What Could Possibly Be the Connection Between Peter Pan Playing Cricket and Islamic Triumphalism? (Part 2)

PART TWO:   CRICKET LOVELY CRICKET.[6]

Harold Pinter, the Nobel Prize-winning playwright, was also a devotee of cricket, and wrote “I tend to think cricket is the greatest thing that God created on earth.” J.M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, also agreed, calling it the “an idea of the gods.” He then added, “cricket is the only game they [the gods] play themselves “. E.W. Hornung, creator of Raffles, the gentleman cricketer and burglar of the fashionable rich, wrote of “the unfolding drama of a cricket match on a hot summer afternoon”.

Can one imagine a more improbable Cricket Team than one which boasts players who have invented some of the most famous characters in English Literature: Sherlock Holmes, Peter Pan, Jeeves and Winnie-the Pooh? Such a cricket team was indeed put together by the Scottish writer, Sir James Matthew Barrie [1860-1937]. Though he is now better known for creating Peter Pan, Barrie was in late Victorian and early Edwardian times a very successful playwright, of such hits as The Little Minister based on his own novel, which earned him £80,000. There was also the sentimental period comedy Quality Street [1901], and his most enduring play, The Admirable Crichton [1902].[7] But his most famous creation was the children’s favourite, Peter Pan, which grew out of stories he had written for the five sons of his friends Arthur and Sylvia Davies. He was highly honoured: made a baronet, awarded the Order of Merit, and received several honorary degrees. Despite his success, Barrie was timid, but admired courage, helping to sponsor Scott’s Antarctic expedition. His work has fallen out of favour as it is considered to be marred by sentimentality and whimsy.

A little bit of the whimsy is lost on those do not like, or know the rules of the game of, or understand the fascination for, cricket. But not entirely. He wrote a kind of handbook for his cricket team which contains this only half-serious self-description, “BARRIE (CAPT.) An incomparable Captain. The life and soul of his side. A treat to see him tossing the penny. Once took a wicket.”  Kevin Telfer’s charming account of Barrie’s team describes him as “the captain, the wit, the instigator, the Machiavellian schemer, scorer, writer-in-residence, anarchist and organiser of this improvised team of writers and other friends and acquaintances.”[8]

The final pages of the handbook include these Hints to the Team by their Captain: “Don’t practise on the opponent’s ground before match begins. This can only give them confidence.” Another was: “Should you hit the ball, run at once. Don’t stop to cheer.” On another occasion, Barrie wrote a letter to the captain of the opposing team: “As one captain speaking to another, I would beg you not to let your team see that you are hopeless of their winning. It will only demoralise them still further.”[9]

Barrie was unimpressive physically: a frail, sensitive looking fellow a little over five feet tall. There was nothing remotely athletic in his appearance. Yet he inspired love and devotion from famous athletes, writers, politicians, artists, and explorers. Scott of the Antarctic, for example, wrote to him: “I never met a man in my life whom I admired and loved more than you but I could never could show you how much your friendship meant to me- for you had much to give and I nothing.”[10]

Barrie was devoted to play-recreation, that is. There was going through all these fervent activities a certain boyishness, a schoolboy’s enthusiasm. Peter Pan, his most famous creation, is constantly defying adults and their dull routines. “For Barrie everything important began in childhood and indeed, according to him, ‘Nothing that happens after we are twelve matters very much’”[11]

James Matthew Barrie was born on 9 May 1860 in a small town called Kirriemuir, which is situated just north of Dundee, in eastern Scotland. It was while growing up in Kirriemuir that he learnt to play cricket. But it was not the only physical activity or sport that he delighted in; for he seems to have enjoyed ice-skating, football, fishing and taking very long walks. However the most memorable and significant event of his childhood was the death of his brother, David, when Barrie was six. David, who died in an ice-skating accident just before his fourteenth birthday, had been the great hope of the family: tall, intelligent and athletic. Many biographers of Barrie have surmised that the death of David, at a young age, inspired Barrie’s creation of “Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up” [title of Barrie’s play, produced in 1904]. Andrew Birkin in his touching book, J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys, [12] “If Margaret Ogilvy [David and Barrie’s mother] drew a measure of comfort from the notion that David, in dying a boy, would remain a boy forever, Barrie drew inspiration. It would be another thirty-three years before that inspiration  emerged in the shape of Peter Pan, but here was the germ, rooted in his mind and soul from the age of six.”

In 1873, Barrie went to the secondary school, Dumfries Academy, where he is recorded to have started playing cricket in 1875 with notable success.

He went on to Edinburgh University, from which he graduated in 1882.

Barrie began his literary life in London with journalism, then, as his confidence grew, began writing novels and plays for the London Theatre.

His circle of friends also grew, and one of his activities was taking long walks in the countryside with the newly-acquired friends-writers, journalists, politicians, and many others- sometimes in the county of Surrey. He was fond of visiting the famous cricket ground known as Lord’s just north of Dorset Square, in London. Barrie describes the origins of his own cricket team:

“In those days you could sit on the sward [the grassy part of the ground, at Lord’s, where the game took place] and watch the play as at a country match, but now I am such a swell that I look on from the little hotel on the left as you go in. We have got to know each other there, and I call the attendant I buy the ticket from George. Anon [J.M. Barrie] went alone to Lord’s at first and did not dare speak to anyone, but by his second year he was accompanied by friends, such as [Thomas Lennox] Gilmour [private secretary to Lord Roseberry], already darkly referred to and to be more fully exposed presently, and [Richard] Marriott Watson [journalist, novelist] with whom [James] Anon [J.M. Barrie- one of his many pen-names]  afterwards wrote a play. Sometimes the three of them went for long tramps in Surrey, often most to lovely Shere, in which village, ‘over the butcher’s shop,’ [George] Meredith [1828-1909-novelist] told me he had written one of his novels. On these occasions they talked so much cricket that it began to be felt among them that they were hidden adepts at the game, and an ambition came over them to unveil. This was strengthened by the elderly appearance of the Shere team, whom they decided to challenge after letting them grow one year older. Anon was appointed captain (by chicanery it is said by the survivors), and he thought there would be no difficulty in getting a stout XI. together, literary men being such authorities on the willow. On the eventful day, however, he found out in the railway compartment by which they advanced upon Shere that he had to coach more than one of his players in the finesse of the game: which was the side of the bat you hit with, for instance. In so far as was feasible they also practised in the train. Two of the team were African travellers of renown, Paul du Chaillu[13] of gorilla fame and the much loved Joseph Thomson[14] of Masailand. When a name for the team was being discussed, Anon, now grown despondent, asked these two what was the ‘African’ for ‘Heaven help us,’ and they gave him ‘Allahakbar.’ So they decided to call themselves the Allahakbars, afterwards changed with complimentary intention to the Allahakbarries.”[15] [Celebrating J.M.Barrie, hence Allahak-barries].

In a speech he gave at University College, Dundee, Barrie gave a slightly different version of the origins of the name. “I asked an African traveller, and who, by the way, constantly ran away at the end of each over and had to be brought back for another- I asked him what the Moorish for “Heaven help us? “ Du Chaillu told him “Allahu akbar”.

The first game, 1897, was against the village of Shere in Surrey, Southern England, a charming, beautiful village, which served the Allahakbarrians perfectly since the whole idea was to get away from London, and breathe the country air, and relax in a peaceful, bucolic setting, without taking anything too seriously, in one sense. Indeed, Barrie always insisted that he did not care if he won or lost. Conan Doyle who soon joined the Allahakbarians also confessed “We played in the old style caring little about the game and good deal about a jolly time and pleasant scenery”[16].

But in an other sense, for Barrie, it was far more than just a game,  “it was a symbol of opposition to the modern urban values of dour progress, profit margins and colonial expansion…[For Barrie, nonetheless] cricket was about a return to the pastoral way of life, a way of life that at the end of the nineteenth century seemed to be endangered by industry, urbanisation and population growth.”[17]

The name Peter Pan is equally significant. Pan was of course a Greek god whose home was Arcadia, whose national god he later became. The name means ‘guardian of flocks’; he is a shepherd god and protector of shepherds. His activities are concerned with the pastoral world, and is also associated with paganism, fertility, music and play. Barrie wished to represent youth and youthful society.

The first match against the village of Shere took place in 1887, and it was only in the train from Waterloo station to Shere, Barrie realized much to his horror that many of his players did not understand anything of cricket or its, to an outsider, complex rules. The explorers were particularly clueless: Joseph Thomson turned up at Waterloo station in his pyjamas. Some did not know which side of a cricket bat one had to use to hit a ball.

Du Chaillu would disappear each time the umpire called “Over” thinking the game was over, and had to be brought back. The Allahakbarries were soundly beaten.

Over the next few years, the team flourished and was joined by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [1859-1930], Jerome K. Jerome [1859-1927], who was the author of the work that was to bring him everlasting fame, Three Men in a Boat [1889], Augustine Birrell [1850-1933], essayist and statesman,  A.E.W. Mason [1865-1948], author of Four Feathers, George Meredith [1828-1909], the very successful novelist; P. G. Wodehouse [1881-1975], whose novel, centred on cricket, Mike, George Orwell called his best work; A.A. Milne [1882-1956].

Kevin Telfer ends his charming work on Barrie’s cricket team in this manner:

“The Allahakbarries were for a short period the literary establishment….After the First World War they retreated to their writer’s studies and their other private spaces …. ‘To be born is to be wrecked on an island’, Barrie once wrote, but cricket, along with his writing was one of the main things in his life which helped him to express his personality; to enable the distance between the islands to become more bearable. …The Allahakhbarries were not just a celebration of cricket but of the green fields where they played. Barrie led them from the city like Pan with his pipes and took to Neverland, the island where time stood still, where there was no death; an idealised, romanticised England of peaceful meadows and figures on reasonable terms playing cricket and laughing together, where Michael and George will always be playing at pirates with their brothers on the boundary-edge.”[18]

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[6] Title of a famous calypso celebrating the West Indies team of 1950 when they beat England in a Test Series for the first time.

[7] Which was filmed twice, in 1918 and 1957.

[8] Kevin Telfer, Peter Pan’s First XI. The Story of J. M. Barrie’s Cricket Team. London: Sceptre, 2010, p.7.

[9] Kevin Telfer, pp. 8-9.

[10] Kevin Telfer, p. 10.

[11] Kevin Telfer, p.11.

[12] Andrew Birkin, J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys, London: Constable, 1979.

[13] Paul Belloni du Chaillu [1831-1903]  French-American traveler, zoologist, and anthropologist. He became famous in the 1860s as the first modern European outsider to confirm the existence of gorillas, and later the Pygmy people of central Africa.

[14] Joseph Thomson [1858-1895], British geologist and explorer. Thomson’s gazelle and Thomson’s Falls, Nyahururu, Kenya (East Africa) are named after him.

[15] J. M. Barrie, The Greenwood Hat, Being a Memoir of James Anon [1885-1887], New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938, pp.90-91

[16] Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1924, p.278

[17] Kevin Telfer, p.42.

[18] Kevin Telfer, p.314.