Sir James Barrie –the cricketer and the litterateur. Wikimedia
Sir JM Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, was unabashedly devoted to cricket, to a degree that contrasted incredibly with his limited talents in the game. His travelling cricket team of writers and other celebrities remain one of the curious sidenotes in the history of the game. Pradip Dhole writes about the incredible man, his incredible team and his incredible passion.
“Definition: Psychogenic dwarfism is a growth disorder that is observed between the ages of 2 and 15, caused by extreme emotional deprivation. The symptoms include decreased growth hormone (GH) secretion, very short stature, weight that is inappropriate for the height, and immature skeletal age. This disease is a progressive one, and as long as the child is left in the stressing environment, his or her cognitive and linear abilities continue to degenerate”
- I Won't Grow Up: The Causes of Psychogenic Dwarfism - Karen Munoz
This is what a pamphlet of the forum UNDISCOVERED SCOTLAND has to say about the town of Kirriemuir nestling in the Angus valley of Forfarshire, Scotland: “Kirriemuir was an early example of specialisation. In the 1760s a local weaver developed a double-thickness cloth that was the ideal material to be made into corsets. This formed the foundation for Kirriemuir's growth as a textile centre and by 1860 there were 1,500 hand loom weavers in Kirriemuir and 500 more in the surrounding area. It is estimated that Kirriemuir's weavers produced over 9 million yards of linen per year through the 1860s…..”
The present narrative begins in the homestead of the Calvinist, David Barrie, one of the traditional weavers of Kirriemuir. Page 34 of the birth records of 1860 for the Parish of Kerriemuir in the County of Forfar shows a male child, subsequently named James Matthew Barrie, to have been born on May/09/1860 at 6:30 AM to one David Barrie, Linen Manufacturer, and his wife, Margaret Barrie, nee Ogilvie, the birth having taken place at The Tenements, 9 Brechin Road, Kirriemuir, presently preserved as a Birthplace Museum by the National Trust for Scotland.
James was the 9th of the ten children of the couple, two of the children having passed away before his birth. Seven of his siblings were sisters. His two elder brothers, Alexander (born in 1842) and David (born in 1853) were both were much older than him. Described as being a “small child”, he was to later mature to be a man of short stature, about 5’ 3 ½” or 161 cm in height as recorded in his passport of 1934.
A terrible tragedy struck the weaver’s family on 29 Jan/1867, when James was in his 6th year. The incident is described by Andrew Birkin in JM Barrie and the Lost Boys as follows: “For the first six years of his life, James Barrie lived in the shadow of his glorious elder brother, David. But on the eve of his fourteenth birthday, David was killed in a skating accident. Such was their mother's grief that the runtish (sic) little Barrie determined to replace the dead boy, trying to become so like him ‘that even my mother should not know the difference. But in those nine-and-twenty years she lived after his death he was not removed one day farther from her, for when I became a man ... he was still a boy of 13.’"
To go by contemporary reports, David, with his sweet nature and young Adonis looks, had always been his mother’s favourite child, and Margaret never recovered fully from his loss, frequently confusing James for David in her somewhat disoriented state of mind, and denying James, as it were, a separate identity of his own during his growing years. Father David, always busy with his work and detached from domestic issues by nature, had very little time for the children. It is believed that the ambivalent attitude of both parents towards him may have contributed to what may now be thought of as being a degree of psychological trauma, a cross that James was to bear all his life, and which may even have been a contributing factor towards his “psychogenic” dwarfism.
The official Biography of JM Barrie states that he had been sent to Glasgow at the age of eight to be schooled at the Glasgow Academy under the care of two elder siblings, Alexander and Mary, both of whom used to be teachers in the seminary at the time. The next step in his education was accomplished at Forfar Academy at Angus, from where he had gone on to Dumfries Academy, studying there from 1873 to 1878. Barrie was to remark later: “I think the five years or so that I spent here were probably the happiest of my life, for indeed I have loved this place.”
Elder brother Alexander was by this time a Schools Inspector and Barrie stayed with him while attending Dumfries Academy. He became involved in the newly formed Dramatic Club and began to write for the school magazine. Barrie’s first two real friends at Dumfries were Stewart and Hal Gordon, sons of James Gordon, the owner of Moat Brae, a Georgian townhouse built by Dumfries architect, Walter Newall, in 1823. During this phase of his life, Barrie spent a great deal of his time on the property playing with his friends in the extensive gardens and in the house itself.
The fledgling author’s first play was called Bandelero the Bandit and was written and performed when Barrie was about 17 years old. He also maintained a sort of “Log Book” of the “fantastic” childish games that they would play in the “enchanted land” of Moat Brae. A fairly good student, Barrie won several prizes for the essays he had written in his senior year. More interested in the extra-curricular activities, he enjoyed the dramatics, the debates, and the sporting events. An active member of the Dumfries Academy football and cricket teams, he was a surprisingly enthusiastic ice-skater, despite the family tragedy of his elder brother David dying from a skating accident.
James Barrie’s desire to make a living among the dramatic circles was frowned upon by his parents, who encouraged him to pursue a more conventional vocation such as the Church. The impasse was resolved and a compromise was reached with Barrie agreeing to attend University. The 22-year old Barrie left Edinburgh University with a Master of Arts in Literature in 1882.
There followed a brief interlude in London as a staff journalist for the Nottingham Journal but that did not satisfy his creative soul. Returning to Kirriemuir, he began writing fictional tales based on the stories that his mother had told him in connection with the town. Having written a few, he sent them to the London newspaper St. James’s Gazette, who expressed an interest in them. Thus encouraged, he began a series that was subsequently published in the form of his first three novels, Auld Licht Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1890), and The Little Minister (1891).
Barrie could not forsake his romance with the stage, however, and began to write for the theatre. His first successful play was called Ibsen’s Ghost (1891), a parody of the great Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s drama Hedda Gabler and Ghosts, and it was highly acclaimed among the cognoscenti. It was during the production of his third play that Barrie succumbed to the charms of the actress Mary Ansell, marrying her on 9 July, 1994. It was whispered among contemporary circles that the marriage was never consummated.
The lady decided to retire from the stage following her nuptials to Barrie but the couple remained childless. Following allegations of infidelity on the part of Mary, the marriage was dissolved in 1910, bringing to an end sixteen years of togetherness with only an adopted St. Bernard puppy named Porthos that the couple had acquired during their honeymoon in Switzerland, for solace and company.
As has been well documented, Barrie, himself for ever a child at heart, and with no children of his own, had struck up a friendship with the handsome barrister Arthur Llewellyn-Davies, his wife Sylvia, known to be one of the great beauties of her time, and their five sons. This association was to later form the basis of his fictional character Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, his immortal legacy to the world of children’s literature. With time, even though James Barrie became a celebrity among literary circles and earned an enormous fortune from his literary output, the little left-handed writer with the broad forehead, the dreamy eyes, and the drooping moustache never quite played down the impish child-like spirit always lurking very close to the surface of his persona.
A man with a quixotic sense of humour and an affinity for the unusual, James Barrie was a repository of several whims in his imaginative and creative brain, one of which arose from his love for cricket. Writing under the bye-line J.M. Barrie’s Literary All-Star Cricket Team, Stacy Conradt says: “For whatever reason—perhaps because writing can be a rather solitary venture—literary types have long gathered together in search of other pursuits….J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan—who was born ….in 1860—decided to form an amateur cricket team, and recruited many of his famous friends to join him.
Barrie put together a strangely motley crew of people, principally from the literary and artistic world, but also including sundry others, in 1887. An article appearing in The Scotsman of Apr, 2010 opined that: “Peter Pan author JM Barrie and pals were lost boys at cricket”, going on to state that: “They were the strangest characters in the history of cricket, a team captained by Peter Pan, with Sherlock Holmes as the star batsman and Winnie the Pooh also at the wicket.
Perhaps it had been the instinct of originality present in the members of his chosen group that had caused the authors, the artists, the big game hunters, and explorers like Captain Scott to gravitate towards him in a bond of mutual affinity. Barrie’s disarming eccentricity may also have been a significant contributing factor in attracting such an eclectic conglomeration of individuals towards him.
Not surprisingly, Barrie’s selection criteria were rather uncommon. He was loth to adhere to the conventional custom of using a person’s athletic ability as a basis for his selection in the team. In his own words, he chose his men as follows: “With regard to the married men, it was because I liked their wives, with the regard to the single men, it was for the oddity of their personal appearance.”
Like a true leader of men, Barrie would often issue valuable advice to his men, exhorting them never to indulge in any cricket practice, particularly in “away” games, before the beginning of a game because the sight would invariably boost the confidence of the opponents. He would also remind them that: “Should you hit the ball, run at once. Do not stop to cheer."
The seeds of the enterprise had been sown in September, 1887 when James Barrie had requested a group of his friends to congregate at the village of Shere, Guildford, to play against the local team. It is said that it was only after the assembly had actually foregathered at Waterloo station that the enormity of the task of playing a cricket game as a harmonious team had dawned on them, given their almost total collective ignorance of the sport.
It is said that there were members of the team who were unsure about which face of the bat was to be used to actually strike the ball. A French member of the team was under the impression that the call of “Over” from the umpire signified the end of the game. Another team member, the naturalist Joseph Thomson, preferred to take the field dressed in his pajamas rather than in conventional cricket attire. Many of the fielders, having concluded that the safest position in the field was long-on, and shying away from any actual physical contact with the ball during play, would gravitate towards that position. Indeed, it is reported that in one memorable game, as many as seven men could be found populating that area of the field, to the wonderment of both the skipper and whatever curious spectators that may have assembled on the day.
A typical turnout, apart from skipper Barrie himself, may have looked something like this:
· A.A. Milne, author of the Winnie the Pooh series
· Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series
· P.G. Wodehouse, author of the Jeeves and Wooster series and the Blandings capers
· H.G. Wells, author of The Time Machine and other science fiction works
· Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book
· E.W. Hornung, author of the A.J. Raffles series
· G.K. Chesterton, author of the Father Brown detective novels
Of the literary luminaries present in the list above, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was perhaps the only one with any genuine and proven cricketing ability. From the archives, James Barrie is seen to have played in 12 documented cricket games of “Minor” status from Sep/1896 to July/1905. In the first of these, a one-day single innings affair, played at Lord’s on 17 Sep/1896, Barrie had represented a team called Authors against the Press. The match report states that the game had originally been scheduled for 10 Sep/1896 but inclement weather had forced an abandonment of the game. In their collective benevolence, the MCC authorities had then allowed the game to be rearranged for the following week.
The Times had reported that the weather had not been conducive for the postponed game either and that the ground had been “in a state of quagmire.” There is no information on the toss but the Authors had batted first, and had declared at a total of 216 for the loss of a solitary wicket in 51 overs. Opening the batting, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had remained undefeated on 101, sharing a 1st wicket stand of 178 with Charles Tyssen (97), a Curate, and later an erudite professor at St. Edmund’s College, Hertfordshire. The Press had made 81 runs for 6 wickets in 28 overs in a game overwhelmingly dominated by the creator of Sherlock Holmes. In passing, James Barrie had merely graced the occasion with his already celebrity presence, neither batting, nor bowling, and not contributing anything in the field.
Having assembled the odd mixture of creative talent to form a truly unconventional cricket team, Barrie was at a loss to find a name for it. As it turned out, the name arose from a misinterpretation of a term from an ancient Central Semitic language. Two seasoned African explorers, professing a self-proclaimed mastery of the Arabic language, convinced Barrie that the term “Allahakbar” translated to “Heaven help us”, a fitting description of the feelings of the strange group at the prospect of actually embarking on a series of cricket matches, given their shortcomings with regard to cricketing proficiency. In point of fact, the suggested term equates to “God is great.” When the realisation of the error hit the literary group, they thought it fit to add “ries” to the term, resulting in a cricket team called the “Allahakbarries”, a moniker that, by a happy coincidence, also incorporated the name of the illustrious founder and skipper of the team
James Barrie’s “truly atrocious cricket team,” circa 1903
Photo Courtesy: Old Guv Legends
Back row (L to R): E.W. Hornung of Raffles fame, author and poet E. V. Lucas, P.G.Wodehouse, J.C. Smith, G. Charne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, big game hunter Hesketh-Hesketh Prichard, illustrator L. D. Luard, painter C. M. Q. Orchardson, landscape and flowers painter Leonard Charles Nightingale, A. Kinross.
Front row (L to R): C. Gascoyne, author Shan F. Bullock, painter G. Hillyard Swinstead, architect Reginald Blomfield, the Hon. W. J. James, American illustrator and painter Edwin Austin Abbey, painter Albert Chevalier Taylor, J. M. Barrie, German-English poet, criminologist George Cecil Ives and painter George Spencer Watson.
Sitting on ground: Author and Politician, A. E. W. Mason, best remembered for his novel Four Feathers.
Of his own cricketing abilities, the left-handed Barrie would be the first to admit that he was no Demon Bowler. Of his own bowling, he would say in later years that: “if he didn't like the look of a ball he could go and fetch it before it reached the other batsman & bowl it again". Indeed, the Allahakbarries played their village cricket for the fun of the game, and as a childish advemture, always in a spirit of friendly competition, and often with a cavalier disregard for the conventional norms that have come to be recognised as being part of the essentially British game.
It is a pity that the early games played by the eccentric team of literary giants and other well-known faces had not been documented for posterity. The first match of the Allahakbarries for which a scorecard is archived was a 1-day single innings game against the Artists, played at Denmark Hill in the London borough of Southwark on 19 May/1899, and played on a 12-a-side basis. The Artists won the keenly contested game by 7 runs, after batting first and scoring 141 all out. The bulk of the total had come from the bat of George Swinstead, the Chelsea born artist and illustrator, who carried the team with his 106, none of the other batsmen getting into double figures. Extras contributed 14 runs.
The successful bowlers for the Allahakbarries were Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard, the noted explorer, adventurer and marksman, with 5 wickets, followed by a rather nondescript H Wilson with 4 wickets, and SS Pawling with 2 wickets. For the Allahakbarries, there were four men in double figures, the palm going to Pawling for his top score of 34. Skipper Barrie scored 3. As far as the bowling was concerned, it was virtually a one-man show with the centurion Swinstead also picking up 8 wickets.
Writing for The Lutyens Trust in her book Lutyens and the Edwardians, An English Architect and his Clients, Jane Brown comments: “ Tucked away in the library at Lords is a rather well-thumbed score book kept by J M Barrie for his Allahakbarries cricket team on their annual excursions into Surrey in the turn of the 19th century summers. Barrie fell in love with the countryside that was young Ned Lutyens’s earliest stamping ground; he rented a cottage at Shere at the time Ned was building a village shop and lodge for Reginald Bray, and it seems certain they first met here and formed a lifelong friendship. The Allahakbarries played one of their first matches against Shere Fire Brigade – the fire station still stands next door to Ned’s shop – and the firemen won ‘by about 60’ runs.” This match, sadly, is not documented in James Barrie’s cricket profile.
The itinerant Allahakbarries played their capricious brand of cricket in village greens from 1887 till the outbreak of World War I brought the harsh realities of life home to them. An article appearing in The Scotsman of Apr/2010 says: “Tragically, what began on the village greens of Worcestershire and Kent was to end among the trenches and bomb craters of Flanders when a number of players lost their lives during the First World War.”
The Allahakbarries played their last game from 13 Oct, 1913, with author AA Milne playing in his only game for them. Also in the team was George Llewellyn Davies, one of the five boys of the family that had been the inspiration behind the creation of Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. Writing in his diary on a visit to Scotland at this time, Barrie had commented: “the Last Cricket Match. One or two days before war declared – my anxiety and premonition – boys gaily playing cricket at Auch, seen from my window. I know they're to suffer. I see them dropping out one by one, fewer and fewer."
Barrie’s gloomy prophecy was soon to be proved true from among his close acquaintances. One of the casualties of the wasteful war was to be George Llewellyn Davies, shot through the head on 15 Mar/1915, his spectacles and revolver being passed on to another former Allahakbarrie, 2nd Lieutenant Percival Drewett Lucas, attached to the Border Regiment of the British Army, who was to himself succumb to his war wounds on 6 July, 1916.
Kevin Telfer, author of Peter Pan’s First XI, says: “"JM Barrie was the one who made this team so special. It was an unusual obsession for a Scotsman but Barrie was fascinated by the English and with cricket. No-one else could persuade Jerome K Jerome, PG Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle to abandon their fear of coming across as ridiculous and play for a team that was at times farcical." The book was published to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Sir James Barry in May, 2010.
In the year 1890, Barrie wrote a slim volume about the hilarious exploits of his beloved Allahakbarries under the title Allahakbarries CC. He had dedicated the book “To Our Dear Enemy Mary de Navarro,” a famous American diva of the age, who had retired to a small village called Broadway in Worcestershire, and who had indulged in village cricket, some of the games being commemorated in Barrie’s book. It is said, that forming a cricket team among the artists residing at Broadway, the lady had bowled out Barrie in a game in 1907, much to his discomfiture, and to the hilarity of his opponents.
A revised edition of Barrie’s book had appeared in print in 1899. The 1950 reprint of the book had a forward written by Sir Donald Bradman, the Australian batting legend. While copies of the original volume are very rare, the 1950 reprint is more readily available at a reasonable price. Before we move away from the cricketing exploits of James Barrie, and in all fairness to him, it must be stated that he had once dismissed Douglas Haig, later to become Field Marshal Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, KT, GCB, OM, GCVO, KCIE, the World War I military hero, often referred to as the “Butcher of the Somme”, in a friendly cricket game.
On a personal note, it was a “magical” summer of 1901 at Black Lake Cottage near Farnham that inspired the creation of his immortal character Peter Pan, the play being first staged on 27 Dec/1904 to instant and enthusiastic acclaim. The charming boy who never grew up was a synthesis of the five Llewellyn Davies boys. Barrie used to tell them: “I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together…as savages with two sticks produce a flame. That is all Peter is – the spark I got from you.”
His fame as an author and, with it, his fortunes, began to grow by the day, and he was knighted in 1913, becoming the 1st Baronet, and adorning the chair of the Rector of St. Andrews University in the same year, just before the dreaded War was to engulf Europe. Barrie was invested with the Order of Merit in 1922. Succeeding Thomas Hardy as the President of the Society of Authors in 1928, Sir James Barrie was the Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh from 1930 to 1937.
Generous in his bounty towards children, Sir Barrie had thought it fit to bequeath the copyrights of Peter Pan to the Great Ormond Street Hospital in 1928. The Hospital had subsequently begun a campaign to have a sequel to Peter Pan written, and the winning entry, by Geraldine McCaughrean being published as Peter Pan in Scarlet.
Rising to the north from the centre of the town of Kirriemuir is the Hill of Kirriemuir. In 1930, Sir James Barrie caused a structure to be built on a parcel of flat land near the summit of the hill, a landmark of his native town. Known as the Kirriemuir Camera Obscura, it was used as a pavilion by the local cricket team for many years.
On the occasion of the official opening of the cricket pavilion on 7 June/1930, an estimated 5,000 townspeople had gathered to witness the ceremony and to grant Sir James Barrie the Freedom of Kirriemuir. A ceremonial game of cricket had been played on the day between a reconstructed Allahakbarries line-up and a team from the West of Scotland. Having recently celebrated his 70th birthday, Sir Barrie had acted as the 12th man of his team and had confined his role in the festivities to the spinning of the coin.
When Sir James Barrie had passed away on 19 June, 1937 at the height of his literary fame, it had been expected that he would be buried at Westminster Abbey along with the other lions of English literature. He had however, left specific instructions that he be laid to rest in full view of the Hill of his beloved Kirriemuir, and was interred in the family grave on the south side of the hill.