Peter Pan's First XI: The Extraordinary Story of J. M. Barrie's Cricket Team

The creator of Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie, was a hugely enthusiastic cricketer of very little talent. That didn't stop him from leading perhaps the most extraordinary amateur cricket team ever to have taken the field. Some of the twentieth century’s most famous writers including A. A. Milne, P. G. Wodehouse, and Jerome K. Jerome, regularly turned out for Barrie’s team between 1890 and 1913. This very Edwardian vision of village cricket, what Barrie called "green fields dotted with white figures on reasonable terms," was only brought to an end by the First World War. In Peter Pan’s First XI, Kevin Telfer weaves cricket, literature, history, humor, and biography to create an entertaining account of this little-known band of cricketing Peter Pans—and the age in which they lived.