Cricket Back in Blighty – Taking a Break from the White Man’s Burden

Martin Chandler | 9:21am GMT 22 February 2026

Published: 2025
Pages: 96
Author: Musk, Stephen
Publisher: Red Rose Books
Rating: 3 stars

Tucked away at the back of the international section of Wisden is a feature titled Cricket Around the World, which looks each year at some of the game’s most far flung outposts. After reading Stephen Musk’s latest book I took a quick glance at the feature in the 2025 edition, and then went all the way back to 2017.

The reason for my curiosity was to try and gauge the strength of the game’s foothold in West Africa, and the answer is clearly fragile. Mali, Liberia and Tunisia get one mention each, but it wasn’t until 2017 that one of the two countries I was interested in, Nigeria and Ghana* featured at all. In 2017 it was Nigeria that got a mention, the game being described as clinging on in the north east of the country.

The catalyst for all this is the subject matter of Cricket Back in Blighty, that being a series of tours, ten in all, made from the region between 1924 and 1937. The tours were all made to Norfolk, hence Musk’s attention being attracted to these long forgotten events.

The first of the tours was in 1924, by the Gold Coast Ramblers, and teams under that name reappeared in 1925 and 1927. There was then a hiatus until 1931 when, and for the six succeeding summers, the West African Wanderers visited Norfolk.

The trips were all for just over a week, and were an opportunity for civil servants and other ex pats to return to England and to play cricket and visit family. The cricket the tourists played seems to have been of a reasonable club standard. Amongst his other tasks Musk seeks to provide biographical details of all the tourists. He isn’t able to find out very much about some of them, but a couple of Minor County players are identified and the fact they do not appear to have been dominant speaks volumes as to the quality of their teammates.

The two main men behind the tours were Sir Gordon Guggisberg, a former Brigadier and decent cricketer, and Edgar Cozens-Hardy, a scion of a well known Norfolk family. Both of them receive an extended biographical essay.

As to the cricket played Musk has had to rely largely on the Norfolk press to reconstruct the visit and he has been successful in doing so, although unfortunately he has not been able to find any detail as to why, after the first match, the 1925 programme was abandoned owing to illness and other causes.

Despite the difficulties inherent in researching the history of a sport in countries that, essentially, appear to have given the game up Musk has marshalled what resources he has been able to find in order to outline the history of cricket in Nigeria and in Ghana but it is a little frustrating that he has not been able to present a more complete picture.

Despite the gaps in the narrative this is however an important contribution to cricket literature and, I suspect, may well not be the last we hear on the subject. Conspicuous by their absence from the sources list are any scrapbooks, diaries, or other personal documents from any of the tourists. Hopefully the existence of Musk’s work reaching a wider audience will bring some new primary source material from someone’s personal archive and, much like in the case of David Battersby’s fine body of work on the Pakistan Eaglets, I suspect there will be a supplement to Cricket Back in Blighty appearing in the not too distant future.

And if you want to invest in this one it is available from publisher Red Rose Books in a signed and numbered limited edition of 30 hardback copies.

*Gold Coast until independence in 1957.