This project was inspired by a chance discovery and a hunch. I realised that the various Authors teams of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were, in fact, all closely related to one another – an observation which, amazingly, nobody had ever made before. What was more, I was sure that this was more than a fun piece of trivia: something much more significant was going on. My hunt for answers turned into a PhD project at King's College London and then this book, taking me from Portsmouth to Texas. And the more I dug, the more I saw how it all tied together. The tale of the literary cricketers is, to my mind, a fabulous saga that reveals something fundamental about the ways in which we've narrated English culture into being.”
Dr Ollie Randall, Visiting Research Fellow
18 May 2026
Ollie Randall reveals the untold story of cricket's influential role in London's literary world
Writers in Whites – How a group of literary cricketers changed English culture is reveals cricket’s influential – and sometimes controversial – role in London’s literary world from the 1880s to the 1960s.
Dr Ollie Randall's new book, published by Fairfield Books today draws on his History and English PhD at King's.
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.
Their teams went by various names, but most often they called themselves the Authors. Based on a wealth of new research, 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 Authors 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.
Writers in Whites draws on their books and unpublished letters, letting these men narrate, in their own words, how literary cricket played a key role in their lives. 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. It also drew in some of the great names of twentieth-century Test cricket, such as CB Fry, Douglas Jardine, Learie Constantine, Len Hutton and Richie Benaud as well as cricket writers and reporters such as EV Lucas, Neville Cardus, EW Swanton and Henry Blofeld.
I’ve really enjoyed turning it into a book for the general reader – it’s a story full of human drama and humour, and it tells us something really interesting about how English culture developed over time. These writers loved playing cricket with each other – it really mattered to them, and it makes for a really interesting story. I like to think that anyone who’s interested in stories about writers’ lives will enjoy Writers in Whites – whether or not they’re into cricket. I’m very grateful to King’s for enabling me to do this research, without which this book would not have happened.”
Dr Ollie Randall
Ollie Randall is a writer, historian and cartoonist. He completed his doctoral thesis, ‘Cricket, Literary Culture and Englishness, 1887- 1968,’ in January 2026 at King's. Ollie has written articles for a variety of publications, most frequently for the Times Literary Supplement. He has worked as the historical researcher for a former leader of the House of Lords, and as a tour manager on cultural tours. His second book, Lord’s and Maharajas – about the political intrigue and imperial crisis that shaped the origins of Indian international cricket – is due out in autumn 2026.
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Visiting Research Fellow