Allahakbarries C.C. J.M. Barrie's extraordinary celebrity cricket team
If I were to ask you how Winnie The Pooh, Peter Pan, Mowgli, Sherlock Holmes and The Invisible Man share a camaraderie: one beyond the obvious; beyond bookshelves, what would you think of? Disney? Bestselling? Animation?
Can a clique of elite literati get an etymology wrong? A clique so elite that it had multiple knights, nobel nominees, poet-laureate candidates, statesmen, royal academics, and aristocrats – including six future knights, two barons and at least three politicians.
The Allahakbarries was an amateur cricket team founded by J.M. Barrie, the Kirriemuir-born author of Peter Pan. The group was made up of like-minded contemporaries who shared his intellectual niche, including literary and artistic bigwigs such as Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Canon Doyle, A.A. Milne, P.G. Wodehouse, Jerome K. Jerome, Walter Raleigh, G.K. Chesterton, Henry Justice Ford and many others.
Wherever the cricket team played would have seen perhaps the highest concentration of
