Connie: The Marvellous Life of Learie Constantine

Connie: The Marvellous Life of Learie Constantine

by Harry Pearson
Connie: The Marvellous Life of Learie Constantine

Connie: The Marvellous Life of Learie Constantine

by Harry Pearson

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview

Winner of the MCC Book of the Year Award

His father was a first-class cricketer, his grandfather was a slave.

Born in rural Trinidad in 1901, Learie Constantine was the most dynamic all-round cricketer of his age (1928-1939) when he played Test cricket for the West Indies and club cricket for Nelson. Few who saw Constantine in action would ever forget the experience.

As well as the cricketing genius that led to Constantine being described as 'the most original cricketer of his time', Connie illuminates the world that he grew up in, a place where the memories of slavery were still fresh and where a peculiar, almost obsessive, devotion to 'Englishness' created a society that was often more British than Britain itself. Harry Pearson looks too at the society Constantine came to in England, which he would embrace as much as it embraced him: the narrow working-class world of the industrial North during a time of grave economic depression. Connie reveals how a flamboyant showman from the West Indies actually dovetailed rather well in a place where local music-hall stars such as George Formby, Frank Randle and Gracie Fields were fêted as heroes, and how Lancashire League cricket fitted into this world of popular entertainment.

Connie tells an uplifting story about sport and prejudice, genius and human decency, and the unlikely cultural exchange between two very different places - the tropical island of Trinidad and the cloth-manufacturing towns of northern England - which shared the common language of cricket.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780349140391
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Publication date: 09/11/2018
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 368
Product dimensions: 4.90(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Harry Pearson was born and brought up on the edge of Teesside. He is the author of eight works of non-fiction. The Far Corner - A Mazy Dribble through North-East Football, was runner-up for the William Hill Prize and has been named as one of the Fifty Greatest Sports Books of All Time by both the Observer and The Times. He wrote a weekly sports column in the Guardian from 1996 to 2012, and won the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize for his book about Northern club cricket, Slipless in Settle. He lives in Northumberland.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Sipping Nectar with the Gods 11

2 A Cushion for the Life Ahead 38

3 The Chilly Embrace of the Mother Country 65

4 A Man of Steel Springs and India Rubber 94

5 Cricket for the Atomic Age 121

6 Bubbles with a Dash of Brandy 162

7 A Mob Down Under 177

8 The Whiff of Gunpowder 226

9 Cricket in the Shadows 250

10 Playing Cricket and Beating Hitler 271

11 Insults and Ermine 300

Notes 323

Bibliography 335

Index 339

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