Revisiting​ old haunts is a hazardous pastime. The beloved buildings may look smaller or shabbier, the unforgettable view is ruined by the new solar farm, the once fascinating characters in the novel have lost their power to enchant, everything seems blurred or – the verdict from which there is no appeal – dated. Surely Raffles would be the least likely fictional hero to survive the cut. His exploits seem to belong, irredeemably, to the world of gaslight and hansom cabs. But no, he survives, and it’s not just the verve and breakneck pace of the stories. What captivated me once again, what I had more or less forgotten, was the angst. Raffles and his slow-witted sidekick, Bunny, shin up drainpipes, leap from roof to roof, squeeze through trapdoors and whip the emeralds from the dowager’s neck with an unquenchable gaiety, but it is a desperate gaiety, teetering at every moment on the edge of ruin.

The series begins with Bunny rushing into Raffles’s rooms in the Albany, having just dropped more than two hundred quid at baccarat and signed a flurry of cheques which will all bounce, because he has spent every penny of his inheritance. He has a pistol in his pocket with which he proposes to shoot himself in front of A.J. Raffles, the glorious cricketer he has worshipped ever since he was his fag at school. Raffles calms him down and tells him that he is broke too: ‘We’re in the same boat, Bunny; we’d better pull together.’ And so begins their rackety partnership in crime, with repeatedly calamitous results: the rewards of their villainy are scant, the fences with whom they deal miserly and the police always close behind. At the end of the first series, Bunny is sent to prison and Raffles apparently drowns at sea, only to surface again in the next series, but living in hiding disguised as an elderly invalid – a disguise that completely fools Bunny, as Raffles’s disguises invariably do.

It is a crippling drawback of this otherwise welcome Penguin Classics reissue that it gives us only eighteen of the 26 stories, also leaving out the full-length novel, Mr Justice Raffles. (Reprints of the complete Raffles are readily available online.) Among the omissions is ‘Le Premier Pas’, which tells the tale of Raffles’s own first steps in crime in Australia, where he is just as broke and desperate as Bunny is in ‘The Ides of March’ and robs a bank which happens to be managed by a cousin of his for whom he gets mistaken. It’s important, I think, to have this flashback, making Raffles originally a creature of panic just as much as his straight man.

This volume also leaves out ‘Gentlemen and Players’, where Raffles expounds his philosophy: ‘Cricket, like everything else, is good enough sport until you discover a better. As a source of excitement it isn’t in it with other things you wot of, Bunny, and the involuntary comparison becomes a bore. What’s the satisfaction of taking a man’s wicket when you want his spoons?’ We do have other passages, though, in which Raffles, mercurial as ever, shrugs on, if only for the moment, the mantle of Robin Hood. In ‘A Jubilee Present’, Raffles offers his take on the gold cup which is to be presented to the nation to celebrate the queen’s Diamond Jubilee: ‘A number of the immorally rich clubbed together and presented it to the nation; and two of the richly immoral intend to snaffle it for themselves.’ But having snaffled it, Raffles posts it off to the queen, to whom he is devoted: ‘My dear Bunny, we have been reigned over for sixty years by infinitely the finest monarch the world has ever seen.’ It is this sinuous inconsistency, this unpredictable mixture of brutality and chivalry which beguiles Bunny and his readers – and viewers too. Stage and then screen adaptations of the tales began soon after they were first published in Cassell’s Magazine in 1898. And the lead role has attracted all the dashers over the years, from Gerald du Maurier through John Barrymore and Ronald Colman to David Niven. I particularly enjoyed the Yorkshire TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never fails.

Ernest William Hornung, always known as Willie, was born in Middlesbrough in 1866, the youngest of eight children of a coal merchant from Transylvania, Johan Petrus Hornung, who anglicised his name to John Peter. Willie was sent off to be thoroughly Englished at Uppingham School, then under the headship of the magnetic Edward Thring. Hornung loved everything about the school – the headmaster, the classics, the ethos of muscular Christianity and above all the cricket, although he was not much good at games, being tiny, near blind behind his pebble glasses and afflicted with asthma, sometimes so badly that, when he was batting, his sister had to act as his runner. His health remained poor, and he left Uppingham early to be packed off to Australia in the hope that the climate would mend his lungs. He worked as a tutor to start with, then spent much of his two years Down Under in sheep stations in the outback. The whole experience shaped the rest of his life. As a bespectacled young jackaroo just out from England remarks in his novel The Belle of Toorak (1900): ‘I shall come back to these paddocks in my dreams. I can’t tell why, but I feel it in my bones; it’s the light, the smell, the extraordinary sense of space and all the little things as well. The dust and scuttle of the sheep when two or three are gathered together, it’s really beastly, but I shall smell it and hear it till I die.’

Australia haunts his first novel, A Bride from the Bush, serialised in the Cornhill in 1890. Alfred Bligh, the not very bright son of a stuck-up judge, brings back an Australian wife, to the horror of his parents. She is a dark and handsome girl, but as soon as she opens her mouth … It’s not just the grating twang, it’s her appalling candour, and her unstoppable banging on about the beauties of Oz. Hornung evokes the chilliness of the English upper classes with a frisson that suggests he must himself have been on the receiving end. Even her name is unspeakable, Gladys, the shortening to Gladdie worse still. The embarrassment reaches a peak when they go riding in Rotten Row and, in the presence of royalty, Gladys spots a friend from home and unleashes an ear-splitting ‘Cooee!’ Despite her mother-in-law’s best efforts to house-train her, Gladdie seems to be incorrigible, and she begins to pine away under the icy blast of their dislike. Eventually she runs off in despair and fakes suicide by leaving her hat and cloak on the riverbank. In fact, she has simply taken the next boat home, where she resumes her life as a brilliant stockrider, cracking her whip as well as any man. The still adoring Alfred follows her out there, and they live happily ever after out on the range.

Hornung emphasises that Gladdie is no ignoramus. She is devoted to the poetry of Adam Lindsay Gordon and startles her in-laws by quoting from ‘The Sick Stockrider’, the most resonant of all bushranger ballads:

’Twas merry ’mid the black-woods, when we spied the station roofs,
To wheel the wild scrub-cattle at the yard,
With a running fire of stock-whips and a fiery run of hoofs:
Oh! The hardest day was never then too hard!

Throughout Hornung’s fiction, Australia recurs as the land of freedom where a man can make what he likes of himself. Raffles is a development of his first dark hero, Stingaree, the bushranger who sports a monocle and who robs banks and holds up mail coaches and, like Raffles, is a master of disguise. He, too, is on the run from his past. Though he can fool policemen and bank managers, he cannot deceive the Hon. Guy Kentish, a visiting Englishman who recognises him instantly from the Old Country: ‘I was a new member when you were turned out of the club.’ In the outback, Stingaree hums his favourite numbers from Gilbert and Sullivan, as he manufactures his own myth. The young idler George Melvin in ‘The Villain-Worshipper’ is bowled over by the thought of him: ‘That’s the man for my money … Stingaree, sir, is the greatest chap in all these colonies, and deserves to be viceroy when they get Federation.’ But Stingaree persuades George that he is unsuited to a life of crime and tries to rescue him – at the cost of himself being betrayed to the police. Only a couple of years later, Hornung realised that for artistic purposes the great villain needs a worshipper, just as every Holmes must have his Watson, and so Bunny is born alongside Raffles, and with him that intense relationship ‘passing the love of women’, although modern readers have more often thought of Oscar and Bosie than David and Jonathan.

And here the plot thickens, in Hornung’s life no less than in his fiction. He gets published in the magazines and plays cricket for the Allahakbarries (a conflation of ‘Allahu Akbar’ and J.M. Barrie, the team’s founder); Jerome K. Jerome and Arthur Conan Doyle were also members. He had already met Conan Doyle’s sister Constance (Connie) on holiday, and the two men had become friends. By the time that Hornung, Doyle and Jerome visit the Black Museum in Scotland Yard (later reflected in the visit of Raffles and Bunny there to view the relics of Raffles’s own crimes), Willie is engaged to Connie. Conan Doyle liked Hornung from the first, describing him as ‘one of the sweetest-natured and most delicate-minded men I ever knew’. And when the first collection of Raffles stories is published, Willie dedicates it to his now brother-in-law: ‘To A.C.D. this form of flattery’.

At this point, though, I think we need to pause. We are on the brink of losing our footing in the 1890s, that treacherous quagmire of ideas and connections. It’s a temptation to slip into the habit of assuming that all the great figures were intimate with one another, and sat around together all night at the Café Royal in a haze of absinthe, talking about art for art’s sake. Hornung, we are told, is not only Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law but his best friend. Conan Doyle and Wilde have apparently been intimates ever since they were dined by their shared American publisher, J.M. Stoddart, at the Langham Hotel in 1889. The closeness of the bond between Hornung and Wilde is shown by the fact that when Willie and Connie had their first and only child in 1895, they christened him Arthur Oscar, after Doyle and Wilde, and always called him Oscar.

Peter Rowland, Hornung’s biographer, does emphasise that there is no documentary proof of the link, and both he and Andrew Lycett in his Life of Conan Doyle agree that this was ‘a brave act of solidarity on Willie’s part’. That’s an understatement. It was on the day of Oscar Hornung’s birth, 24 March 1895, that Frank Harris met Wilde at the Café Royal and advised him to drop his libel suit against Lord Queensberry. Ten days later, the disastrous libel suit opened at the Old Bailey, and only three weeks after that, Wilde was himself in the dock. Would you really want to saddle your first-born with such a name at such a time?

Might there not be a simpler alternative explanation for calling the baby Oscar – a family name perhaps? And indeed, there is, as Rowland admits. Johan Petrus and his wife, Harriet, had a first-born son in 1849, seventeen years older than Willie, who survived only three months, but long enough to be christened Oscar George Peter. Rowland is inclined to dismiss this memory as too far in the past, but Harriet died the year after the second Oscar was born. His naming may have been a farewell gift to her. It is common, after all, to christen a newborn child after a sibling or uncle who died in infancy.

How well​ did Willie and Oscar know each other anyway? In the two massive Lives of Wilde, by Richard Ellmann and Matthew Sturgis, Hornung’s name is not mentioned once. Nor is there a single letter to or from Hornung in the equally massive Complete Letters, edited by Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, and Rupert Hart-Davis. Rowland has a whole chapter on the relations between Willie and Oscar, ‘Wilde about the boy’, which he begins with a warning: ‘It must be emphasised from the outset that, in the absence of information of a more tangible kind, what follows in the present chapter can be regarded, for the moment, as no more than conjecture.’ And so it is. There’s not a single solid reference to any meeting, only hazardings that they could have met when they lived only a couple of streets apart. At the end of his biography, Rowland binds his subject more tightly into the Wildean orbit by suggesting that Willie was homosexual. Here again, this may or may not be true; Rowland offers nothing in the way of evidence, apart from a couple of sentences towards the end of Hornung’s wonderful school novel, Fathers of Men (1912), when the schoolboy ‘Chips’ Carpenter, the hero’s babbling, bespectacled best friend, slyly vouchsafes to the hero Jan Rutter that ‘you think I’ve been so straight! So I was in the beginning; so I am now, if you like, but I’ve not been all the time.’ Chips can indeed be seen as the author’s alter ego, but clearly what he means in the context of the story is that he hasn’t always told Jan the truth. The modern sexual sense of ‘straight’ is decades away.

What about Conan Doyle and Wilde then? We know that they enjoyed what Conan Doyle called ‘a golden evening’ at the Langham with Stoddart. Wilde, on his best behaviour, listened instead of holding forth. From this dinner, there resulted the following year Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray and Conan Doyle’s Sign of the Four. Conan Doyle wrote a polite fan letter to Wilde, who wrote an effusive ‘thank you’ back. That seems to be the total extent of their correspondence. Conan Doyle mentions only one further meeting. Just after the opening of An Ideal Husband to great notices (though Henry James hated it), Wilde bumps into Conan Doyle and asks him if he’s seen the play. Conan Doyle hasn’t. Wilde said with a grave face: ‘Ah you must go. It is wonderful. It is genius!’ And Conan Doyle thinks he’s gone mad. He’s never seen swanking on this scale.

No further meetings are recorded. Yet you will find blogs and critiques that make such claims as ‘their friendship would continue to grow over the years and they would often meet and correspond with each other, sharing their thoughts and ideas on literature and the writing process.’ What we do know is that Conan Doyle didn’t think much of Wilde’s narrative skills. For that matter, he did not hide his dislike of the Raffles stories either. He makes it clear in his memoirs that from the start he had profound reservations about the whole project, while admiring the technical skill on display: ‘There are few finer examples of short-story writing in our language than these, though I confess I think they are rather dangerous in their suggestion. I told him so before he put pen to paper, and the result has, I fear, borne me out. You must not make the criminal the hero.’ If a taste for transgression and indulgence of elegant amoralism were to be the hallmarks of the Naughty Nineties, Conan Doyle wanted no part of them. Hornung removed the dedication after the first edition.

The lingering froideur over Raffles was as nothing to the incandescent row they had in August 1900. Conan Doyle’s wife, Louisa, had been terminally ill with TB since 1893, and he had taken up with Jean Leckie, who was fifteen years younger and who became his second wife after Louisa eventually died in 1906. Jean had come to watch a game at Lord’s with him, and Willie, who was also in the crowd, spotted her in the stands. When confronted, Conan Doyle admitted the friendship but protested that their relationship was platonic. Willie retorted: what’s the difference? ‘It’s the difference between innocence and guilt,’ Conan Doyle exploded. He later told his mother that he did send ‘a polite note to Connie, which, between ourselves, is more than she deserves. And I don’t feel better by contemplating the fact that William is half Mongol, half Slav.’ But then Willie could dish out the racism himself. Penguin Classics may perhaps be excused for omitting Mr Justice Raffles, the full-length novel, from their selection, for the character of Dan Levy, the rapacious moneylender in the book, is the grossest antisemitic caricature since Fagin.

You begin to wonder whether Hornung really had any more to do with the 1890s than his brother-in-law. Rather, the character of Raffles looks forward to Bulldog Drummond, the Saint and, even more so, James Bond: the unflappable elegance, the insouciant brutality and the brand names (Raffles’s Sullivans, Bond’s Chesterfields and Morlands), the insistence on the best champagne and on the shaken-not-stirred martinis. The escapades of both heroes deploy the latest miracles of technology. Raffles exploits all the resources of the recently opened Tube lines to evade his pursuers; he has Bradshaw at his fingertips. In ‘A Jubilee Present’, he hails a hansom cab

shouting ‘Charing Cross!’ for all Bloomsbury to hear.

We had turned into Bloomsbury Street without exchanging a syllable when he struck the trapdoor with his fist.

‘Where the devil are you driving us?’

‘Charing Cross, sir.’

‘I said King’s Cross! Round you spin, and drive like blazes, or we miss our train! There’s one to York at 10.35,’ added Raffles as the trapdoor slammed; ‘we’ll book there, Bunny, and then we’ll slope through the subway to the Metropolitan, and so to ground via Baker Street and Earl’s Court.’

In his essay of 1944, ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, George Orwell contrasts Raffles’s gentlemanly persona with the unrestrained violence of the villains in the work of James Hadley Chase. Like Bond too, Raffles’s occasional heartlessness and stylish cynicism are excused by his underlying patriotism. He and Bunny volunteer for the South African war, and it is on the high veldt that Raffles is killed, sportive to the last, while swapping shots with a Boer sniper. Like Holmes, he is brought back for a further series, not resurrected but in a collection of his earlier exploits with Bunny. Hornung did not share the fierce opposition to the war of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton (though Belloc was to become a friend and neighbour of Hornung’s in Sussex). He thought the cause a just one (as did Kipling and Conan Doyle, who both went out to South Africa to help the war effort) and he later wrote an elegy for three old schoolfellows who had died in the conflict.

If his hero is a progenitor of modern thriller heroes, in his attitude to his old school, Hornung looks back, not forward. His last substantial novel, Fathers of Men, has resonances of Tom Brown’s School Days, published half a century earlier. Thomas Hughes immortalised Dr Arnold’s Rugby; Hornung does the same for Thring’s Uppingham. Compare the Squire’s memorable meditation before sending Tom off to boarding school: ‘What is he sent to school for? Well, partly because he wanted to go. If he’ll only turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian, that’s all I want … I don’t care a straw for Greek particles, or the digamma.’

In Fathers of Men, Jan Rutter’s pipe-smoking housemaster, Mr Heriot, sets out a similar credo: ‘Our standard is within the reach of most … there are those who would tell you it’s the scorn of the scholastic world. We don’t go in for making scholars. We go in for making men. Give us the raw material of a man, and we won’t reject it because it doesn’t know the Greek alphabet.’ We are surely back in the world of Charles Kingsley rather than the world of Oscar Wilde. In many ways, Conan Doyle too still drank at that spring – why else would he christen his son Kingsley? High-minded parents seem to have gone on Kingsleying their boys until well into the 20th century – Kingsley Amis (b. 1922) perhaps one of the last – before muscular Christianity was extinguished as part of the all that which was to be said good-bye to.

Fathers of Men is nonetheless a tingling evocation of public-school life – the sly brutality of the boys, the fragile friendships, the uncertain tempers of the masters, together with the uplifting compensations, for some, of cricket and chapel. But Hornung’s book has another dimension lacking in Tom Brown’s School Days. Rutter is a surly lad with a sense of paranoia and a Yorkshire accent. This is because he has a Secret. His mother, from a genteel family, eloped with the groom, and died soon after Jan was born, leaving the boy to be brought up in a stable, quite abandoned by his mother’s People. Only after his father dies do they reluctantly take any notice of him and send him off to boarding school, but without showing him the slightest affection. If Jan is to be turned into a gent, nobody must know about his background. The irony is that in real life Teddy Thring, whom Hornung worshipped as ‘one of the greatest headmasters of the 19th century’, had a jaundiced view of education for the lower orders:

You cannot break the laws of nature which have made the work and powers of men vary in value. This is what I mean when I ask, why should I maintain my neighbour’s illegitimate child? I mean by illegitimate, every child brought into the world who demands more than his parents can give him or to whom the Government makes a present of money. The School Boards are promising to be an excellent example of public robbery.

Jan seems to triumph over his difficulties, and he captains the First Eleven (like Raffles, he is a devilish slow left-arm bowler). But he leaves the school under a cloud, his mother’s family won’t pay for him to go to university, and so he goes off to seek a new life, where else but in Australia? Thus from first to last, Hornung’s fiction is haunted by the meanness and snobbery of the English upper classes.

But​ in his writing and in his life, Hornung was even more obsessed with cricket. It was cricket that healed the rift with his brother-in-law. For seven years after the Lord’s incident, they ran the Authors XI together, recruiting P.G. Wodehouse, A.E.W. Mason, A.A. Milne and stalwarts of J.M. Barrie’s earlier Allahakbarries team. To understand fully how central cricket was to Hornung’s vision of England, you need to read Ollie Randall’s superb history of the rise and fall of cricket as the embodiment of Englishness. In the Raffles stories, actual cricket matches barely feature. For those, you must turn to the classics in the genre, such as J.C. Snaith’s Willow the King, Wodehouse’s The Gold Bat and Mike, Hugh de Sélincourt’s The Cricket Match and A.G. Macdonell’s England, Their England – all by authors who turned out for Hornung’s teams. And the little man invariably was first on to the field. As Conan Doyle said kindly: ‘To see him stand up behind the sticks with his big pebble glasses to a fast bowler was an object lesson in pluck if not in wicket-keeping.’

In the Raffles stories, by contrast, cricket operates as a kind of meta-language, taking the sting out of his actions as a burglar, which might otherwise seem unpleasant and brutish – ‘knocking them all round the wicket’, ‘drawing stumps’, ‘hitting him for six’. Almost Raffles’s last words to Bunny, as he is about to be shot by a Boer sniper, are: ‘I can’t see where that one pitched; it may have been a wide; and it’s very nearly the end of the over.’ As it says in Tom Brown’s School Days, cricket is ‘more than a game. It’s an institution,’ and one whose traditions of fair play underpin ideas of empire. In late Victorian England, cricket-speak fulfils the same function as the language of chivalry and the tournament once did to sanitise the blood and guts of medieval warfare. And it is cricket that provides the rationale and the language for the coming conflict. Hornung literally preached the message in public schools and prep schools – for example, on 5 July 1914, a week after the assassination of the archduke at Sarajevo, at Stone House, Broadstairs (as it happens, my father’s old prep school, though he was a couple of years too young to hear Willie’s extraordinary effusion):

Who wants an easy victory? Who wants a life of full-pitches to leg? Do you think the Great Scorer is going to give you four runs every time for those? I believe with all my heart and soul that in this splendidly difficult Game of Life it is just the cheap and easy triumphs which will be written in water on the score sheet. And the way we played for our side, in the bad light, on the difficult pitch; the way we backed up and ran the other man’s runs; our courage and unselfishness, not our skill or our success … surely, surely, it is these things above all other that will count, when the innings is over, in the Pavilion of Heaven.

When war breaks out three weeks later, Oscar, aged nineteen, joins up instantly from Eton (not Uppingham!). He is best friends with John Kipling, who is not quite seventeen. They have met on winter sports holidays at Engelberg in Switzerland for the past few years. Their fathers have met in Sussex already, and unlike the fog that hangs over Hornung’s supposed friendship with Wilde, it is clear that he and Kipling clicked immediately. It was at Engelberg in 1912 that Kipling read Fathers of Men and loved it, which delighted Willie, who had loved Stalky and Co. a decade earlier.

Kipling is as much an enthusiast for the war as Hornung, and he is devastated when John is rejected for military service by the Royal Navy and then by the army too, on account of the bad eyesight that he has inherited from his father (but which Oscar hasn’t from his). Kipling then used his influence with Field Marshal Lord Roberts (‘Bobs’) and John is squeezed into the Irish Guards. Kingsley Conan Doyle had started at medical school but became a captain in the First Hampshires. Oscar Wilde’s sons, Cyril and Vyvyan Holland, both finished up in the Royal Field Artillery. Cyril was already a regular, and before Vyvyan joined him, he wrote to his brother: ‘First and foremost, I must be a man. There was to be no cry of decadent artist, of effeminate aesthete, of weak-kneed degenerate … I am no wild, passionate, irresponsible hero. I live by thought, not by emotion. I ask nothing better than to end in honourable battle for my king and country.’

Oscar’s letters home from the Front were no less remarkable than his father’s sermons, over the top in every sense: on 19 June 1915, he wrote that he’d been given command of a bombing unit equipped ‘with new Hand-bombs – glorious things, just the size and weight of a Cricket Ball!’ The previous night, he had led three men on a raid to throw them into the German trench opposite.

I led off with cricket-ball No. 1 – it was just like ‘throwing in’ from ‘cover’ (a fast long hop!) – only this time I had ‘some’ batsmen to run out and there was a price on those stumps! … The others then stood up and ‘threw in’ – the wicket-keep put them down nicely – and we made haste back to the Pavilion! – it was a case of ‘appealing against the light’ – for it was 1.30 a.m. by then and getting uncomfortably light.

Just two weeks later, on 6 July, Oscar was killed at Ypres. In the same year, Cyril and John were killed. Kingsley was badly wounded at the Somme and died in the great flu epidemic after the war; flu did for Willie Hornung too, in 1921. Hilaire Belloc’s son perished in one of the last great battles of the war. Only Vyvyan survived into old age.

The fathers​ worked out their unbearable grief in different ways. Kipling threw himself into a passionate quest to find John’s missing body. His haunting poem ‘My Boy Jack’ was in fact written to commemorate the victims of the Battle of Jutland, in particular Boy Jack Cornwell, one of the youngest people to win the VC, but the poem was obviously infused by sorrow for his own son. Hornung was an energetic war propagandist and finally got himself sent out to help at the Front, where he felt closer to Oscar. Far from being disillusioned by the slaughter, he felt the justice of the cause ever more intensely. He reported back on what he thought the deplorable pacifist attitude which was spreading through several units and was fuelling the call for an armistice. In a postscript added to Fathers of Men in 1919, he expressed pride that between four and five hundred Old Uppinghamians (actually 461), about the same size as the school’s population, should have ‘had the last honour of dying in battle for all that they learned to love and reverence at Uppingham’. His poem ‘Wooden Crosses’ breathes an undimmed patriotism:

The men who die for England don’t need it rubbing in;
An automatic stamper and a narrow strip of tin
Record their date and regiment, their number and their name –
And the Squire who dies for England is treated just the same.

So stand the still battalions: alert, austere, serene;
Each with his just allowance of brown earth shot with green.

Sassoon and Graves and Owen were obviously far better poets, but it is important to remember that they were not the only, or even the dominant, voices in the air. Disillusion and horror were counterbalanced by pride in what, it continued to be argued, was a necessary sacrifice. In this connection, it is worth mentioning Hugh Cecil’s Flower of Battle (1996), which covers a dozen novelists of the time, many of them bestselling, who tried to make sense of the war with more sorrow than bitterness.

And Conan Doyle? Even before Kingsley’s death, he had become disillusioned with the Church and correspondingly obsessed with spiritualism. His second wife, Jean, whom we last saw in the stands at Lord’s, turned out to be a brilliant medium, and it was she who got in touch with Kingsley in the Beyond, and he immediately gave news of Willie, who had died only four months before. In life, Hornung had been scornful of spiritualism, and had refused to listen to the messages relayed from Oscar. Now he had no choice:

Are you in touch with Willie Hornung?

Yea, he came right over to us.

How is he?

He is heavy and tired. But he will improve. Already he is better. His mind is more open. He is sorry, and he realises things now.

A long pause.

I am Willie. I am here. I am so glad to be here. Arthur, this is wonderful. If only I had known this on earth, how much I could have helped others. However, it is too late. I am with Oscar. It is so glorious. I am working and feel so well … And I am no longer handicapped by my horrid old asthma. You would not recognise me. I am much improved in appearance.

England after the war was, as Kipling said, ‘a land of ghosts’. Strange that Raffles didn’t get in touch too.

Hornung’s eagerness to keep literary cricket going after the war was undiminished. And in August 1920, his last summer, he was there among the spectators at the cricket ground at West Grinstead owned by his brother ‘Pitt’ Hornung, who had made a fortune in sugar in Mozambique, to see his niece’s husband, young Jack Squire, lead out his team soon to be christened the Invalids. Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton were often among the spectators, Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon regular players. Thomas Hardy offered to umpire during their Dorset tour. The future of literary cricket seemed bright again. But a more deadly enemy than the Boche was lurking beyond the boundary rope.

Randall charts the decline of cricket as a cultural influence with just as much brilliance and assiduity as he chronicles its rise. At the Invalids match at Rodmell at the end of that August, he spots Virginia Woolf among the spectators. In fact, Woolf rather liked the game and had enjoyed playing it as a girl, but she couldn’t abide Squire, a writer and editor, and his gang: ‘Happily we had fine weather; and sat in the meadow and watched Squire and Sassoon play cricket – the last people I wished to see – Somehow that the Downs should be seen by cultivated eyes, self-conscious eyes, spoils them to me.’ Her countryside was not to be taken over by these philistine middlebrows. Modernism was on the march, and the enemy was the Squirearchy.

Woolf called Squire ‘more repulsive than words can express, and malignant into the bargain’. Lytton Strachey called him ‘that little worm’. Eliot declared that ‘no truce is possible with such people.’ D.H. Lawrence called him ‘a suburban rat’ (for the modernists, ‘suburban’ was always the ultimate insult). In New Verse, Geoffrey Grigson set out to discredit for ever the middlebrow world of letters. By 1940, the job was done, according to George Orwell: back in the 1920s, ‘Squire ruled the London Mercury … there was a cult of cheeriness and manliness, beer and cricket.’ But ‘the wind was blowing from Europe, and long before 1930 it had blown the beer-and-cricket school naked, except for their knighthoods.’ Cricket itself was the enemy too. Osbert Sitwell wrote that it was hardly credible ‘that an adult would, of his own accord, engage in such orgies of futile infantilism’. It had taken two centuries, from Chaucer to Cervantes, to destroy the myth of chivalry. The myth of cricket was in ruins after little more than a decade. Nothing seemed more laughable now, more horribly at odds with reality, than Hornung’s sermons and verses; no ironies more ghastly than those in Oscar’s letters home from the Front.

Suddenly cricket itself didn’t seem so picturesque. The steady and remorseless professionalising of the game left no room for frivolity; the village green seemed a long way from the huge new stadiums. And then came the bodyline controversy of 1932-33. The England captain, the implacable Douglas Jardine, had decided that the only way to get Donald Bradman out was for Harold Larwood to hurl his thunderbolts directly at his body. Plum Warner, the tour manager, chevalier to the last, hated the tactic and visited the Australian dressing room to make peace, only to be told by the Australian captain: ‘I do not want to see you, Mr Warner. There are two teams out there. One is playing cricket. The other is making no effort to do so.’ ‘Not cricket’ – the ultimate insult was now being thrown at England’s own Test team. The game went on, but innocence had departed.