Lives in Cricket No 11 - CP Lewis

Chapter Twelve Later Years The outbreak of the Great War brought an abrupt, but not overdue, end to C.P.’s playing career. The world was very different when cricket resumed in 1919, with David Hughes-Morgan taking over as captain of the Llandovery Town side. Like Lewis, Hughes-Morgan had been educated at Oxford, but there the similarity ceased as the new captain had a plethora of other sporting interests, including participating in hill-climbs in a big black Mercedes, sailing with the Swansea Bay and Bristol Channel yacht clubs, and in the winter months hunting and horse-racing, serving as a director of Chepstow Racecourse. He was still able to call on the services, albeit for a couple of years only, of Douglas Jones, whilst C.P. maintained his involvement through umpiring and serving on the committee of both the Town club and the Carmarthenshire county side. From 1900, C.P. and Jennie lived in Llandovery at Llandingat House, described as ‘a two-storeyed house crowned with a galaxy of seventeen chimney pots’. When he moved there is unclear, as there was a Mr.Harries in residence up until 1899. His was a comfortable life as a country solicitor. He and his fellow professional men worked in a seemingly unchanging era of varnished oak and strong-smelling leather, seated behind giant desks. Whiffs of Edwardian Llandovery still survive to this day. From 1899 Lewis served as a magistrate in the courtroom on stilts above Llandovery’s open air market hall. It closed, unchanged, only in the early years of the twenty-first century – atop a winding staircase with wooden treads worn down by myriads of feet; a narrow wooden bench towering above the sunken centre floor with a four sided dock crowned by metal railings, more decoration than bars; and a series of box like structures with wooden seats for the various solicitors and court petitioners. Llandovery’s Black Ox Bank was equally unchanging, despite being taken over by Lloyd’s in the twentieth century. It was here in the 1990s that Llandovery C.C. found that they owned a musty deposit 108