Larger Than Life
Martin Chandler |Published: 2025
Pages: 200
Author: Phillips, Barry
Publisher: Private
Rating: 4 stars
This one is a biography, but beyond fitting in to that oft visited genre of cricket literature it is, certainly in my experience, quite unique in the particular subject that it approaches.
The man who is at the heart of Larger Than Life is William Donne. The name is not one that is instantly recognisable, hardly surprising given that Donne never played a single First Class match. In fact there is only one match on Cricketarchive which includes him, and in that he failed to trouble the scorers and did not bowl. The match was not without importance though as the team that Donne played for in that game remain cricket’s reigning Olympic champions.
And that observation will means something to some. Olympic cricket is a subject that has been the subject of books before. In 1900 in a Paris velodrome the Devon County Wanderers took on the French Athletic Club Union in a match that Great Britain won by a comfortable margin, but with just five minutes to spare. Several years later the International Olympic Committee made its judgment and the Wanderers became gold medallists.
So who was Donne? The short answer is a West Country industrialist. His family ran a significant company in Castle Cary in Devon that manufactured flax products and the book begins with a look at the family and the previous generations that had run a business that began at the end of the eighteenth century.
Donne was a big man and no athlete but he was a lover of sport nonetheless, and became heavily involved in the local cricket and Rugby Union clubs where his organisational flair was invaluable. The cricketing side of his life included the organisation of tours, usually within the UK but, on that one occasion, to France and on others to the Netherlands, Ireland and the Channel Islands as well as various locations in England.
There were numerous press reports of Donne’s involvement in cricket and Rugby Union and, in relation to the Devon and Somerset Wanderers cricket team, a vanishingly rare book published in the year Donne died, 1934, contained a detailed account of that part of Donne’s life. Other local books and publications shed further light and it is clear that Phillips has consulted many local archives.
Much of Donne’s sporting lives can therefore be reconstructed, but not quite all. There is still some uncertainty over just why and how the Wanderers came to be in Paris in 1900, but I suspect that, in what is a fascinating part of the William Donne story, that Phillips has drawn the correct conclusion from the available evidence.
He was married, but Donne had no children, although a brother survived him who continued to run the family company in his stead. After his demise a long serving employee took over but with the rise of synthetic products that replaced the old flax ones the company was in time taken over and ceased to exist in the 1970s.
The only person I can think of in any way similar to Donne was Sir Julien Cahn, the wealthy furniture manufacturer who made his fortune by pioneering hire purchase. Cahn operated on a bigger scale of course, but he was certainly a cricketer of limited ability who nonetheless insisted on leading his own team. The selection of a player of First Class standard was not unknown for Donne, but like his business his cricket team was several levels down from Cahn’s.
Considering that there is no one left alive who knew Donne, or any family members or anyone associated with him available to interview Phillips has done a remarkably good job of giving a flavour of the sort of man that Donne was. A biography like this is destined never to be as full or comprehensive as its author will want it to be but this one is a valuable book on many levels. It is an important record of social history, club cricket and club rugby from the turn of the twentieth century onwards.
Self-published in a limited edition of 120 copies the book is, as with Phillips previous efforts, very nicely produced in a cloth binding with a dust jacket. It is also available at the very reasonable cost of £22 – interested purchasers can email the author at bpwg@sky.com and I believe one or two copies will be available in Australia from Roger Page.
All in all there is but a single real disappointment in the book, that being Phillips’ observation that, on the subject of his writing, this is definitely the last. Having greatly enjoyed his series of books on Somerset Cricketers and his biographies of Arthur Wellard and Henry Stanley I can but console myself with the thought that, as he does admit, he has said that before. I do hope that, once again, he is ‘crying wolf’.
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