Hello! Writers in Whites has now been published for exactly a month – so it seems like a good moment to run through the early book reviews. And I’m pretty thrilled with them so far!
Readers have been sending me photos…
London Review of Books
“Superb… Randall charts the decline of cricket as a cultural influence with just as much brilliance and assiduity as he chronicles its rise”
“Thoroughly enjoyable… It is thoroughly engaging from cover to cover and one can only marvel at the depth of research… This is likely to be one of the books of the year”
“Writers In Whites is a vivid, intriguing cultural history with a wide sweep and, like many of its stars, should appeal beyond a cricket readership.”
Du Maurier Society
“An engaging and pleasing read, even if you know very little about cricket or are typically not interested in the sport! There are plenty of stories and surprising bookish connections to discover that will keep any literary fan reading and introduce an underappreciated part of literary history.”
“What better reading for summer than Ollie Randall’s Writers in Whites… With skilful sleuthing, a sense of period values and dashes of humour and compassion, Randall fields an initially unlikely team of distinguished literati… A forgotten moment in English cultural history brought exuberantly to life.”
Two weeks ago, my debut book, Writers in Whites, was published. It’s been an enormously exciting time for me, and the outcome of years of work.
The book’s full title is Writers in Whites: How a group of literary cricketers changed English culture. It’s a nonfiction book about a coterie of writers who played cricket together for three generations, from JM Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle and PG Wodehouse, via Evelyn Waugh and Edmund Blunden, all the way through to Henry Blofeld and Michael Morpurgo, and how their cricket-based friendships influenced their careers and the wider literary landscape.
I signed some copies at Daunt Books in Marylebone!
Writers in Whites spans eight decades, from the 1880s to the 1960s, charting the rise and fall of cricket’s role in London’s literary world amid the changing national culture. Along the way, there are scandals, controversies and numerous funny anecdotes and human moments – often in the participants’ own words – about the writers’ cricket-field antics. I would say it’s 40% a cricket book, 60% literary biography and cultural history. Although based on my PhD research, it’s written to be an accessible, enjoyable read for laypeople: if you’ve heard of Sherlock Holmes and you’re aware that cricket is a team sport involving bats and balls, you ought to know enough to enjoy this book.
We had a double-header launch: a cricket match (what else?) on Sunday 17th May, followed by a more traditional pub launch in Vauxhall the following evening.
The cricket match was the Authors XI versus the Gold Bats, the cricket team of the PG Wodehouse Society. Since the book is all about writers playing cricket together, often in teams called the Authors XI, and since Wodehouse is a prominent character in the book, the teams could not have been more thematically appropriate. The ground was Brasenose College Sports Ground in Oxford: the site of one of the cricket matches described in Writers in Whites. I played for the Authors. I did not impress. I was sent in to bat first, and immediately got out. (The Authors, nevertheless, won.)
The charms of Brasenose College Sports Ground
There was a good turnout of onlookers, and one of the Gold Bats posted an enjoyable YouTube video of the match. An American spectator (a member of the PG Wodehouse Society) was having the rules of cricket explained to her when she was struck on the leg by a tremendous six – the only six of the match – and thereafter she watched from the safety of the pavilion. This was the day’s only mishap.
Twenty-four hours after the end of the cricket match, I arrived at the Jolly Gardeners pub in Vauxhall for the “main” launch. It was a wonderful, albeit delirious and somewhat overwhelming, experience. Three descendants of major characters turned up, among an eclectic mix of friends and cricket-world people. The turnout must have been well over a hundred, and I signed scores of books until I wasn’t sure anymore how to spell the most basic names.
Charlie Campbell interviewing me at the launch.
I did a Q+A with my literary agent, Charlie Campbell, who also happens to be the captain of the present-day Authors XI and was the person who originally pointed me in the direction of this project. Then I signed more books. I hope everyone had a good time – I was far too busy to speak to anyone for more than half a minute.
As well as the launch events, there have been a couple of other especially exciting moments in recent weeks. The London Review of Books published a very generous review of Writers inWhites, calling it “superb… Randall charts the decline of cricket as a cultural influence with just as much brilliance and assiduity as he chronicles its rise.” This was actually published before the book had even gone to print. The reviewer, Ferdinand Mount, kindly turned up at the Vauxhall launch, where he explained that he’d been researching a piece on E.W. Hornung for the LRB and, while Googling in search of Hornung references, had stumbled upon an advance press announcement for my book. Hornung is a major character in Writers in Whites; so he asked for an advance copy, in the form of a PDF. Serendipity indeed.
Things have been very busy since then. I wrote an article about the book that was published in The Times. More early reviews have started to trickle in – and I’m thrilled with how positive they are. I have a string of speaking engagements in the calendar. My friends have rallied round and been brilliant. Onwards and upwards!
A couple of my friends accidentally dressed up as the book for the launch.
I am thrilled to share the news that, in mid-May, my debut book is due to be published. It’s called Writers in Whites: How a group of literary cricketers changed English culture. Based on my three years of PhD research, it’s a nonfiction book about a network of London-based writers who played cricket together for eighty years. It’s available for preorder here!
The cricket clique lasted from the 1880s to the 1960s and included some of the most famous names in English literature: J.M. Barrie, Jerome K. Jerome, Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, A.A. Milne, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Evelyn Waugh, J.B. Priestley, Harold Pinter, and even Michael Morpurgo, who featured in the 1960s as the youngest player. Other key members of the group were major figures in their time and deserve to be better remembered: people like E.W. Hornung, J.C. Squire and A.G. Macdonell.
When I began my PhD, I nervously hoped that my hunch was right and the shared cricket was actually important to these writers. Luckily for me, the evidence far exceeded my expectations. The friendships that they made through playing cricket together were a major part of their lives. And not only did these writers shamelessly use their cricket connections to network and advance each other’s careers, but their shared identity as literary cricketers turned out to be very important to their self-image and their public positions. This mattered because they were, collectively, a very powerful force in the cultural debates of their day.
I realised I’d uncovered a whole new perspective on the English literary world, and English culture more broadly, which had been more or less totally forgotten. In the 1890s, for example, the literary cricketers were at the heart of the thrusting new generation of writers who made literature more accessible through bestsellers such as the Sherlock Holmes stories. And in the 1920s, they were Britain’s dominant literary faction – to the fury of the up-and-coming Modernists, who hated them. (The Modernists’ ultimate victory is one reason why the literary cricketers were forgotten.) The whole story is in Writers in Whites.
Cricket was a symbol of the idealised English gentleman – but it was a symbol that ordinary people could access, if they had enough likeminded friends. Many of the literary cricketers were aspirational writers from the lower-middle classes, who used cricket to help advance themselves socially. But the literary cricket network, by being so meaningful for its participants, could be unfair on writers who weren’t involved – particularly women.
All of the main participants absolutely loved their literary cricket teams. Dozens of them wrote lovingly about literary cricket in their memoirs. The result is that I’ve assembled a huge cache of in-jokes, hilarious anecdotes, human stories, and testimonies of deep and lasting cricket-inspired friendships.
Now I’ve woven them all into a book! It’s been tremendous fun, and I’m very pleased with how Writers in Whites has come together. I very much hope that some of you will enjoy it.
This morning I received an immensely pleasing email: my PhD examiners have ratified my minor corrections to my thesis, and they’ve submitted the final paperwork. I won’t get formally notified about it for another few weeks, and I won’t graduate until the summer, but there is no more work for me to do. I’ve officially finished my doctorate.
It seems a good opportunity to post on here for the first time in quite a while. For the past three and a half years, I have either been working on my research or dealing with a rather dramatic kidney-related health saga. (More on that another time, perhaps…) But now I’ve surfaced from both, so it’s time to dust myself down and take stock.
The Weston Library in Oxford: one of the many places I did my research.
My thesis title is ‘Cricket, Literary Culture and Englishness, 1887-1968,’ and I’ve really loved the whole process. I’ve been carrying out my PhD at King’s College London, thanks to funding from LAHP. My research has involved digging into the stories of famous writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse and Michael Morpurgo. Alongside them, I’ve researched almost-forgotten but fascinating figures such as George Ives, a tormented gay rights campaigner, and J.C. Squire, the dethroned king of interwar literary criticism. It’s been immensely fun to trace the way all of these men were linked to one another by cricket. Obscure acquaintances know me as the ‘cricket doctorate guy,’ which I guess has been a usefully memorable identifier.
There have been some big highlights along the way. In 2023, I spent a very happy month in Austin, Texas, going through huge quantities of archive material (yes, including lots of cricket content) at the brilliant Harry Ransom Center. In 2024, I published my first peer-reviewed journal article, ‘Cricket, Literary Culture and In-Groups in Early Twentieth-Century Britain,’ which generated a nice bit of interest in my research. And in 2025, I actually joined a cricket club and started playing (or trying to play) cricket for the first time since school. Some things are naturally easier when one is an adult rather than a teenager. Ball sports, I can confirm, are not one of them.
The Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. It’s a tremendous place to do research.
My journal article, which was published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, was shortlisted for a prize in the world of academia, and won another in the world of fandom: I was a Doylean Honoree for the ACD Society for my scholarly contribution to work on the life of Arthur Conan Doyle. This was a very fun and completely unexpected turn of events, though sadly I was not able to get to New York at four days’ notice to attend the prizegiving.
And now that the PhD is complete, what’s next for the Cricket Doctorate Guy? It’s time to build on my research! I’ve got something in the pipeline that I’m very excited about, which I’ll share as soon as I’m ready…
A friend commissioned me to draw him and his whole family! So here is the set of five framed portraits I put together for him:
These five pictures are now hanging in a line beside a staircase in his parents’ house. I always enjoy drawing a set of sketches: I like having several pictures that belong together.
