Lives in Cricket No 11 - CP Lewis

Chapter Nine South Wales Cricket Club: A Dream Dies By the time that C.P. bowed out of international rugby, he had decided to switch careers, handing in his resignation in 1883 to the Warden of Llandovery College and entering the solicitor’s practice of his good friend and fellow Llandovery cricketer, Charles Bishop. As we have seen in Chapter Four, Bishop had been instrumental in forming the Carmarthenshire club in the 1860s. C.P.’s decision to change career may well have been the result of mixing with the kind of people who frequented county matches and country-house games. The precocious student-sportsman was by now a mature man of thirty, who had perhaps come to realize that he wanted to do more than just teaching and coaching youngsters. His possession of a pass rather than an honours degree perhaps limited his promotion prospects. Indeed, many of his sporting contemporaries now had very respectable jobs in a range of professions. Although schoolmasters were held in high regard by some, the time had therefore come for him to leave Llandovery College once and for all. He’d achieved much for his pupils – especially on the sports field – but now it was time for Lewis to put himself first, and carve out a niche away from academia. He’d seen a school cricketing generation reach maturity, too, and may have preferred fresh challenges to doing it all again. It wasn’t an acrimonious split as he continued to live near the College and in his spare time also helped coach some of the youngsters. A sports day programme from October, 1884 also names him as guest ‘starter’ for the sprints, and he carried on coaching cricket for some years until the College engaged a professional, Walter Attewell, 32 a cousin of William, the Nottinghamshire and England cricketer. But with his training in London taking up more and more of his time – his pass degree had involved no legal studies and so did not provide him with a short cut to a professional qualification – C.P.’s 86 32 The surviving records do not credit him with a first name, but Walter coached at several schools during his career.