Lives in Cricket No 11 - CP Lewis

Chapter Three Undergraduate Athlete and Rugby Player When Lewis was a young man, commercial, ‘gate-money’ sports, particularly those played in the winter months, existed on only a limited scale. The tiny numbers of mostly privileged undergraduates at the ancient English universities were disproportionately represented in any listing of the leading sportsmen of the 1870s, assisted by organisational preferences for ‘amateurs’. University players packed the teams who played the first rugby internationals; Oxford University were finalists in the F.A.Cup competitions of 1873, 1874 and 1877; student athletes set new records in athletics events; and vast numbers of people identified themselves with Oxford or Cambridge at the time of the Boat Race. Even in cricket, which had a sizeable professional workforce, Cambridge University were plainly the strongest of any English first-class side in 1878. Though he himself had not attended one of the great English public schools where many of these leading sportsmen originated, C.P. had opportunities of sorts, while at Oxford, to achieve national sporting prominence. In cricket, as we have seen, he didn’t quite achieve ‘prominence’, but in rugby he laid the foundations of an international career, and in athletics he represented the university, not very successfully, as we will see. Little is known about how many organised games of rugby C.P. played whilst in residence at Oxford. As Jesus was a small college, it did not at this time have the manpower, or collective muscle, to raise its own team which could play larger colleges on reasonably equal terms. It is possible that C.P. may have participated in the combined college matches, or the scratch matches which were recorded without team lists in the Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduates’ Journal. What is known for sure, is that during his vacations from Oxford he played football and rugby in South Wales, both for Llandovery College and Llandeilo whilst back home with his eldest brother, as well as guesting for Swansea when he stayed with his uncle, Rev 32