Writers in Whites: How a Group of Literary Cricketers Changed English Culture

Writers in Whites is the untold story of cricket’s central role in a slice of London’s literary world, from the 1880s to the 1960s. PG Wodehouse used his cricket-playing to launch his writing career. JM Barrie modelled the pirates in Peter Pan after his cricket teammates. Arthur Conan Doyle named Sherlock Holmes after a cricketer he’d played against. They all belonged to a network of cricket- playing writers, who collectively left a permanent legacy on English culture. Their teams went by various names, but most often they called themselves the Authors. Based on a wealth of new research, Writers in Whites tells the story of this group, from Jerome K. Jerome via Evelyn Waugh to Michael Morpurgo. It wasn’t simply that lots of important writers happened to like playing cricket together. The very act of playing for the Authors influenced their careers and their writings – both through networking opportunities and by helping to shape their cultural outlook. The literary cricketers weathered scandals and ferocious culture wars, but they also wrote numerous memoirs describing their antics on and around the cricket field. Writers in Whites draws on their books and unpublished letters, letting these men narrate, in their own words, how literary cricket played a key role in their lives. The full story – which provides a fresh way of viewing English cultural history from the 1880s to the 1960s – has never been told before. Literary cricket played a role in the rise of mass literature before the First World War, and in rallying resistance to the Modernists in interwar London. It also drew in some of the great names of twentieth-century Test cricket, such as CB Fry, Douglas Jardine, Learie Constantine, Len Hutton and Richie Benaud as well as cricket writers and reporters such as EV Lucas, Neville Cardus, EW Swanton and Henry Blofeld.

'A delightful and revealing jaunt into the world of some of my favourite writers.' Alexander Armstrong

'The perfect book to take with you and your deck chair to a village cricket match this summer. This book reminds us how writing and cricket and reading belong together, as do the people who love them. And I’m one of them!' Michael Morpurgo

'Randall charts the decline of cricket as a cultural influence with just as much brilliance and assiduity as he chronicles its rise. To understand fully how central cricket was to Hornung’s vision of England, you need to read his superb history of the rise and fall of cricket as the embodiment of Englishness.' Ferdinand Mount