Lives in Cricket No 11 - CP Lewis

His senior cricket during the late nineteenth century was as vice-captain – very often the playing captain – of the South Wales Cricket Club on its annual ‘London’ tour, which a decade before Lewis’ advent had introduced W.G.Grace to big cricket. When this socially exclusive team split up ‘to form county sides’ his teammates and neighbours waited more than a dozen years while urging him to set in train a Carmarthenshire side to equal the improving Glamorgan and Monmouthshire teams with their Minor County ambitions. In the end, a younger generation took things into their own hands. By then, Lewis, busy in his legal practice, had virtually retired, but he did come back to lend a badly needed hand to Carmarthenshire’s struggling Minor Counties side during the early 1900s. He was, by this time, well into his fifties – and not, judging by his photographs, a particularly fit man. Instead, he was heavily built, well-dined, and looking as if he might suffer from gout or other problems associated with gentlemen of that age. But he played, and often captained Carmarthenshire sides as they tried – sadly, in vain – to establish themselves as a Minor County. It was far from the glories of his youthful years. The avuncular figure of the early twentieth century was very different from the images of his youthful years when a ‘team photograph’ of the solidly staid and scholarly masters at Llandovery College included Lewis, lounging against a wall, schoolmaster’s robes ill-fitting and out of place on what is clearly a young man not used to standing still. That picture, seen in Chapter Five, shows his hair windblown and unruly, different, even in a time of big whiskers and sideburns. When teaching at Llandovery, C.P. was a well-liked member of the College’s community: in fact, he could hardly be anything less, given his sporting prowess and standing as a Welsh rugby international of some repute. He ran Trafalgar House – one of the boarding houses used by the College to house the adolescent boys – and no doubt C.P. regaled his impressionable charges with tales of derring-do on the sports fields of Wales and England. In later life, he continued to have a fund of stories, some greatly embellished, which he told, sometimes with cheerful exaggeration, to his friends and acquaintances in the Llandovery area after he had changed careers during the early 1880s to become a solicitor in the old droving town at the foot of Wales’ central mountains. Introduction 9