J M Barrie created Peter Pan and also a cricket team, made up of some authors, called the Allahakbarries - Conan Doyle, Milne, Wodehouse, among others. Enjoyable tale, sad, funny, poignant... ( )

I’m not sure who this book is for. Little of it will keep the cricket buffs happy. It doesn’t, in my opinion, give enough insights into JM Barrie to warrant a substantial book. I guess it gives a snapshot view of an upper English class whiling away their lives – wasting them perhaps? It’s a little picture of the silliness of that particular class at a particular time.

In other words, I like the idea of the book more than its execution, which I don’t think is the fault of the author, there simply isn’t enough there to hold one’s attention for the required period.
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I’m not sure who this book is for. Little of it will keep the cricket buffs happy. It doesn’t, in my opinion, give enough insights into JM Barrie to warrant a substantial book. I guess it gives a snapshot view of an upper English class whiling away their lives – wasting them perhaps? It’s a little picture of the silliness of that particular class at a particular time.

In other words, I like the idea of the book more than its execution, which I don’t think is the fault of the author, there simply isn’t enough there to hold one’s attention for the required period.
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In lots of ways this was a fascinating book about the great and the good of the late Victorian and early Edwardian era, and in particular world class writers such as Conan Doyle, Milne and Wodehouse who were all members of the Allahakbarries cricket team.

This team was created by J.M Barrie, write of Peter Pan. He had huge enthusiasm for the game of cricket, but had very little talent. Barrie created this team that played at Shere for the first few matches, and as years went on played elsewhere. Some of the members of the team were first class cricketers in their own right, as well as being published authors. Sadly some members were not particularly good at cricket, or sport for that matter.

The make up of the team and members is hugely complicated; not helps by fragmentary documentation that there is on them, but the narrative was not always easy to follow. The book also looks at the literary achievements of the members, most were very successful authors, playwrights and a lot of them wrote for Punch. The narrative weaves its way through the closely knit establishment figures and details the relationships between theses men.

That said, the author has done a good job of making an interesting story, and eliciting the facts from the fragments. ( )

A well written history of J.M. Barrie's cricketing team the Allahakbarries (he mistakenly believed Allahakbarries to mean "God help us" rather than "God is Great" in Arabic).

Barrie's literary highlights need know introduction but many may have been surprised to read of his close connection to cricket. Being a very proper British gentleman, Barrie was a cricketer, even if his enthusiasm far outshone his ability, and the team he founded comprised friends, who just happened to be some of Britain's greatest literary stars of all time. So we get appearances by HG Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle (who was actually a decent cricketer), PG Wodehouse and AA Milne, amongst others.

Barrie makes great mileage in his descriptions of how bad the Allahakbarries are and how much he had to coach them to become merely terrible, and these are the most enjoyable passages of the book. More moving though is his reactions to the deaths of the Llewelyn Davies boys. In the end "Peter Pan's First XI" ebbs away like a Test heading for a draw, rather than the last over of a T20 but, as aficionados know, a draw can still be a good result. ( )