Lives in Cricket No 11 - CP Lewis

Scotland for rugby football – once I found that the boys at Llandovery played a sort of Association football without definite rule, I introduced rugby and it thrived wonderfully. The boys quickly took to it, and rejoiced in it, and we never looked at Association football again. The masters of my time did all they could to foster a love of cricket and to create a good school XI, but cricket did not thrive like rugby football.’ Nevertheless, Lewis seems to have followed up much of the advice imparted by Whittington and put it to good practice, as in May 1868, when C.P. had a fine all-round game for the College – at the age of just fourteen – against Swansea Grammar School. He opened both the batting and bowling as the College won by an innings after dismissing the Swansea schoolboys for just 13 and 29. Batting first, the Llandovery team had made 89, with C.P., according to The Cambrian , ‘making a well played score of 26 when he was bowled by Schenk.’ But the influence of Whittington on the adolescent Lewis was only very brief as the youngster suffered a series of tragic blows during the 1860s. The first had happened in the first week of June 1861, before C.P.’s days at the College, when his mother Anna died at the relatively early age of 44 as a result of heart failure caused, as outlined on her death certificate, by hypertrophic cardiomyopathy – a genetic disease in which the heart muscle thickens abnormally, often as the result of strenuous exercise, or as in Anna’s case, multiple childbirth. However, it can also result in premature and sudden death, and the effect of his mother’s abrupt passing can only be imagined, and the chance to play in various sports at the College, and to mix with the other sons of the local gentry, must have helped to take the eight-year-old’s mind away from this domestic tragedy. However, the harsh realities of Victorian life dealt C.P. another blow in early March 1866, when his father Frederick contracted a severe bout of bronchitis which resulted in his death on 15 March, at the age of 54. Together with the rest of the Lewis children who lived at Llwyn Celyn, they became the charges of their uncle, Rev Charles Prytherch Williams who had been vicar of Llanddewi and curate of Port Eynon, on the Gower peninsula, before focussing his efforts on running a school for young gentlemen at Norton Lodge in Oystermouth, situated just a couple of miles from Swansea. Williams was a fervent disciple of ‘muscular Christianity’, and in March 1867, when he left the curacy of Port Eynon, his School Days in Llandovery, Swansea and Gloucester 15