Allahakbarries, smoking and cricket - the passions of JM Barrie's literary eleven

BOOK OF THE DAY: Peter Pan's First XI: The Extraordinary Story of JM Barrie's Cricket TeamBy Kevin Telfer Sceptre, 344pp, £16.99

PETER PAN is not someone you hear much about now, and if you do it is as a term of mild abuse. But from 1904 the eponymous play, and the novel it later became, Peter and Wendy, about a boy who never grew up, made JM Barrie a very wealthy man and a household name. He was the most commercially and critically successful British writer of his time.

Barrie’s heyday was also the golden age of cricket, 1890-1914, when, strange as it may seem now, that sport was by far the most popular game in England. Kevin Telfer’s book nicely combines the two histories.

Barrie was born in 1860, one of eight children of a weaver and his puritan wife, in a small town north of Dundee. After an MA from Edinburgh he went south in search of work, and found a job on the Nottingham Journal, where his boss divided content into news and "tripe" – tripe being anything that did not fit into the former category. Barrie's job was to supply all the tripe.

He moved on to London, became a prolific freelance journalist and began to publish stories based on his mother’s tales of childhood. Described as “a weedy fellow a little over five feet tall”, he built up a group of friends, mostly writers – among them PG Wodehouse and Jerome K Jerome – but also explorers, politicians, editors and cartoonists, who became the makings of a cricket team. This was the Allahakbarries – the name made up of, as he thought, the “African” for “heaven help us”, combined with his own surname.

His bachelor days shaped him: he liked male company, silly games and light-hearted banter, idling with men who were enjoying the “apparent spaciousness of their futures ahead of them”, and smoking. Smoking, as the author remarks, “like cricket, seemed to make time slow down”.

Though they later attracted some first-class cricketers, most of the team were men "who longed to be good at cricket but never truly would be". One of the more capable players was Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmesstories, who once bowled out the great WG Grace.

Barrie made light of his own cricket skills, saying of his slow bowling, that if he didn’t like the look of a ball he could easily go and fetch it before it reached the batsman, and bowl it again.

He married, but it was not a great success and, it is suggested here, the marriage was not consummated. Just as he enjoyed boyish, bachelor behaviour, he liked the company of children and spent a lot of time with the sons of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, a woman he admired, and they inspired Peter Pan. The author wisely avoids intervening with 21st Century attitudes and takes Barrie on his own terms: he finds a man of attractive innocence and a great gift for friendship.

Cricket had been enlisted as a character-former, an approach to life in which the English virtues it expressed would lead to victory on other fields. The savagery of the first World War quickly killed that ideal. It was the end, as the author puts it, of “a whole culture which praised boys and young men . . . before they were carelessly tossed to their deaths”.

This engaging book scrutinises its many subjects well, but with a kind eye. The author is obviously himself passionate about cricket, and explains enough of the pleasures of the game to pass on some of that passion to the reader, and to send us off to read not just Barrie but Conan Doyle too, and his brother-in-law (and team-mate) EW Hornung’s “Raffles”, the gentleman thief.

John S Doyle is a freelance journalist