Published by Sceptre on May 13 and available now from Amazon

 

This book tells the story of perhaps the most extraordinary amateur cricket team ever to have taken the field.

 

Some of the most famous English writers from the early twentieth century occupied the crease for a cricket club called the Allahakbarries between 1887 and 1913, marshalled with zest and brio by the slight and whimsical figure of J. M. Barrie.They included Arthur Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse, A. A. Milne and Jerome K. Jerome as well as many famous people of the day who have now faded into relative obscurity.

 

Those years were full of golden summers — ‘the scene of contests and suppers of Homeric splendour’, according to Barrie, who also documented the exploits of his band of adult Peter Pans in two small private books printed for members of the team.

 

The period from 1890 and 1914 is often called ‘The Golden Age of Cricket’. However, the carefree and youthful pursuits of this extraordinary club, along with cricket in general, were curtailed by the First World War. And the war meant that the Allahakbarries would never again come together to recall their glorious exploits of old. But this book does precisely that, with the help of fantastic photographs and other illustrative material — re-creating the matches and adventures of a team that played in what A. A. Milne called ‘a world in which imaginative youth could be happy without feeling ashamed of its happiness’.

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