How can studies of group activities inform our understanding of historical figures? In this post, Ollie Randall introduces his new article,‘Cricket, Literary Culture and In-Groups in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’, published this month in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.
The social and literary role of the ‘Authors Eleven’, a cricket side of London-based writers active between 1899 and 1912, is explored through case studies of the writers George Ives, E. W. Hornung and P. G. Wodehouse.
Each saw their involvement in cricket, and particularly the Authors Eleven in-group, as an essential component of their social status. Shared physical activity and embodied sociability, encapsulated in groups such as sports teams, offer ways to understand the development and cultural significance of individual lives.
Transactions is the Society’s academic journal, published by Cambridge University Press. Submission of article for review, by historians at all career stages is welcome. From August 2024, all articles published in TRHS appear open access with no charge to authors or readers.
Why cricket? From a twenty-first-century standpoint, the game is not an obvious route into understanding fin de siècle intellectual culture in Britain.
Cricket is today the second-most popular sport globally; at a very rough approximation, cricket fans comprise something like a quarter of the world’s population. And yet in a British context, being fond of cricket is often seen as a foible – an unserious self-indulgence. Cricket, frankly, seems like an unlikely source of intellectual stimulation.
But this was not the case in the decades preceding the First World War, when a high proportion of the British population – including many of its foremost thinkers and writers – took cricket very seriously indeed.
A particularly illuminating manifestation of the game’s hold over the national imagination may be found in the circle of writers who took to playing cricket together. Famous participants included J.M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jerome K. Jerome, A.A. Milne and P.G. Wodehouse. The enduring fame of these men should give us pause: it was more than an incidental curiosity that they all played cricket together.
Authors vs Artists, 22 May 1903. Back row (left to right) standing: 1st E.W. Hornung, 3rd P.G. Wodehouse and 6th Arthur Conan Doyle; Front row (left to right) seated, 8th J.M. Barrie and 9th George Ives. Image public domain. Wikimedia Commons.
As well as being a central part of the feverish late-Victorian sports boom, cricket evoked a set of symbolic connotations – tradition, village life, imperial values, manliness, aesthetic beauty, physical health – from which observers and participants could take their pick. Many of these symbolic meanings overlapped with the nebulous concept of Englishness; and if cricket was considered to represent the best of Englishness, then so, in another way, did Britain’s proud literary culture. It is little wonder an affinity developed between the playing of cricket and the writing of literature.
When we start to unpick what cricket meant to these men … we can learn a great deal about the way they thought, networked and lived their lives.
That said, it’s important not to overlook the simple fact that these writers found their cricket matches tremendous fun. They had a great time, larking about, and writing up their mock-exploits in passages thick with in-jokes. The humour and joy that radiate from their written accounts are one of the pleasures of studying this subject.
When we start to unpick what cricket meant to these men – and why they were eager to share a team and a joke with their fellow-writers – we can learn a great deal about the way they thought, networked and lived their lives. They did not simply love watching cricket; they played cricket – and more particularly, they played cricket together.
There has always been a large proportion of people who find cricket baffling and impenetrable. But for the clique of cricket-playing writers, this was part its attraction. Cricket’s opacity to outsiders makes it very effective at creating an in-group and an out-group, and the ‘literary cricketers’ – as I call them – relished being members an in-group. To succeed in being part of the team, sporting skills were less important than being a ‘good chap.’ This criterion fed the literary cricketers’ sense of exclusivity, and shut out whole groups of their supposed peers – especially, of course, women writers.
Arthur Conan Doyle, cartoon by James Thorpe, reproduced with permission of the archive of the Marylebone Cricket Club, London.
There were two main literary-themed cricket teams before the First World War, with heavily overlapping personnel. The first was J.M. Barrie’s Allahakbarries (a corruption of ‘Allah Akbar’ combined with ‘Barrie’), which was active from 1887 to 1905; the second was the Authors Eleven, captained by Arthur Conan Doyle, active from 1899 to 1912. It’s unhelpful to draw too clear a dividing line between the two teams: it was the same network of writers, appearing under different identities depending on who was captain for a given fixture. Very little has been written about the literary cricket phenomenon, despite copious evidence from diaries, memoirs and contemporary newspaper articles that attest how much it meant to its participants.
Cricket was central, not peripheral, to these men’s existences, and their prioritisation of cricket often informed their highly-influential novels and stories.
My new article for Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, ‘Cricket, Literary Culture and In-Groups in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’, is the first scholarly treatment of any aspect of literary cricket. It looks at three members of Doyle’s literary eleven – George Ives, E.W. Hornung and P.G. Wodehouse – to demonstrate what we can learn about their lives, outlooks and careers from the perspective of their membership of the Authors XI.
Ives was a pioneering campaigner for gay rights, who used cricket to bolster his homosexual identity; Hornung, creator of the famous cricketer-thief Raffles, saw cricket as the ideal training – and analogy – for imperialism, while Wodehouse, author of the Jeeves and Wooster stories, first made his name writing cricket-filled magazine pieces. All three writers saw their involvement in cricket, particularly the Authors Eleven in-group, as an essential component of their social status
Cricket was central, not peripheral, to these men’s existences, and their prioritisation of cricket often informed their highly-influential novels and stories. It is a reminder that we cannot expect to get a full picture of the place of particular intellectual figures within their culture, if we confine ourselves simply to the texts they wrote. The role of recreation in the lives of intellectual figures remains under-studied, and this gap is particularly glaring in the case of team sports like cricket.
After the First World War, some of the Authors Eleven players reappeared in literary cricket matches in the 1920s, and the tradition continued to flourish until as late as 1968.
My article for Transactions reveals the benefits of reconceptualising sport as a pervasive cultural practice rather than an unserious diversion. It also demonstrates the value of re-examining the links between individuals’ intellectual, social and physical activities. By doing so, we can advance the current effort to update our image of the desk-bound intellectual by expanding our appreciation of how their minds worked. Historical figures’ recreations, their social networks and their bodily experiences – all relevant to a cricket match – are vital parts of this more rounded understanding.
Although my article focuses on Arthur Conan Doyle’s team, the story of literary cricket continues further into the century. After the First World War, some of the Authors Eleven players reappeared in literary cricket matches in the 1920s, and the tradition continued to flourish until as late as 1968. Celebrated writers including Evelyn Waugh, Siegfried Sassoon, J.B. Priestley and Michael Morpurgo participated through the decades – with an unbroken line of continuity, in terms of overlapping players, stretching from J.M. Barrie’s first match in 1887 through to the final matches in the 1960s.
What was it about literary cricket that kept it relevant enough for its participants for the network to last so long? My article unpacks some of the varied and surprising reasons why literary cricket meant so much to its players. The common theme is that they found participation to be deeply affirming. Cricket was an aspect of fin de siècle intellectual culture – and of prewar British culture more generally – that was intimately bound up with players’ everyday lives and values.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ollie Randall is a PhD research student at King’s College London, where he is working on a thesis, ‘Literary Cricket, 1887-1968: Gatekeepers of Englishness and Literary Networking’.
His journal article, ‘Cricket, Literary Culture and In-Groups in Early Twentieth-Century Britain‘, was published in the Society’s academic journal, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, in September 2024.
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