Preface
Cricket has always been one of my life’s dominating passions. I mean of course first-class cricket, not the one-day stuff. I first went to a Test match in 1964, at Old Trafford. Bobby Simpson made a triple century for Australia; Barrington and Dexter 256 and 174 for England. I must be the only person alive who has seen both individual scores of 311 ever made against England. I was with my father in 1964, and in 2012 with my son at the Oval watching Hashim Amla repeat the achievement.
This essay was stimulated by a misattribution. Tony Lloyd, a former Law Lord and fellow Inner Temple Bencher, once quoted the line “O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!” over high table lunch, and said that it came from a poem by James Elroy Flecker. This seemed to me extremely unlikely, but I could not remember who the author was. I bet him my usual maximum stake (5p) and went away to look up the poem. Then I remembered the superb essay on Francis Thompson by Ronald Mason in one of my cricket anthologies, from which in due course I borrowed heavily when writing the second half of the piece. (I possessed so many of these collections from such an early age that it was only much later in life that I came to realise that not all anthologies were cricket anthologies.) The essay that emerged is an unusually eclectic hotch-potch of allusions, but all of them are objects of my affection.