Authors Cricket Club
cricket team
The Authors Cricket Club is a wandering amateur English cricket club founded in 1899 and revived most recently in 2012. Prominent British writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse, A. A. Milne, E. W. Hornung and J. M. Barrie have been featured as players on the club team, the Authors XI.
Original team (1899–1912)
The original Authors Cricket Club was an offshoot of J.M. Barrie's Allahakbarries team. It also drew some of its membership from the Authors' Club, which had been founded in 1891 as a place for British authors to gather and talk. Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle, an excellent cricketer who would go on to play ten first-class matches for the Marylebone Cricket Club in 1903, was the team captain. The bat that Doyle used when he made 101 not out in a game for the Authors' Club vs. the Press in 1896 is still on display at the MCC Museum at Lord's Cricket Ground. This match, predating the 1899 establishment of the 'real' Authors XI, brought together several of the writers who would found the team three years later.
Doyle was joined by other writers including Winnie the Pooh creator A. A. Milne, reputed to be the best fielder on the team, and Jeeves author P. G. Wodehouse, who was regarded as a decent player. Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie, however, was not, despite his great enthusiasm for the game. The Authors and Barrie's Allahakbarries existed side-by-side for a number of years, with Doyle, Milne and Wodehouse among the players who featured for both teams.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q65086323. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1899, 2012, 1912 and 1891.
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This entry incorporates text from “Authors Cricket Club” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.