Cricketing Days: Conan Doyle of the M.C.C.
Cricketing Days: Conan Doyle of the M.C.C. is an article written by Clifford Jiggens published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 6, 1995).
This article documents Arthur Conan Doyle's career with the M.C.C., detailing his matches, statistics, tours, and notable performances at Lord's. It also recounts his controversial proposal to abolish left-handed batting and the cricketing reaction it provoked.
Cricketing Days: Conan Doyle of the M.C.C.
Since I contributed 'Cricketing Days: The Game Conan Doyle loved most of all' (ACD, Vol.5), I have had an opportunity to see the results of research into Conan Doyle's M.C.C. career by Mr P. A. Negretti (to whom I am much indebted). In my previous piece I included a summary of Conan Doyle's ten first-class games for the M.C.C. against various counties, in one of which he took the treasured wicket of Dr W. G. Grace. Mr Negretti has looked at all the M.C.C. games in which Conan Doyle played, totalling a further 85, about a third of them on several tours of the West Country, Midlands, and Scotland. It now seems that, including three or four matches for the Authors XI, he played at Lord's no fewer than thirty-six times!
His election as a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club was in June 1899, the proposer and seconder being, respectively, Mr (later Sir) F. E. Lacey and Capt E. G. Wynyard. Lacey, a former Hampshire batsman, was secretary of the M.C.C. for twenty-eight years and was knighted for his services to cricket. Wynyard, who captained Hampshire at the time of Conan Doyle's election, played in several Test matches.
Conan Doyle's first game for the M.C.C. was within three weeks-at Richmond on 5 July, when he scored a duck and took just one wicket. In the last of six matches that summer (and his first for the club at Lord's) he took 7-51 against Cambridgeshire, which was to remain his best bowling achievement with the M.C.C. He played for the M.C.C. in nine seasons: 1899-1905 and 1907-8 (missing 1906, the year his wife died). The number of games he took part in, including his first-class ones, averaged about ten a season. Many were two- or three-day matches. His busiest season was 1903, when he had sixteen matches, a total of twenty-six cricketing days, for the M.C.C. — and it must be remembered that in these years he was also sometimes playing for other teams, too. The opponents in his M.C.C. fixtures ranged from first-class and minor counties to Royal Navy and Army teams, public schools, and strong town clubs.
Conan Doyle took part in three August tours of the M.C.C. to Devon and Cornwall in 1902-3-4, on each of the first two playing as many as six two-day games; two Warwickshire tours (July 1903 and June 1907); and one in the south of Scotland in June 1904.
In his long cricketing career he hit several centuries, including one at Lord's, but for the M.C.C. his highest score was 96 not out against the Revd R. W. Sealy's XI at Westward Ho! in the 1903 West Country tour.
A summary of all his M.C.C. matches shows that he scored 1,873 runs at an average of 19.3, and he took 72 wickets. In Memories and Adventures Conan Doyle refers to a hat-trick against the Gentlemen of Warwick, but Mr Negretti's research suggests that this was in fact achieved against Leamington Town a few days before the match with the Gentlemen during the 1907 Midlands tour. (Conan Doyle's memory was not infallible, as I found two or three times in checking the facts in the pages devoted to cricket in his reminiscences.)
One curious and little-known episode in Conan Doyle's cricketing life is his efforts to have left-handed batsmen barred from the first-class game. He set out his reasons in the Strand Magazine (September 1909):
- One reform is badly needed in order to improve cricket as a spectacular game. It is the abolition of left-handed batting. The left-handed bowler hurts no one, but the batsman is undeniably a perfect nuisance, delaying the game and giving the field an immense amount of extra trouble. Why should he be permitted to do this when he is in so immense a minority?
Conan Doyle proposed that existing left-handed batsmen should have their position respected, and that there should be a margin of three or four years so that batsmen just coming on might not be disqualified. But after that, legislation should prevent any new left-handers being admitted to the first-class game. He believed that in most cases a boy who showed an inclination to be left-handed could easily be trained to be right-handed and 'the matter can be set right at the source'.
Had the game's legislators approved Conan Doyle's proposal, we should never have heard of David Gower, Allan Border, Brian Lara, Neil Harvey, Graeme Pollock, and many other great left-handed batsmen. But they did not. A cricketing contemporary of Conan Doyle, E. H. D. Sewell, who may well have played with him and who later became one of the best-known cricket journalists of the inter-war years, recorded in one of his books, Overthrows (1946), what happened:
- Sir Conan ... approached the M.C.C. in the matter. But the governors of cricket, who very rarely make a mistake, though they take their time before coming to any decision that concerns the good of the game, turned the Nelson eye and the deaf ear, with their usual politeness, to this, the most revolutionary proposal that has been made in cricket in my time.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
