Lives in Cricket No 11 - CP Lewis

Llandovery is first mentioned by Arthur Haygarth in Scores and Biographies in September 1873, which gives the score of a match between Llandovery College and Christ College, Brecon. Haygarth says he was putting the game in ‘as a curiosity’, with Brecon being all out for nine. ‘It contains no names of note,’ he says. Lewis batted at three but was out for a duck, but took five lower-order wickets – four of them bowled and one lbw – before steering his side to victory with 12 not out. This annual contest, which had started in 1872, was between the two leading public schools in South Wales, and later came to be regarded as the Eton v Harrow match of Wales. Cricket was first played at Llandovery College seven years before. Like many other schools in Wales at the time, the incorporation of rugby and cricket into the timetable at Llandovery stemmed from the appointment of a new member of staff at the school. In Llandovery’s case this was an old boy of Cowbridge Grammar School, Rev Watkin Price Whittington, who had first recognized the benefits of healthy recreation whilst at school in Cowbridge, before studying Classics at Jesus College, Oxford. Whittington’s family hailed from the Neath area, and like a good ‘muscular Christian’, 1 he regularly kept wicket for the Cadoxton Club, who at the time were amongst the leading clubs in South Wales. He also played for the Glamorganshire side in 1869, before devoting his attention to teaching, at Llandovery and later at Ruthin School in North Wales where he served as Headmaster from 1881 until 1909. He became Second Master at Llandovery in 1868, and for a while he inspired and nurtured the sporting talents of the young C.P., who had joined his elder brothers at the College in the mid 1860s. Lewis quickly made his mark in academic and sporting circles, and the arrival of Whittington helped to boost the youngster’s abilities, especially on the rugby field. As Whittington later recalled: ‘Coming as I did from Merchiston Castle – the best school in 14 School Days in Llandovery, Swansea and Gloucester 1 A term, perhaps derisive in original intent, used to describe a Victorian movement largely associated with the English authors Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes. Kingsley thought that ‘games conduce not merely to physical but to moral health’. Hughes suggested that, particularly for men, it was ‘a good thing to have strong and well-exercised bodies,’ which should be ‘used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth’. C.J.Bartlett has identified some 200 players who appeared in first-class cricket in the United Kingdom between 1850 and 1899 who were church ministers at the time or became one later, almost all of them Anglicans. These, and many others of lesser cricket talent, had a significant effect in schools and parishes throughout much of England and Wales.