George Cecil Ives, born October 1, 1867, was a writer, poet and penal reformer … fate also made him the first ever First-Class cricketer to admit to homosexuality. Abhishek Mukherjee documents the curiously interesting character.
The Allahakbarries CC : Ives is seen second from right in the front row.
Back row l-r E.W. Hornung of Raffles fame, E. V. Lucas, P.G.Wodehouse, J.C. Smith, G. Charne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Hesketh-Hesketh Prichard, L. D. Luard, C. M. Q. Orchardson, Leonard Charles Nightingale, A. Kinross.Front row l-r: C. Gascoyne, Shan F. Bullock, G. Hillyard Swinstead, Reginald Blomfield, the Hon. W. J. James, Edwin Austin Abbey, Albert Chevalier Taylor, J. M. Barrie, George Cecil Ives, George Spencer Watson.
June 30, 1892. Vernon Hill smashed the Cambridge bowlers for 114 in 100 minutes in the Varsity Match at Lord’s. However, he was outscored by one Malcolm Jardine (141), whose son would later reduce Don Bradman to a mortal. Jardine and Hill added 168 for the seventh wicket. By stumps Cambridge were 34/2.
The match had changed course of dramatically over the day’s play. Oxford had lost both their openers for ducks. Cambridge had them on the mats at 86/4. And then this.
No, the Cambridge supporters were not happy.
Among them was one George Cecil Ives, who attended a dinner that night at the Authors’ Club. There he met a young man for the first time. This man, Oscar Wilde, had taken England by storm with The Picture of Dorian Gray and had been dabbling with theatre of late. Lady Windermere’s Fan was staged earlier that year.
England’s most iconic victim of homophobia met one of the earliest gay reformers in the country for the first time. Not only were homosexual practises illegal, they were – to put it very, very mildly – not looked upon very kindly.
The two men were poles apart. Wilde was expansive and flamboyant in his prose, a style that continues to captivate his readers to this day. Ives, poet, writer and penal reformer, was mainly a chronicler, a rigorous curator of facts; he was more meticulous than suave. (Cricket historians can learn a thing or two from his methods) And their respective genres reflected the personae of two men as well.
In Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles and Imitations, John Stokes described Wilde and Ives as “unlikely allies by virtue of temperament alone.”
Two much-publicised lawsuits later, Wilde was sentenced to prison for two years of hard labour for “gross indecency” in 1895.
Ives founded the Order of Chaeronea – the first known society for homosexuals – in 1897, the same year when Wilde completed his two-year sentence and left for France, never to return.
Wilde and his lover, the author, poet, and translator Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, had both been recruited to the Order. Wilde’s timeline makes this a bit blurry, though the Order’s website clearly mentions him being a member.
Note:
“Bosie” is another word for the googly. It might have been, as Justin Parkinson theorised in The Strange Death of English Leg Spin, “more than a harmless shortening of his surname [of Bernard Bosanquet, the inventor of the delivery].” It might well have been a reference to “Bosie” Douglas.
Parkinson pointed out that “wrong ’un”, an Australian slang for a homosexual, is another often-used word for the googly. He also pointed out that the term “Bosie” was more common in Australia, where the locals were “always ready to mock the pretensions of the supposed moral guardians of empire, wanted to make the MCC uncomfortable about its part in bringing this limp-wristed deceiver to their country.”
When Wilde passed away in 1900, Ives mourned his death with a poem in Reynolds’ Newspaper and at least two diary entries. In one of these he referred to Wilde as “victim and martyr”.
Chaeronea and beyond
What had prompted Ives to found the Order? There are theories that Ives had been influenced by Walt Whitman and George Carpenter, who had had sexual encounters in their early days (Carpenter himself disclosed this to Gavin Arthur).
Ives himself had met Whitman when he toured America in 1882. “I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips,” he later admitted. He was also close to Carpenter, with whom (and others) he helped found the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology in 1914.
The name was inspired by the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC), where the Sacred Band of Thebes were routed by Phillip II of Macedon. The Band was composed of a hundred and fifty pairs of male lovers.
Throughout his life Ives battled for what he referred to as “The Cause”, to get pro-homosexuality laws passed. He did not live till 1967, when same-sex sexual activities became legal in England, but he was one of the earliest battlers.
Ives was also an author of some renown. While he dabbled in verses and fiction from time to time, he is remembered mostly for his monographs, lectures, correspondences, and meticulously detailed diaries that he maintained for over six decades. These covered topics from sex psychology to prison reform to abortion and were published as anthologies at various points of his lifetime.
Stokes provided a possible explanation behind this effort: “The sheer bulk of his legacy – innumerable scrapbooks, endless manuscripts, and a gargantuan diary (122 volumes, over three million words), asserts an unshakeable confidence that sooner or later his day would come.”
Stokes described Ives as “a humanitarian who not only looked forward to a future when homosexuals would be free to live as they wished but, more than that, believed that they would be able to instruct the rest of society by their tolerance and moral concern.”
A visionary.
There was another curious aspect that deserves mention. In his biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Andrew Lycett mentioned that EW Hornung had modelled his famous detective Raffles on Ives, though as Lycett wrote, Hornung “may not have understood this sexual side of Ives’s character.”
And then there was cricket. Ives was not a competent cricketer by any definition, but that never affected his enthusiasm. He was recruited by JM Barrie for his Allahakbarries, and even turned up for MCC on a few occasions.
Only one of these MCC fixtures, against WG Grace’s London County at Crystal Palace in 1902, was given First-Class status. Led by WG Grace, London County featured the likes of former Australian captain Billy Murdoch and future Leicestershire captain Cecil Wood.
On the other hand, MCC boasted of two greats – Albert Trott and (albeit in a different field) Arthur Conan Doyle.
Ives neither bowled nor took a catch. Batting at 11 in each innings, he was bowled for 7 and 2, and that was that.
But he remains the earliest First-Class cricketer to admit to homosexuality – albeit not in that sequence.
Legacy
Over a century after Ives that match at Crystal Palace, Alan Hansford of Sussex wrote a letter to Michael Atherton on the lines of “there can’t be too many gay accountants who dismissed you twice in a first-class match.” Hansford was referring to his First-Class debut, for Sussex against Cambridge.
Alex Blackwell and Lynsey Askew
Things had changed by then. When Steven Davies came out of the closet in 2011, he received unanimous support from his teammates. A year ago, James Anderson had no problem posing for the cover of the gay magazine Attitude.
Marizanne Kapp and Dane van Niekerk
Alex Blackwell received support from her Australian teammates as well. On September 3, 2015 she married England’s Lynsey Askew in what was international cricket’s first same-sex marriage.
They were followed by New Zealand’s Amy Satterthwaite and Lea Tahuhu (in 2017).
And finally there were South Africa’s Dane van Niekerk and Marizanne Kapp (2018).
Meanwhile, the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act 2017 in Australia was read for the first time on November 15 and was passed on December 9. That put the stamp on approval on the marriage of Blackwell and Askew in both countries.
Ives would have been a happy man today.