On 12th June, the KCL History Department will be celebrating the publication of WRITERS IN WHITES: How a Group of Literary Cricketers Changed English Culture, by Ollie Randall. There will be wine, nibbles and a Q & A with Dr Randall.
To book tickets, please follow this link.
The book is based on Ollie Randall’s PhD project, undertaken at King’s between 2022 and 2026. He is now a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s.
Writers in Whites is the untold story of cricket’s influential role in London’s literary world, from the 1880s to the 1960s. PG Wodehouse used his cricket-playing to launch his writing career. JM Barrie modelled the pirates in Peter Pan after his cricket teammates. Arthur Conan Doyle named Sherlock Holmes after a cricketer he’d played against. They all belonged to a network of cricket-playing writers, who collectively left a permanent legacy on English culture.
Writers in Whites tells the story of this group, from Jerome K Jerome via Evelyn Waugh to Michael Morpurgo. It wasn’t simply that lots of important writers happened to like playing cricket together. The very act of playing for the literary cricket teams influenced their careers and their writings – both through networking opportunities and by helping to shape their cultural outlook. The literary cricketers weathered scandals and ferocious culture wars, but they also wrote numerous memoirs describing their antics on and around the cricket field. The full story – which provides a fresh way of viewing English cultural history from the 1880s to the 1960s – has never been told before. Literary cricket played a role in the rise of mass literature before the First World War, and in rallying resistance to the Modernists in interwar London.
Some of this research first appeared in a 2024 TRHS article – ‘Cricket, Literary Culture and In-Groups in Early Twentieth-Century Britain.’ This article was shortlisted for the 2025 Royal Historical Society Early Career Article Prize.
Further information is available on the publisher’s website: fairfieldbooks.co.uk/shop/writers-in-whites/