Humbert Wolfe’s 1924 English cricket poem

Years ago, John Quilter, the late Wellington bookseller showed me a book he had by Humbert Wolfe. Quilter, a knowledgeable person in the book trade, had noted a cricket poem in Wolfe’s Kensington Gardens (1924). The edition he had was a reprint from 1927 by Ernest Benn Limited, UK. I bought the copy from him.

Subsequent checks of cricket poetry anthologies have shown the poem by Wolfe has never been included in anthologies.

Wolfe was a popular writer during the 1920s and is not read much nowadays. He was born in Milan in 1885 and was a British civil servant receiving a CBE and CB for his services. He died in 1940 at age 55. While working a job he found spare time to write and publish over 40 publications. Wolfe was made a commander of the Order of the British Empire.

The cricket poem in Kensington Gardens is amongst poems celebrating facets of daily life in the gardens. Flowers, trees, birds, fishes, animals, games, monuments, its palace, its navigation, and its people.

HUMBERT WOLFE

Cricket

My child, when we were children,
we played in the Garden at cricket
with a racket, a ball of rubber,
and a chestnut-tree for a wicket.

I carted the ball for sixes,
while you, from the very beginnings
of our knowledge of one another,
were bowled at the start of your innings.

It’s a queer thing, isn’t it surely,
that the good ones are always out,
and the bad ones are always batting,
and knocking the others about?

Poem © Humbert Wolfe

Humbert Wolfe, National Portrait Gallery