Lives in Cricket No 11 - CP Lewis

Chapter Four Cricket for Breconshire and South Wales By the time C.P. came down from Oxford his cricketing curriculum vitae – as an erstwhile Classicist, he would have appreciated the full Latin terminology – included a cricket Blue, plus appearances for the South Wales club and several Welsh county teams that had been formed during the 1860s and 1870s. These were boom years for cricket in South Wales, in which rural Carmarthenshire played a leading role. Indeed, the first recorded game of cricket in Wales had taken place in the county in August 1783 with a group of gentlemen meeting up at Court Henry Down near Cwmgwili, between Carmarthen and Llandeilo, for a challenge match. Eighty years later, Carmarthenshire was at the forefront again, as a fully-fledged county club was created in 1864 by Charles Bishop who lived at Dolgarreg on the road between Llangadog and Llandovery. Within a few years, county teams representing Breconshire and Glamorganshire had also been formed, and like Bishop’s side, they owed their origins to successful summer gatherings of well-to-do young gentlemen at various country estates where playing a few games of cricket was just one of the attractions and activities laid on by the hosts. Indeed, for some of the participants in these games, being able to bat or bowl was almost an irrelevance, given that many of the fair sex would be attending the banquets and balls which were held after the cricket was over. Indeed, social reasons were also a factor behind the formation of the South Wales Cricket Club in 1859. After a few years of inactivity, the club was reformed in 1874 as a result of the emergence of some promising homegrown talent. 13 C.P. Lewis was 38 13 The South Wales club was best known outside the Principality in its earlier incarnation as the team which introduced W.G.Grace to higher-grade cricket in its ‘London’ tours of 1864 and 1865. In the first of these years, W.G., still only fifteen, famously scored 170 and 56* in a two-day match against the Gentlemen of Sussex on the Brunswick Ground on Hove seafront. In all, Grace played six matches for South Wales in July 1864, two of them at Lord’s (his first appearances there), and three in July 1865, one at Lord’s, by which time, now aged sixteen, he was a first-class player of some renown.