier history. Employed as a professor and dean of studies at McMaster University, Ontario, he took an early retirement to England. Since then, he has devoted much of his time to the summer game, having contributed numerous articles to cricket magazines and journals as well as compiling indexes to several books and acting as a consultant cricket historian.