by Arunabha Sengupta
He attended Charterhouse. So obviously he did play cricket. However, the experience accompanied the seeds of satire sown in his soul.
“At this school I learned to keep a straight bat at cricket and to have a high moral sense, and my fifth different pronunciation of Latin, and my fifth or sixth different way of doing simple arithmetic.”
In fact by the time he was in his senior year, he targeted cricket as the symbol of tradition against which he unleashed his rebellious spirit. In fact, his well timed blows through the cordon of supposed English moral fibre struck home and stung the establishment to the quick.
“My last year at Charterhouse I devoted myself to doing everything I could to show how little respect I had for the school tradition. In the winter of 1913 … Nevill Barbour and I were editing the Carthusian and a good deal of my time went in that. Nevill, who as a scholar had met the same sort of difficulties as myself, also had a dislike of most Charterhouse traditions. We decided that the most objectionable tradition of all was compulsory games. Of these cricket was the most objectionable, because it wasted most time in the best part of the year.
“We began a campaign in favour of tennis. We were not seriously devoted to tennis, but it was the best weapon we had against cricket — the game, we wrote, in which the selfishness of the few was supposed to excuse the boredom of the many. Tennis was quick and busy. We asked Old Carthusian tennis internationalists to contribute letters proposing tennis as the manlier and more vigorous game. We even got the famous Anthony Wilding to write. The gamesmasters were scandalized at this assault on cricket.”
However, during the Great War, his memories on cricket form one of the most famed accounts of the game within the greater game.
His experiences as lieutenant and later captain of Royal Welch Fusiliers, and rather detailed description of trench warfare, including the tragic incompetence of the Battle of Loos, the use of gas and the first phase of the Somme Offensive form a major part of Goodbye to All That. However, the book also contains the paragraph:
“This afternoon we had a cricket match, officers versus sergeants, in an enclosure between some houses out of observation from the enemy. The front line is perhaps three quarters of a mile away. I made top score, twenty-four; the bat was a bit of a rafter, the ball was a piece of rag tied round with string, and the wicket was a parrot cage with the grisly remains of a parrot inside. It had evidently died of starvation when the French evacuated the town. The match was broken up suddenly by machine-gun fire. It was not aimed at us; the Germans were shooting at one of our aeroplanes and the bullets falling down from a great height had a penetrative power greater than an ordinary spent bullet.”
In between there is also a verse on the dead parrot.
Graves wrote several commercially successful historical novels, I Claudius and Claudius the God being the most famous. He penned a speculative study of poetic inspiration —White Goddess , a book-length essay on the nature of poetic myth-making, is rather interesting in some cricketing context, primarily the Cardusian. He was also a prominent translator of Classical Latin and Ancient Greek texts.
He did return to the cricket field off and on after the War. He played for a club in Islip for a while before leaving in a huff because of arbitrary selection of friends of club officials. In his later days, he was photographed with pads on waiting for a game.
Yes, his connection to cricket was at best sketchy.
However, his paragraph on cricket during World War One finds place in a number of cricketing anthologies, including erudite and pseudo-erudite treatises on the connection between the game and War.
Robert Graves was born on 24 July 1895.
Illustration: Maha