Anyway, I did happen upon a little Frank Keating ramble that entertained me yesterday in the Guardian (Manchester, not Cornish, natch)...
If the world of sport - or our way of watching it - changed irrevocably at the very time of my birth, there happened, too, one glorious final fling for sport's old order. I was precisely one week old 70 October 11s ago (the very day, as it happens, that Mrs Cissie Charlton of Ashington gave birth to bonny babe, Robert) when an England cricket team, led by Hampshire's Lord Tennyson, embarked for India. They won the series but Fleet Street never so much as whispered that, during it, they enjoyed hunting panther, tiger and elephant, that at Patiala the Maharajah gave the team the run of his 300-strong harem, and that on the very eve of the state match against Madras (according to Arthur Wellard's memoir) "the local Maharajah challenged us to an all-night drinking contest - whisky, brandy, gin, the lot. George [Pope] and I dropped out after midnight, but Joe [Hardstaff] matched the Prince glass for glass, drink for drink, till past 5am when Joe collapsed and we had to carry him home as good as dead." Next day, Hardstaff scored 213 (c Gopalan b Parthasarathi) in five hours, 24 fours, and, says Wisden, "never appeared in any trouble".
(link to full column)
If you're going to flash, flash hard.Well, made me chuckle anyway.
2 comments:
I don't know if your trackback will show it, but I linked you here. As I said in my post, anybody who thinks of Flashman first is all right in my book. (He's probably better-known over there, but here in the States, it's hard to find many people familiar with Fraser.) The part about the harem especially sounds like it belongs in bawdy fiction, rather than sporting history.
Well, thank you Joel - I think you've just doubled my readership in one fell stroke!
Flashman is a undervalued character in modern fiction on both sides of the Atlantic, I fear.
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