[BITList] The Allahakbarries : Peter Pan's First XI

[John Feltham]

From a contributor of mine.


ooroo



 
The Allahakbarries : Peter Pan's First XI

Bought this book recently : Peter Pan's First XI by Kevin Telfer, it makes great reading about the Golden Age of Cricket (1890 - 1914) and about Barrie and (literary) friends having fun playing inept cricket. The punchlines are all supplied by Barrie quoteson cricket, some of which I have underlined below. The book is full of nice old photos plus cartoons in addition to well written narrative.

The book and the article below are of special interest to me because there's a photo featuring a young P G Wodehouse (full head of hair) which I had not seen before. Bosh might have, if not he'll like this.




The first XI that included Jeeves, Wooster, Pooh and Peter Pan: J.M. Barrie's celebrity cricket team revived

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated on 18th April 2010



Magic action: Barrie tosses one up during an Allahakbarries match. The author bowled out General Haig

J.M. Barrie is famous for penning Peter Pan, one of the greatest children's stories ever told.

But the author's real passion was playing cricket and he founded Britain's first ever celebrity teams to play the game.

This summer the somewhat peculiarly named 'Allahakbarries' side is to be reformed for a match to mark the 150th anniversary of Barries' birth. 

The team was named in the mistaken belief that 'Allah akbar' meant 'Heaven help us' in Arabic (rather than 'God is great').

While there is no doubt that Barries' writing ability far outweighed his cricketing talent (he was Scottish), the Allahakbarries will go down in literary history as a star-studded team quite unlike any other.

Its members included science fiction master H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and Jerome K. Jerome, author of Three Men In A Boat.

The team could also call on talents such as G.K. Chesterton, creator of the Father Brown detective novels, Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne and P.G. Wodehouse, the man behind Jeeves and Wooster.

There was also A.E.W. Mason, who wrote The Four Feathers, and E.W. Hornung, creator of the Raffles novels.

Snaps of the team playing have recently been unearthed and will be published in a book next month, according to the Sunday Times. 

They include a shot of Barrie bowling Douglas Haig, who went on to command the British Expeditionary Force in World War One.

Asked to describe his bowling action, Barrie replied that after delivering the ball he would go and sit on the turf at mid-off and wait for it to reach the other end which 'it sometimes did'.

The team obviously played for the love of the game, rather than the results it achieved, and Barrie was generous in his praise for team-mates and opposition alike.

He praised one Allahakbarrie's performance by observing that: 'You scored a good single in the first innings but were not so successful in the second.'

And he congratulated the opposition's effort by pointing out how: 'You ran up a fine total of 14, and very nearly won.'


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Cricket lovers: The Allahakbarries pose for a team picture before a match at the turn of the century

He instructed Bernard Partridge, an illustrator from Punch magazine who was afflicted with a lazy eye, to, 'Keep your eye on square leg' while bowling and told square-leg, 'when Partridge is bowling, keep your eye on him'.

Barrie refused to allow his team to practise on an opponent's ground before a match because 'this can only give them confidence'.

But the author's most calamitous performance came when he was cleaned bowled by the American actress Mary Anderson in the 1897 'test' against the village of Broadway, in the Midlands.

Kevin Telfer, author of the forthcoming book Peter Pan’s First XI (to be published by Sceptre), has been invited to play.

He said: 'I thought the story of all these great writers playing together was fantastical. They were an incredible collection of characters.'

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PGW
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Doyle
Never stumped: Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne, Jeeves and Wooster creator P.G. Wodehouse and the inimitable Sherlock Holmes genius Sir Arthur Conan Doyle all turned out for the Allahakbarries cricket club 

This remarkable celebrity team was celebrated in a slim book, privately published by Barrie in 1890, called Allahakbarries C.C. A revised edition appeared in 1899.

A reprint followed in 1950 which contained a forward by legendary Australian batsman Don Bradman.

The pre-1900 copies are extremely hard to find and much sought-after by rare book collectors.

However, the 1950 reprints are relatively easy to find and also affordable with prices under £60.

The book is dedicated, 'To Our Dear Enemy Mary de Navarro', the famous American stage actress, who retired to Broadway in Worcestershire, and played cricket against the Allahakbarries.

The actress, who formed a team from the community of artists living in Broadway, bowled out Barrie during a match in 1897, much to Barrie's chagrin and probably to the hilarity of the author′s team-mates.

The 1950 edition contains an introduction by Philip Carr, a former 'junior' member of the team.

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Cricket lovers: American author Jerome K. Jerome, the writer and academic G.K. Chesterton and H.G. Wells the author of classic science fiction novels like The War Of The Worlds and The Time Machine

It begins with the words: 'If you had met Barrie, a cricketer was about the last thing that you would have imagined him to be. For he was small, frail and sensitive, rather awkward in his movements, and there was nothing athletic in his appearance.'

The Allahakbarries were basically Barrie's long-running joke. The Allahakbarries book is filled with gags from Barrie about his team's lack of talent.

It sounds as if the majority of players had trouble with batting, bowling and fielding, although players of some ability were recruited from time to time to bolster the ranks.

Carr describes Conan Doyle as Barrie's 'chief tower of strength'.

The creator of Sherlock Holmes had ample sporting ability - he was a good goalkeeper in football, a useful golfer and played a handful of first-class cricket matches for the M.C.C.

Other artistic players included Punch cartoonist Bernard Partridge and E.T. Reed, editor of Punch Owen Seaman, the book illustrator Henry J Ford, and Sydney Pawling who became head of Heinemann Publishing.



Peter Pan's First XI by Kevin Telfer

Stephen Moss is bowled over by JM Barrie's unlikely cricket team




What an odd book. Or perhaps that should read books, because I'm not sure Kevin Telfer ever quite works out what he is writing. He starts with a terrifically promising donnée, the Allahakbarries, a team founded by JM Barrie in 1887 which played village cricket together more or less every summer until the eve of the first world war. As well as its guiding force, who brought more than a touch of the Peter Pans to its hit-and-miss performances, the team called on the varying abilities of Arthur Conan Doyle (a very good cricketer who once dismissed WG Grace), EW Hornung (creator of gentleman, cricketer and thief Raffles), Jerome K Jerome, AA Milne, PG Wodehouse, and a score of other late Victorian and Edwardian writers and artists.

There should be riches enough for half a dozen books, despite the fact that details of many of the games the Allahakbarries played are sketchy. Barrie's wonderfully dry observations are themselves almost worth the entrance fee. Of the useless Jerome, he said: "He was a great cricketer, at heart." Has a comma ever been more adroitly used? He describes another hapless performer as "an invaluable man on the train going down [to the match]. Very safe bat in the train. Loses confidence when told to go in." As captain, he issued nine "hints" to his players. Number one: "Don't practise on opponents' ground before match begins. This can only give them confidence." Barrie claimed his team was so named because two renowned explorers had told him "Allahakbar" meant "Heaven help us", but he was a notoriously unreliable memoirist.

This comedy is good, and there is plenty of it. The French player who when the umpire called "over" invariably left the field thinking the game was at an end. The defeat against the Surrey village of Shere in the Allahakbarries' inaugural match, in which the locals made what Barrie called a "goodly" score (ie so many the scorers gave up counting) and the Allahakbarries mustered 11 – "The general feeling was that [we] had been beaten but not disgraced," he said phlegmatically. The match, not on this occasion involving the Allahakbarries, in which Conan Doyle's flannels were set on fire when a quick delivery rapped him on the thigh while he was batting, igniting a box of matches in his trouser pocket. Marvellous stuff. The Conan Doyle tale even mirrors the famous story of Tom Stoppard setting his pads alight by dropping his cigarette into them while keeping wicket for Harold Pinter's equally celebrated XI, the Gaieties.

There is a lovely comic memoir of a theatrically inclined group of public-school chaps led by an idiosyncratic little Scotsman lurking here, which we might happily fit into the tradition of Archie Macdonnell's England, Their England (another Scot looking for a place in English society) and Hugh de Selincourt's bucolic fable, The Cricket Match. But that is not the book Telfer wants to write. He is aiming for something more ambitious and keeps dropping random clues about his undertaking: the imminence of war; the tragedy of a doomed generation; the way Barrie used cricket as an antidote to a world that was losing touch with its pastoral antecedents; his surrogate father role with the parentless Llewelyn Davies boys, who in part inspired Peter Pan; the role cricket played in Neverland. He is tentatively driving at some vast thesis that pulls together cricket, the public school ethos, empire, war, exploration (Barrie was a friend of Captain Scott, and several explorers played for the Allahakbarries), male sexuality and Edwardian literary escapism, but it's beyond his reach. He can't even decide whether 1890-1914 was cricket's "golden age" or not. At times he seems to rubbish the idea, but by the end of the book he is fitting the Allahakbarries' quarter-century into a golden‑age narrative.

Instead of a rich tapestry which knits these grand themes together, Peter Pan's First XI at times descends into a bathetic list of great events that add up to surprisingly little. Thus, towards the end of the book, we get Milne joining the team in 1910 as the "last member" of the Allahakbarries (cue six pages on his literary career), a politician member of the team being beaten up by Suffragettes, a sensational innings in a first-class match in 1911 by a Nottinghamshire player who has nothing to do with the Allahakbarries, the death of Scott on his expedition to the South Pole in 1912, and the almost contemporaneous sinking of the Titanic (perhaps included because one of those killed was an artist who had played against the Allahakbarries). This is the kitchen sink approach to history, and it won't wash.

That is not to say the book is without merit. As well as the comedy, one gets the strong sense of Barrie as someone who both loved the game – I would guess from the photographs of him playing that he was better than Telfer thinks – and used it as an entrée to English society. He clearly enjoyed organising things – running a cricket team for 26 years is no easy matter – and liked to do it properly, with club colours, dinners and commemorative booklets. There is much of Pinter, who was similarly painstaking in his organisation of the Gaieties, here: both a strong sense of how the game should be played and a deeply theatrical recognition of its ritual, almost cathartic, qualities.

The book is deeply suggestive, without ever exhausting any of its numerous themes. It leaves you wanting to know more of Barrie and his odd collection of Allahakbarries – each of the major figures is, of course, well served by conventional biographies – and eager for a more coherent account of this pre-war Neverland. A chancy cameo, then, rather than a dutifully compiled double-hundred; an innings more suited to village cricket than a Test match. Which, in its way, is not inappropriate for a book about this most unlikely of cricket teams.

Stephen Moss edited Wisden Anthology 1978-2006: Cricket's Age of Revolution.


From Times Online
May 8, 2010
Peter Pan’s batting tip: ‘Should you hit the ball, run at once’

Lindsay McIntosh





The history of cricket has not yet had much to say about J.M. Barrie. That could be because, while the creator of Peter Pan is celebrated for one of the great literary creations of our time, his exploits at the crease have been less memorable. All that may now be changed, however, following the public display of a collection of pamphlets chronicling what must be one of the most eccentric cricket teams ever assembled.

Written by Barrie himself, and illustrated by the famous Punch cartoonist Bernard Partridge, they describe the exploits of a group of writers, artists and other 19th-century dilettantes, whose knowledge of cricket was minimal, but whose enthusiasm for the game was unbounded. Known as the Allahakbarries, because Barrie had been told that Allah Akbar was Arabic for God Help Us (in fact it means God is Great) they included such luminaries as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse, A.A. Milne, the creator of Winnie the Pooh, the explorer Paul du Chaillu, and a civil servant, T.L. Gilmour, who was private secretary to Lord Rosebery.

On sunny English summer days between 1887 and 1913, Barrie, Partridge and the others could be found on village cricket pitches attempting to figure out which side of the bat they should be trying to hit the ball with. Barrie, as captain, had issued them with “hints to the team” that included useful instructions such as “should you hit the ball, run at once. Don’t stop to cheer”.

The first 12-page booklet lists a dozen of the players and offers an unflattering description of their skills. Of “Doyle”, who was known to have some talent, Barrie states he “knows a batsman’s weakness by the colour of the mud on his shoes”. Partridge is referred to as “the demon”. Barrie writes: “Terrific delivery. Bowls all over the field. No one is safe. Breaks everything except the ball.” Of himself, Barrie says that he was the slowest of slow bowlers — so slow in fact that he could catch up with the ball and bowl it again if he was not satisfied with his first effort. 

All this and more is contained in the pamphlets, titled Allahakbarries CC, printed privately by Barrie in 1893 for circulation among his friends. They are on show at the National Library of Scotland, part of an exhibition celebrating the 150th anniversary of the writer’s birth. It is the only public copy known to exist in the UK. Also on display is The Allahakbarrie Book of Broadway Cricket from 1899, which commemorates a series of three matches played against an assortment of American artists. They had formed an unlikely community in the Cotswolds and fielded a cricket team called Broadway.

The curious story of the Allahakbarries is also the subject of a new book, Peter Pan’s First XI, by journalist and author Kevin Telfer, to be published later this month. Mr Telfer said that the team name had arisen from a confused conversation on the train journey to the very first game in 1887 in Shere, Surrey.

“Barrie took along a few of his, mainly bachelor, friends who were very inept at playing cricket,” he said. “One of them was Joseph Thomson, the Scottish explorer. He didn’t know what to wear, so he wore his pyjamas. They got on the train and it was only then that Barrie realised how bad his team were. He asked the explorer, ‘what is the Arabic for God help us’ and he said ‘Allah Akbar’, hence the name of the team — although that actually means God is great.”

The second pamphlet features a Partridge illustration of a diminutive Barrie beside the American actress Mary de Navarro, who was playing for the opposition. It was produced ahead of what would be the deciding match between the Allahakbarries and Broadway. Perhaps reflecting their opponents’ own shortcoming on the field, Barrie’s side won the match.

A Broadway match is to be recreated next month in the Cotswolds in commemoration of tomorrow’s anniversary of Barrie’s birth. Events are also taking place throughout Scotland, and in Barrie’s hometown of Kirriemuir.

The exhibition at the National Library of Scotland runs throughout May.







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