A Flash Outside The Off Stump

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A Flash Outside The Off Stump

Andy Carter

18 episodes

8 months ago

A podcast on cricket history looking at early Black and Asian cricketers in England. A book of the series is now available entitled Beyond The Pale: Black and Asian Cricketers in Britain 1868-1945. It is available from Amazon and numerous other retailers worldwide.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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All content for A Flash Outside The Off Stump is the property of Andy Carter and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

A podcast on cricket history looking at early Black and Asian cricketers in England. A book of the series is now available entitled Beyond The Pale: Black and Asian Cricketers in Britain 1868-1945. It is available from Amazon and numerous other retailers worldwide.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Show more...

Episodes (18/18)

A Flash Outside The Off Stump

A Flash Outside the Off Stump

1911 was a pivotal year in Indian cricket as it marked the first time that a truly representative India side toured abroad. This episode tells the story of that tour and of the remarkable man who was India’s best player of the tour, Palwankar Baloo. As an untouchable, Baloo’s struggle for recognition in the game had wide social implications at a time when India was trying to forge a national identity. By coincidence, 1911 was also the year in which the Indian national anthem, Jana Gana Mana, was composed. This episode looks at how cricket and the anthem became two pillars of Indian identity.

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1 year ago

41 minutes 6 seconds

A Flash Outside The Off Stump

A Flash Outside the Off Stump

Newly installed as Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, Ranjitsinhji had hoped to find his troubles behind him, but he was to find himself in the wars both figuratively and literally. This episode tells of his off-field financial woes in the years leading up to the 1st World War, his service in the war, how an act of bravery in Yorkshire was to result in tragedy for the great batsman.

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1 year ago

18 minutes 30 seconds

A Flash Outside The Off Stump

A Flash Outside the Off Stump

Ranji was still capable of playing as well as ever in the years 1901 to 1904 but his form became erratic as outside influences caught up with him. He was dogged by money worries and was increasingly drawn in to intrigues about the Nawanagar succession. His England career ignobly petered out although he was still able to excite crowds with his displays of batting prowess but events off the field were catching up with him.

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1 year ago

19 minutes 59 seconds

A Flash Outside The Off Stump

A Flash Outside the Off Stump

The story behind the first West Indies tour to England in 1900. Cricket had been played in the Caribbean for many years and in the second half of the 19th century inter-colonial matches began to be played between the various British colonies. The 1890s saw three visits by English touring sides which triggered the creation of a representative XI for the combined West Indies, but the different levels of racial integration evident in the cricket in the various colonies meant that the selection of players was to be a controversial issue. Eventually the West Indies sent a party of 15 comprised of 10 white and 5 black players including Lebrun Constantine, father of Learie, and Charles Ollivierre who stayed behind after the tour to become a stalwart of the Derbyshire side and the first Afro-Caribbean player in county cricket.

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1 year ago

19 minutes 33 seconds

A Flash Outside The Off Stump

A Flash Outside the Off Stump

As the nineteenth century drew to a close Ranji enjoyed a successful domestic season in which he consolidated his position as Sussex captain and the leading batsman in county cricket. Times were changing, on the field and off it, and this episode takes a brief look at the experiences of players like Hampshire’s Charlie Llewellyn and Derbyshire’s Charles Ollivierre (pictured) and British attitudes towards people of other races at the end of the Victorian era.

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1 year ago

14 minutes

A Flash Outside The Off Stump

A Flash Outside the Off Stump

As one of the leading run scorers in English county cricket, Ranji’s selection to play for England against Australia came as no surprise, but some voices were opposed to his inclusion in the team. Ostensibly this was because he was born overseas, but when it emerged that many England players had been born in the colonies and many Australian players had been born in England, it became clear that it was race rather than place of birth that was the real issue. Nevertheless, Ranji’s supporters prevailed and his contributions to England’s performances in the 1890s were widely acclaimed. Soon he was a mainstay of the English test team both at home and on tour.

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1 year ago

17 minutes 37 seconds

A Flash Outside The Off Stump

A Flash Outside the Off Stump

Ranjitsinhji was born in Sarodar, Gujarat in 1872 and might well have been destined for a life of obscurity as a local landowner had he not been adopted as the heir to the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar at the age of six. As the future ruler of an Indian princely state he was sent away for an English style public school education to Rajkumar College, a boarding school for the sons of maharajahs where he was introduced to “manly English sports” including cricket.

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1 year ago

16 minutes 27 seconds

A Flash Outside The Off Stump

A Flash Outside the Off Stump

The team which arrived in England in May 1886 was not the Parsees’ best having been largely selected on the basis of who could afford to pay his own way rather than cricketing merit alone. Robert Henderson’s friend the Surrey secretary and former England centre-forward Charles Alcock had arranged a packed programme for them which kept them playing on most days between the last week in May and the first week in August on an itinerary which started in Sussex and took them as far north as Edinburgh. All told there were to play twenty-eight matches, winning just one, drawing eight and losing the other nineteen.

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1 year ago

16 minutes 46 seconds

A Flash Outside The Off Stump

A Flash Outside the Off Stump

This episode tells the story of how India’s rise as a cricketing nation was linked to a dynastic union between the English and Portugues royal families and reveals how the Parsi community of Bombay began playing cricket in the 1830s. We take a look at the earliest Indian cricket clubs and their struggles to be taken seriously as cricketers by the British and to find space to practice and play.

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1 year ago

16 minutes 9 seconds

A Flash Outside The Off Stump

A Flash Outside the Off Stump

The Aborigine cricket team remained in England from mid-May to mid-October on a punishing schedule that saw them play 47 matches, most of them two day games followed by a further day of athletics which included displays of Aboriginal hunting and fighting skills.

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1 year ago

17 minutes 19 seconds

A Flash Outside The Off Stump

A Flash Outside the Off Stump

When they finally arrived in Melbourne for their Boxing Day fixture in 1866 the Aborigines were perhaps somewhat overwhelmed by the size of the crowd. Several of the players performed below expectations and they were fairly easily defeated. However, while they lost the game they had captured the imagination of the public and offers soon came in for them to play further afield.

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1 year ago

17 minutes 18 seconds

A Flash Outside The Off Stump

A Flash Outside the Off Stump

In 1868 the first Australian cricket team to tour England was composed of Aborigines. This podcast tells how the team was formed in rural Western Victoria two years earlier and its earliest matches in Edenhope and Hamilton. The story is all the more remarkable because it took place against a background in which the indigenous people of Australia were facing extinction from the combined pressures of disease, alcohol addiction, land grabs and cold blooded murder.

This episode also tells us something of Tom Wills, once acclaimed Australia’s finest cricketer. Grandson of a convict, he was educated at one of England’s finest public schools and found himself coaching the Aboriginal team five years after his father had been killed by natives in Queensland.

Australia in the mid-nineteenth century was an untamed land of opportunity for white settlers, with fortunes to be made from sheep ranching and the goldfields. For black Australians they were dark days with many commentators predicting that the aboriginal population would be extinct within a generation or two, but this small group of men set out on an epic two year journey which would take them around the world to challenge the prejudices of the time.

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1 year ago

16 minutes 5 seconds

A Flash Outside The Off Stump

A Flash Outside the Off Stump

Cricket began to be played abroad from quite early in its history. English residents in Syria were playing the game in 1676 and colonists had introduced it to America and India by the early 1700s. This episode looks at the early history of cricket abroad, its rise and fall in America and arrival in Australia.

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1 year ago

15 minutes 51 seconds

A Flash Outside The Off Stump

A Flash Outside the Off Stump

The true origins of cricket are lost in the mists of time but it probably began sometime in the Middle Ages, most likely in the hills of Kent, Sussex and Surrey. This episode looks at how an obscure rustic pastime was adopted by the aristocracy and transformed into the basis for fashionable social events involving enormous wagers.

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1 year ago

14 minutes 15 seconds

A Flash Outside The Off Stump

A Flash Outside the Off Stump

This episode looks at the main themes we’ve touched on in the series and talks about how sport, which Lord Harris and others saw as a cornerstone of Empire, unwittingly became a Trojan Horse for its downfall.

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6 years ago

42 minutes 10 seconds

A Flash Outside The Off Stump

A Flash Outside the Off Stump

This episode has less cricket and more social history. It tells the story of Learie Constantine's post cricket career, his contribution to the British War effort and the establishment of an independent Trinidad & Tobago and his twilight years in the late 1960s.

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7 years ago

48 minutes 40 seconds

A Flash Outside The Off Stump

A Flash Outside the Off Stump

The first of two episodes on the life of Learie Constantine, once Britain's highest paid sportsman, and later the first black member of the House of Lords.

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7 years ago

46 minutes 18 seconds

A Flash Outside The Off Stump

A Flash Outside the Off Stump

After Ranjisinhji's unsuccessful return to cricket in 1920, it was the turn of a new generation of Indian cricketers to try their luck in English cricket. This episode tells the story of Duleepsinhji and the two Nawabs of Pataudi.

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7 years ago

33 minutes 31 seconds