View from Gassin, an oil painting by former Essex, Cambridge and MCC cricketer John Pawle
• A painting of Sachin Tendulkar by a British artist sold for a record-breaking $US750,000 in 2012. The frame of the artwork is made from 12 bats signed by the world’s top-scoring batsmen, together with six balls autographed by the all-time top six wicket-takers sewn into the canvas. The painting by Sacha Jafri also features the handprints of 40 cricketers, including Tendulkar, Brian Lara, Ricky Ponting and Andrew Strauss.
• A former senior British civil servant once wrote a book about famous people from Yorkshire and although it mentioned Fred Trueman and Len Hutton, Geoff Boycott failed to make the cut. Bernard Ingham admitted Yorkshire Greats: The County’s Fifty Finest, published in 2005, was “the most dangerous book I’ll ever write.”
• Essex batsman John Pawle, who appeared in a total of 34 first-class matches in the 1930s and 40s, later became a prominent artist. Having studied at the Westminster School of Art, Pawle had his paintings displayed at galleries in several cities, including London and Edinburgh.
View from Gassin, an oil painting by former Essex, Cambridge and MCC cricketer John Pawle
• Figure in Movement, a 1985 painting of a cricketer by British artist Francis Bacon, sold for $US14m when it went under the hammer at Sotheby’s in New York in 2010. Bacon, an avid cricket fan, collected photographs of, and books by, cricketers, including one volume by David Gower that remained in his studio until his death in 1992.
• The creator of Sherlock Holmes had a great day on the cricket field during a match in 1893 by taking a hat-trick for the County Asylum club. Arthur Conan Doyle – who was good enough to appear in ten first-class matches – achieved an innings haul of 8-9, a feat noted by the Eastern Daily Press: “County Asylum have recently been favoured with the assistance in the bowling department of no less a personage than Dr Arthur Conan Doyle, the well-known contributor to the Strand Magazine. Judging by the Doctor’s analysis his bowling is obviously as thrilling as his stories.”
• The name of possibly the most famous figure in the English language can be found in the scorebooks of first-class cricket. William Shakespeare appeared in 26 first-class matches between 1919 and 1931 with a top score of 67 not out, on his debut for Worcestershire, against Warwickshire at Edgbaston.
Charles Dickens penned some of literature’s most famous novels including Great Expectations, Bleak House, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities. Another Charles Dickens played first-class cricket, for the South African provincial side Griqualand West in the 1940s and 50s. In a match against Orange Free State at Kimberley in 1948/49, Dickens was dismissed by a player named Keats.
• British artist Henry J. Ford, who gained fame as a book illustrator, comes from a large cricketing family with one of his brothers playing against Australia. Francis Ford appeared in the five Ashes Tests in Australia in 1894/95, scoring 168 runs, with a best of 48 on his debut in Sydney.
Henry also played the occasional game of cricket, turning out for the Allahakbarries club, run by Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie. The amateur team functioned between the years 1877 and 1913, and included a number of famous writers, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Jerome K. Jerome and A.A. Milne.
• Former England captain, and part-time artist, Michael Vaughan created what was described as the world’s biggest “artball” painting in 2010, when he splattered an image of a car with paint-covered cricket balls. It was estimated that Vaughan (pictured) hit the canvas some 5,000 times to complete the work.
• Best-selling British author Jeffrey Archer sent out a tweet in 2013 that promoted a new book while also noting an Indian Test win in Chennai. The long-time cricket fanatic tweeted that while Australia may not have won the cricket, they’d be able to get a copy of his new novel Best Kept Secret in India two weeks ahead of the rest of the world.
Later in the year, Archer umpired a special cricket game in London that celebrated the 150th edition of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack and the publication of the book The Authors XI. A Wisden XI took on the Authors XI, whose innings was opened by Charlie Campbell – author of Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People – and Sam Carter, an editor with one of the UK’s leading political publishers.
• Basil Foster, who appeared in 34 first-class matches, was caught by the creator of Winnie the Pooh off the bowling of the creator of Jeeves and Wooster for 100 in a one-day match at Lord’s in 1907. Foster’s wicket was one of two taken by P.G. Wodehouse, who opened the bowling with Arthur Conan Doyle for the Authors versus Actors match. Pooh Bear creator A.A. Milne scored five with the bat for a team that also included E.W. Hornung, famed for his Raffles novels.
• P.G. Wodehouse appeared in six matches at Lord’s with his penultimate appearance producing the all-round double of a half-century and four wickets. Playing for the Authors against the Publishers in 1911, Wodehouse took 4-75 and scored 60. Team-mate Arthur Conan Doyle removed both openers for ducks, finishing with 2-38.
• Hampshire all-rounder Reginald Hargreaves, who appeared in 25 first-class matches, married Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Hargreaves, an underarm bowler, played his first-class cricket between 1875 and 1885.
• When cricket writer Neville Cardus died in 1975 his obituary in The Guardian was written by three fellow writers, including novelist J.B. Priestley. A keen player, Priestley mentions cricket in a number of his works, including the 1939 novel Let the People Sing and Bright Day published in 1946. He also wrote the foreword to The Golden Age of Cricket 1890-1914 by David Frith, released in 1978.
• Jack Russell, the former England wicketkeeper-turned-artist, unveiled an unusual item in 2011 that was painted on cricket bats. Commissioned by the Chance to Shine charity, Russell painted a quintessentially English village cricket scene on a canvas of 36 full-size bats, joined together in two rows of 18. Russell spent some 100 hours on the painting, using a dozen tubes of paint: “Painting on a canvas of cricket bats was certainly different, but I enjoyed the challenge.”
Jack Russell, with England fast bowler Chris Tremlett, and his so-called “cric-art” painting at Lord’s in 2011
• Former England spinner Phil Tufnell, who made his Test debut in a team that included artist and wicketkeeper Jack Russell, unveiled his first major collection of paintings in 2014. His one-man exhibition in Birmingham featured ten paintings in a series of works based on his alter ego “The Cat”: “I love art. In fact, it’s a close call between art and cricket. It’s fantastic to get down to my studio, where I’ve got everything I need and I get tons of inspiration. I think people are sometimes surprised that art is my thing. I got an O-level in art at school and my dad was a silversmith, so there’s a history of creativity in my family.
Rain Stops Play by Phil Tufnell
“I’m not a landscape water-colourist or anything – you won’t bump into me and my easel on a country walk. Instead, I love to work in abstract art and with different techniques.”
• After a decade with Cricket Australia as its media spokesman, Peter Young pulled up stumps in 2014 to pursue his passion for painting. The first painting he sold was one of a country cricket match: “I was named as one of Australia’s 50 most influential corporate affairs practitioners, but I got a far bigger buzz doing a cricket painting and selling it through the Trentham Easter Art and Craft Show.”
• When Joseph Wells took four wickets in four balls in a first-class match in 1862, one of his victims was a nephew of Jane Austen. Representing Kent in a county match against Sussex at Hove, Wells – whose son H.G. would later pen the science fiction classic The War of the Worlds – dismissed three batsmen for a duck, including Spencer Leigh, who’d changed his name from Spencer Austen in 1837.
• While a member of the Australian cricket team, Arthur Mailey was employed by the Sydney Sun newspaper as its sporting cartoonist. A talented painter, Mailey attended art classes conducted by J.S. Watkins, a leading British landscape artist.
• Henry Aubrey-Fletcher played minor counties cricket in the 1920s and was also a noted author of detective novels penned under the name of Henry Wade. His son, John Aubrey-Fletcher, appeared in two first-class matches for Oxford University in 1933.
• Steve Waugh set an Australian record in 2013 when he signed over 2,000 copies of a new book at a single sitting. His self-published book The Meaning of Luck became a No. 1 best-seller. Waugh’s successor also topped the charts in the same year. Publishing house Harper Collins revealed that Ricky Ponting’s autobiography The Close of Play would become its first Australian cricket book to be translated into Hindi.
• Welsh author Leslie Thomas, who penned the comic novel The Virgin Soldiers published in 1966, had previously worked for the London Evening News writing articles for England batsman Len Hutton. Thomas, later a book reviewer for Wisden, met his second wife on a train journey to Lord’s: “I love the game. I love playing it, watching it, reading about it. Everything about it.”
• Mitchell Johnson’s record-busting haul of wickets in the 2013/14 Ashes inspired an award-winning painting. New South Wales artist Judy Nadin, who drew inspiration from the Miley Cyrus music video ‘Wrecking Ball’, took out top prize at the 2014 Bald Archy, a competition that parodies the prestigious Archibald Prize for portraiture: “I happened to get a couple of my friends to pose for me, so maybe that’s why it’s got a bit of a feminine element, but Mitchell is kind of a sexy guy. I did put hair on the legs though, so that butched him up a little bit.”
• Murray Webb appeared in three Tests for New Zealand in the 1970s, later becoming a respected artist. A prolific caricaturist of famous faces from around the world, he provided the illustrations for the book 100 Great Rugby Characters by Joseph Romanos and Grant Harding, published in 1991.
• A Yorkshire artist surprised his neighbours in 2012 when he painted a giant cricket ball on the side of his house. Barry Langroyd Hanson, a former cricket club groundsman, calls himself “Bradford’s other artist”, a reference to the internationally-acclaimed David Hockney: “Hockney did a painting of trees called Bigger Trees. I’ve created A Bigger Ball.”
• British author Virginia Woolf, whose major works include the novels Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, played cricket when a child with her sister Vanessa, later a respected painter. Virginia was known to have had a liking for the game when as young as four: “Vanessa and I were both what we call tomboys, that is, we played cricket, scrambled over rocks, climbed trees, were said not to care for clothes and so on.”
Regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf (at front) playing cricket with her sister Vanessa in 1894
• The celebrated writer Oscar Wilde included a reference to cricket in his final work published in 1898. The second verse of his poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol contains the lines: “He walked amongst the Trial Men/In a suit of shabby grey/A cricket cap was on his head/And his step seemed light and gay.”
Never a lover of sport, Wilde once famously declared: “I never play cricket. It requires one to assume such indecent postures.”
• British cricket artist Christina Pierce has a family cricketing connection with her son playing for the Surrey under-nines at the age of seven. Acclaimed for her portraits of leading Test cricketers, including Andrew Strauss, Stuart Broad and Sachin Tendulkar (pictured), her paintings have been exhibited at a number of major venues including Lord’s and The Oval.
CHRISTINA PIERCE’S DREAM TEAM
David Gower (E)
Chris Gayle (WI)
Viv Richards (WI)
Kevin Pietersen (E)
Ian Botham (E)
Andrew Flintoff (E)
Mahendra Singh Dhoni *† (I)
Shane Warne (A)
Graeme Swann (E)
Shoaib Akhtar (P)
Monty Panesar (E)
Cricket artist Christina Pierce
• Antony Kamm appeared in a number of first-class matches in the 1950s, later becoming a distinguished writer. The son of a publisher who founded Pan Books, Kamm produced the Collins Biographical Dictionary of Literature in 1993, having played nine first-class games for Oxford University and Middlesex.
• The father of Agatha Christie, one of the most popular crime fiction writers of all time, was a player and president of a cricket club in Torquay. A large oak tree at its ground is named in honour of the author, under which she spent many a day as a young girl watching her father play. When her grandson Mathew Prichard captained the Eton first XI at Lord’s in 1962 she described it as one of the happiest days of her life.