Empire Cricket Booklet

•

R.M. POORE

individuals who had played the game at a far higher level and who helped to sustain the game through the crisis. As Allen put it: 'Certainly, with famous cricketers on active service in South Africa, it was perhaps inevitable that games of cricket would be played and that the fortunes of these players should provoke interest.' 12 The links between the military and sport were perhaps never so closely embodied in one man as in Brigadier General Robert Montagu Poore. Throughout his life, Poore managed to combine military service and sport to a remarkable degree, on a number of occasions swapping the real life exchanges on the field of battle for the gentler struggle at the wicket within days,

Africa in 1898 he was one of a group of officers good enough to appear in top-class cricket. Army life restricted the cricket appearances of these men. Military service around the British empire meant years away from home, whilst summer was the time for exercises for units based in England. Leave was not always easy to get, and even the hardest-pressed county team preferred regulars to players with other obligations. Captain E. G. Wynyard, who challenges Poore for the title of the greatest army cricketer of the period, was unable to tour Australia in 1897/8 because of military commitments, although, being stationed in England for much of his later career, he did captain Hampshire for a time. Others were not

R. M. Poore -cricketer and army officer - played the game with great success while posted in South Africa and Rhodesia during the 1890s

so that he became the epitome of that noticeable phenomenon of the late-nineteenth century - the soldier cricketer. Although there had been such players in the English first-class game before - for example, E. G. Wynyard, F. W. D. Quinton, J. Spens and E. I. M. Barrett of Hampshire - it was only towards the end of the 1890s that they became many in number, and by the time Poore returned to England from southern

so lucky. Barrett played 80 games in the period 1896 and 1925 between postings abroad, whilst Spens appeared ten times between 1884 and 1899. 13 Poore might be considered a truly 'imperial' sporting hero, perhaps the first. He established his reputation in India and southern Africa, did not play first-class cricket in England until he was 32, and had only a