Lives in Cricket No 11 - CP Lewis

Road for a quarter of an hour was one that will not readily fade from the memories of those who witnessed it. How the thousands from Lord’s got on the “Underground” that evening this compiler knoweth not.’ says the match report. Batting for a second time, Oxford succumbed to 60 for five, but then a superb century by their captain W.H.Game, ‘gallant if unavailing’, 11 helped put them back in optimistic contention with an Oxford total of 262. At the start of the Cambridge second innings, Lewis found himself bowling to Lucas and the Hon Alfred Lyttelton with just 73 needed; they brought the total required down to 41 by the close of play. On the third day before a small crowd – it was still hot, but with a Cambridge win almost inevitable, only 576 came through the turnstiles – Lewis opened the bowling again, but no wicket fell until the scores were level, when Lyttelton ran himself out. Lucas then hit a boundary and so Cambridge won by nine wickets, their first win for four years. This is really the end of Lewis’ first-class career, though he would have made no such distinction, as he was back at Lord’s within a month to play against M.C.C. for the South Wales Club. The crowd was much, much smaller: now less a crowd, more a group of by-standers. His selection in the South Wales line-up followed an appearance in the Club’s annual trial match which in 1876 took place at the recently completed cricket ground at St. Helen’s, and on the new lush turf which had been lain on the area of reclaimed sandbanks overlooking Swansea Bay. It was not much of a trial for C.P. who was dismissed lbw for 0, though there could have been no doubt that the Oxford Blue would make the touring side for the London tour if he was available. Although he had spent so much time in Gloucester and Oxford, Lewis had also made a mark on the Welsh cricketing scene in the vacations perhaps to the detriment of his studies and seems to have thought of himself first and foremost as a Welsh cricketer. Llandovery Town Club had picked him to play against Knighton, the Welsh border town, where the leading player for the town and for the Radnor county side was Frank Cobden, whose fame rested on him winning the Cambridge v Oxford University match of 1870 by just two runs with a hat-trick. At Knighton on a Wednesday in 30 Oxford and a Lost Cause 11 According to H.S.Altham in his standard History of Cricket , first published in 1926.