Batting, bowling, fielding — and writing

Cricket and literature have long been teammates, opening the batting, the bowling and even the odd book chapter.

In the opening to Flashman’s Lady, George MacDonald Fraser has the effrontery to cast his hero, Harry Flashman, British imperialism’s favourite coward, as being the source for “hat-trick”.

Flashman dismisses, in a sequence of three deliveries, the greatest batsmen of the age (the 1840s). In a game between the Gentlemen of Rugby (Flashman is an old boy, expelled) and the Gentlemen of Kent, he gets out Felix, Fuller Pilch and Alfred Mynn, through skill, luck and sheer sharp practice.

The ball to Mynn is wide of leg stump and brushes a calf (no pads in those days and only an old tin soup plate to protect “the essentials”). Flashman lets rip with a huge appeal for leg before wicket (LBW), at the same time deliberately obscuring the umpire’s view. The umpire, “that gooseberry-eyed old fool Aislabie”, a Rugby man and convinced that another Rugby man would never stoop so low, gives Mynn out.

Mynn walks off, shaking his head, takes off the boater he’s been wearing and presents it to Flashman with a bow: “That trick’s worth a new hat any day, youngster.” And with it, a new word enters the cricketing, and sporting, lexicon. It’s apocryphal, of course, but it’s all part of Flashman’s (or MacDonald Fraser’s) roguish audacity to anticipate by 20 years or so the term’s first use in print.

Pilch, according to Cricinfo, was the greatest batsman known until the appearance of WG Grace, whom MacDonald Fraser allows Flashman to diminish as “that great muffin”, who “bleats like a ruptured choirboy if a fastball comes near him”. Flashman, of course, is a fast bowler — but a poltroon with a bat.

Charlie Campbell’s team, always looking for young talent, could do with a fast bowler like Flashman, but not one as pusillanimous. They’re brave souls in Campbell’s team, better known as the Authors XI, putting out their cricketing skills in public and their work for literary scrutiny: they’re all published authors. They’re much grander than a Press XI, of which there have been many and varied (often reinforced by ringers!).

Much like the Press XI, the Authors XI might often be unsure of having enough runs on the board (five times in six recent matches they haven’t), but the copy is good, far better than any Press XI.

The Authors XI even have their own book, The Authors XI: A Season of English Cricket from Hackney to Hambledon. Players each contributed a chapter, in their case an easier task that prising annual subs in other teams (or ball and beer money from a Press XI).

Kevin Telfer, author of Peter Pan’s First XI (about JM Barrie’s team the, Allahakbarries — a play on the Peter Pan creator’s name and Allah Akhbar, which he believed meant “Heaven help us” rather than “God is great”), says in his review that Hackney to Hambledon is like watching a team of batsmen throughout an innings.

“There are solid contributions, stylish cameos and writers who can so deftly craft a sentence like a glorious cover drive that a careless shot or two does not diminish their aura too greatly. There are also false shots and the odd wave outside off stump, but these add to, rather than detract from, the atmosphere of the collection ... an endearing, studied amateurism.”

If the authors are celebrated writers, they have no pretensions about their cricket talents. One of the team’s best-selling authors, Sebastian Faulks (Birdsong, Charlotte Gray and the James Bond reincarnation Devil May Care), notes in the foreword: “Amateur cricketers tend to be vain, anecdotal, passionate, knowledgeable, neurotic and given to fantasy. So do writers. The game is made for the profession.”

Historian Tom Holland confesses in an article for Financial Times that up until the age of 13, cricket for him meant “tedium, interspersed with the odd moment of raw terror”. In that year, he was converted, watching England’s dramatic victories over Australia in Botham’s Ashes. He now takes the new ball to open the bowling for the Authors XI.

The idea of an Authors XI in English social cricket is not new. It was conceived in 1892 when the annual match against the Actors XI would be played at Lord’s. One of those in the thespian team would certainly have been C Aubrey Smith, who captained England in 1889, when SA played their first Test match. He abandoned the tour before the second Test at Newlands to seek his fortune in the new Eldorado of Joburg.

He made his West End stage debut in 1896, later departing for Hollywood where he had a successful bit-part career acting with, among many others, a young Elizabeth Taylor in Little Women and summoning Tinseltown’s newcomers Laurence Olivier and David Niven for net practices to the Hollywood Cricket Club that he’d established with William Henry Pratt, the wicketkeeper, but better known as Boris Karloff, Hollywood’s most famous monster. Smith might also be one of the very few to have bowled to WG Grace, in a county game, and Don Bradman, who played at the Hollywood Cricket Club during a tour of North America by a team of Australians in 1932.

The venue for the Authors XI against the Actors is no longer at Lord’s. The 2024 fixture, on July 10, will be played at Arundel in the Sussex Downs, a far prettier venue and almost as picturesque as Newlands or Groot Drakenstein, neither of which has a castle overlooking it. Arundel will also be the venue on June 23 for the annual Oxford-Cambridge varsity match.

Among the luminaries in the original Authors XI were opening pair of Arthur Conan Doyle, a hard-hitter who played 10 first-class matches, and PG Wodehouse, a useful batsman but one with poor eyesight and a better bowler. Conan Doyle was said to have been inspired by an uninspiring pair of Nottinghamshire cricketers, Mordecai Sherwin and Frank Shacklock, to name his most famous character Sherlock. Mycroft, Sherlock Holmes’ brother, was apparently the suggestion of Derbyshire players. The writer didn’t live long enough to meet Dan Moriarty of Surrey and SA under-19.

A better “local angle” for the early Authors XI — as any member of the Press XI will tell you — is AA Milne, who preferred watching to playing but had greater ambitions for his son, whom he put with a bear at the centre of Winnie-the-Pooh stories. Milne took young Christopher Robin to a cricket coaching school in London run by Aubrey Faulkner. The former Test all-rounder, who can still be found on the list of “Greatest South African XI of All Time”, passed him on to a young coach named Tom Reddick.

Reddick, then 18 and already with two games for Middlesex under his belt, tried his best, but Christopher Robin had about as much cricket ability as his dad; far better he should go into book dealing. Reddick played mostly for Nottinghamshire, went to SA in the English winter, settled in Cape Town, played for Western Province and coached an array of talented players at the University of Cape Town, Andrew Pycroft and Rob Drummond among them. He also wrote a weekly cricket column for Cape Times that was required reading.

Reddick was politely dismissive of the Press XI, but would have loved the Authors XI, and would have qualified on the strength of his entertaining autobiography, Never a Cross Bat. A man of immense charm, modesty and exceptional writing skill, Reddick would have easily convinced Charlie Campbell to let him open the batting if only the age gap hadn’t interfered. Reddick, born in Shanghai, died in Cape Town, a place he loved, in 1982 aged 70, sadly unrequited by the local cricket community. At least Allan Lamb will remember him; Tom recommended him to Northamptonshire and, as another Tom, Holland, might say, “the rest is history”.

The original Authors XI lasted 21 years and the current team is in its 12th season. It is the creation of an idea by novelist, poet and short-story writer Nicholas Hogg and Campbell, a literary agent and author. Holland was drawn in because he was a regular teammate of Campbell’s, his brother James, a renowned World War 2 historian, joined in along with a few others — and the game was afoot.

“We’d had one game in which we’d all been writers and thought maybe we should keep doing that,” says Campbell. They hadn’t decided on a name until Campbell came across a collection called Wodehouse at the Wicket by PG Wodehouse, which carries stories of the original team of writers. So the Authors XI, more formally the Authors Cricket Club, was revived 100 years after the team of Conan Doyle and Wodehouse had pulled up stumps.

Flashman would never have fitted in with Campbell’s ethos of cricket: “We do try to make it all about cricket. Occasionally, we get people who join who think it’s going to be good for their career or for whatever reason. Cricket unfortunately attracts the person who likes all the stuff that go with it, like blazers and ties ... and I am sadly allergic those things,” he says. “We have a strong team and we have a very talented literary team ... the best players are normally the least successful with book sales. And someone like Tom Holland, who’s an incredibly brilliant and successful author, managed to go 10 years without taking a single catch.”

Ahead of the English summer, Holland hired a Bulgarian personal trainer to help him get fit to continue opening the bowling, but as kind as age may be to amateur cricketers (rather than, say, footballers), it’s not Peter Panish. Campbell recalls a moment from last season when the team’s opening pair, men in their 50s, also opened the bowling in one game. “I just thought, this is catastrophic and will be the end of the team if we’re not careful.”

He went seeking younger talent and the team recruited Michael Taylor, a good off-spinner, and a young playwright, Fred Kelly, a fast bowler. Taylor had played for two Irish age-group teams and first-class matches for Cambridge University. The skipper says he is “ridiculously clever”, and writes about slavery and dinosaurs (Impossible Monsters). He was also a winner in University Challenge, a British television quiz programme, where there is another connection with the Authors XI: Amor Rajan, author of Twirlymen: The Unlikely History of Cricket’s Greatest Spin Bowlers and who succeeded Jeremy Paxman as quizmaster, is a batting all-rounder in the team.

Kelly and Taylor will be good additions. “I went on a conscious effort looking for bowlers because they’re quite hard to find,” says Campbell, who turned 47 in May and played in the team’s first 150 games. But he knows it’s not an easy business finding new and, hopefully, young talent. “Writing a book is not normally something done by the young and most people have taken up batting even if they did once bowl.”

Campbell is also aware that to keep the team competitive, even relatively, the club will need to become more diverse in the search for batting and bowling power to come even close to its brain power.

“It’s a problem in publishing,” says the captain. “What I learnt quite early on is that the people who have the confidence to write to me and suggest they play for the team are, on the whole, from a position of privilege. I realised I would have to try and counter that if I could. I didn’t want to end up like one of those old boys’ school teams, which could easily happen. It’s something I learnt from having to put a cricket team together. We’re aware of that, we try and we can always do better.”

Campbell not only knows about putting together a cricket team, he’s written a book about it: Herding Cats: The Art of Amateur Cricket Captaincy is a counterpoint to the cerebral The Art of Captaincy by Mike Brearley, captain of England in the Botham’s Ashes series.

Along with an enthusiasm for the game, and some skill, team members “have to have been professionally published ... we try not to be too selfish about it and one of the main things is cricketing needs. If people can bowl, a good leg-spinner or off-spinner or quick bowler would be brilliant.”

The Authors XI runs itself very much like any well organised cricket club, that takes in subs, requires players to also umpire — and has a year-end awards dinner. Once, Alex Preston, whose Bleeding City, his first novel, was translated into 12 languages, was umpiring when teammate Richard Beard, whose Muddied Oafs: The Last Days of Rugger looks at the changes since rugby went professional, was the subject of an LBW appeal. “Do you think you were out,” Preston asks an aghast Beard. Later, Preston claimed it was a rhetorical question. Only in an Authors XI match! Preston’s award that year: Decision of the Season.

The club even has a sponsor in Rathbones, an asset and wealth management firm, that helps with the club’s fundraising events, some of which are hugely successful. In 2021, Holland was given a benefit season, an ancient tradition of the game to raise money for retiring old pros but seldom awarded to an amateur cricketers; in Holland’s case it was a fun fundraising event.

“The truth, is I’m not very good at cricket, I’m sure you would have worked it out by now, but I do love it,” he says in a video to promote the benefit where his cricket virtues are exaggerated by past England Test players, among them Andrew Caddick and Matthew Hoggard, whose wickets (or “scalps” in the Press XI jargon) he has claimed. But he’s brought down to earth by James Anderson, who deliberately confuses him with that other Tom Holland: “Spider-Man plays cricket?”

During that benefit season, Holland and his podcast partner, Dominic Sandbrook, did a live recording of their popular The Rest is History programme followed by a dinner that brought in £100,000 for charities benefiting the homeless.

Campbell says the team plays about 30 matches a year. “We could easily have two or three times that number. I would if I could, but have yet to find enough cricket-playing writers. And I don’t want us to become one of those clubs that forgets its origins.”

If there are any aspiring young authors out there, especially ones like Holland who love the game, getting published may be a dream, but getting a place in the Authors XI batting order might be an even greater incentive for the truly devout.