Skip to main content

The Real Jeeves shortlisted for MCC-Cricket Society Book of the Year award

The poignant story of Percy Jeeves, the cricketer whose name became immortalised in fiction, is a well-deserved contender for the MCC-Cricket Society Book of the Year award, the winner of which will be revealed at a ceremony in the Long Room at Lord's a week today.

The Real Jeeves, written by Brian Halford, the Birmingham Mail's widely respected cricket writer, is a thoroughly researched and wonderfully crafted life of a Warwickshire cricketer who would have played many Test matches for England had his career - and, tragically, his life - not been cut short by the First World War.

Percy Jeeves, a Yorkshireman by birth, scored 765 runs and took 106 wickets in his debut season in 1913. By the end of his second season, though, he had volunteered for service and joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.   He was shipped off to fight on the Western Front and never returned, one among tens of thousands of soldiers whose fate was recorded as missing, presumed killed, during the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

He played 50 first-class cricket matches exactly, one of which happened to be witnessed by P G Wodehouse, the author, who took great pleasure from watching cricket and was so impressed by the demeanour as much as the skill of Percy Jeeves that when he set about creating his comic English gentleman, Bertie Wooster, he chose Jeeves as the name for Wooster's valet.

There are six titles shortlisted for the MCC-Cricket Society Award.  To be judged alongside Brian Halford's book are:

The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India, by James Astill (Wisden Sports Writing).

The Authors XI: A Season of English Cricket from Hackney to Hambledon, by The Authors Cricket Club (John Wisden & Co).

Lost in the Long Grass, by John Barclay (Fairfield Books).

Bradman's War: How the 1948 Invincibles Turned the Cricket Pitch into a Battlefield, by Malcolm Knox (The Robson Press).

The Little Wonder: The Remarkable History of Wisden, by Robert Winder (John Wisden & Co).

The judges for the 2014 competition are chaired by Vic Marks, the former England spin bowler and current Observer cricket correspondent who is a Cricket Society vice-president. The panel comprises John Symons and Chris Lowe, the judges nominated by the Cricket Society, alongside the MCC nominees David Kynaston and Stephen Fay.

Halford and Warwickshire captain Jim Troughton are appearing this evening at the Bear Pit Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, where they will discuss The Real Jeeves as part of Stratford Literary Festival.  Jim's father David, a Royal Shakespeare Company actor, will deliver readings from the book.

The Real Jeeves, by Brian Halford (Pitch Publishing) is available from Amazon, WHSmith and Waterstones.

Home


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Leave a comment or submit your own sports book review

Popular posts from this blog

2018 Cross Sports Book of the Year Awards: all the winners are named

Brave Paralympian Martine Wright scoops Autobiography prize Add caption The inspiring story of the GB Paralympic athlete Martine Wright has been named Sports Autobiography of the Year at the 16th Sports Book Awards and will be a strong contender for overall Sports Book of the Year for 2018, which will be decided by a public vote. Written in collaboration with journalist Sue Mott, Unbroken , published by Simon & Schuster, tells the remarkable story of Martine’s incredible fight back from the horrors of the July 7 atrocities in London in 2005, when she was sharing a carriage on a tube train on the Circle Line with a suicide bomber, who detonated his device just outside Aldgate station. Seven passengers around her were killed among 52 who lost their lives that day but she survived, albeit at the cost of both her legs. Martine, who took up wheelchair tennis and sitting volleyball as part of her rehabilitation, represented Great Britain in the latter at the 2012 Paralympics...
19 comments
Read more

Secrets of Mickelson the Master

No instruction manual could teach a golfer to play the extraordinary trees-to-green shot that Phil Mickelson produced at the 13th on the way to winning his third US Masters in Augusta. There is much a player can learn, nonetheless, from the winner of the 2010 green jacket and his phenomenal skills with wedge and putter in Mickelson's Secrets of the Short Game , which can now expect a spike in sales. Mickelson believes that even a golfer of only average ability can become a highly effective short-game player by paying proper attention to mechanics and set-up and combining that scientific approach with a willingness to be imaginative. Published last autumn, the 224-page manual passes on some of the wisdom Mickelson has acquired over 35 years, since his first steps in the game as a small boy. By holding off Britain's Lee Westwood, Mickelson joined the company of Nick Faldo, Sam Snead and Gary Player in having won three Masters titles.  But for the presence of four-times win...
Post a Comment
Read more

No Nonsense: Joey Barton's autobiography on the William Hill Sports Book of the Year longlist after just one day in the shops

Joey Barton Controversial footballer Joey Barton's autobiography No Nonsense has been included on the longlist for the 2016 William Hill Sports Book of the Year even though it was published only yesterday. Written in collaboration with Michael Calvin, the award-winning author and sports journalist, Barton's book promises to deliver a candid account of a life never far from the headlines on and off the field. Calvin is the third writer to work with the player, who began the project in 2014 with Times journalist Matthew Syed and made one attempt to write it himself, which he did not sustain beyond nine chapters. There is much detail, some of it quite harrowing, about his upbringing in hard-edged working class Liverpool, where many of his associates and even family members were involved in crime at one level or another.  His brother, Michael, and his cousin, Paul Taylor, are serving jail sentences for the murder of an innocent black teenager. The book has no short...
18 comments
Read more