Allahakbarries was an amateur

cricket Cricket is a Bat-and-ball games, bat-and-ball game played between two Sports team, teams of eleven players on a cricket field, field, at the centre of which is a cricket pitch, pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two Bail (cr ...

team founded by author

J. M. Barrie Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, (; 9 May 1860 19 June 1937) was a Scottish novelist and playwright, best remembered as the creator of Peter Pan. He was born and educated in Scotland and then moved to London, where he wrote several succe ...

, and was active from 1887 to 1913. The team's name was a

portmanteau In linguistics, a blend—also known as a blend word, lexical blend, or portmanteau—is a word formed by combining the meanings, and parts of the sounds, of two or more words together.

of Barrie's name and the mistaken belief that ' Allah akbar' meant 'Heaven help us' in Arabic (rather than its true meaning: 'God is great'). Notable figures to have featured for the side included

Arthur Conan Doyle Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for ''A Study in Scarlet'', the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Hol ...

, P. G. Wodehouse, Jerome K. Jerome, A. A. Milne, E. W. Hornung, Henry Justice Ford, A. E. W. Mason, E. V. Lucas, Maurice Hewlett, Owen Seaman, Bernard Partridge, Augustine Birrell, Paul Du Chaillu, Henry Herbert La Thangue, George Cecil Ives, and George Llewelyn Davies, as well as the son of

Alfred Tennyson Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (; 6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was an English poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of ...

The team

The team was founded in 1887 and ran continuously until 1905. It was then disbanded, apart from a one-off reunion match in 1913. Barrie's enthusiasm for the game eclipsed his talent for it; asked to describe his bowling, he replied that after delivering the ball he would go and sit on the turf at mid-off and wait for it to reach the other end which "it sometimes did". The team played for the love of the game, rather than the results it achieved, and Barrie was generous in his praise for his teammates and opposition alike. He praised one teammate's performance by observing that "You scored a good single in the first innings but were not so successful in the second" while he lauded the opposition's effort by pointing out how "You ran up a fine total of 14, and very nearly won". He instructed Bernard Partridge, an illustrator from '' Punch'' magazine who was afflicted with a lazy eye, to "Keep your eye on square leg" while bowling, and told square leg, "when Partridge is bowling, keep your eye on him." He forbade his team to practise on an opponent's ground before a match because "this can only give them confidence". The book notes that his most calamitous performance was being clean-bowled by the American actress Mary Anderson in the 1897 Test match against the village of Broadway, in the Cotswolds.

Legacy

By bringing together a number of keen cricket-playing writers, the Allahakbarries established a network of 'literary cricketers' who continued playing cricket together, under various team names, until 1968. One of the most famous literary cricket teams was the Authors Cricket Club (1899-1912), which featured many of the same players. Barrie wrote a 40-page book on his team, ''Allahakbarries C.C.'', which was published privately in 1899. It was reprinted in 1950 with a foreword by

Donald Bradman Sir Donald George Bradman (27 August 1908 – 25 February 2001), nicknamed "The Don", was an Australian international cricketer, widely acknowledged as the greatest batsman of all time. His cricketing successes have been claimed by Shane ...

. These rare books are now highly sought by collectors. ''Peter Pan's First XI: The Extraordinary Story of J. M. Barrie's Cricket Team'', written by Kevin Telfer, was published in 2011.

References

External links

Peter Pan at playBBC News, 7 May 2010: 'How Peter Pan's author invented celebrity cricket'
Club cricket teams in England 1890 establishments in England 1913 disestablishments in England {{England-cricket-team-stub