A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE, WHICH, FOR MANY OF OUR CLUB MEMBERS, IS A PARTICULARLY LONG AND WINDY ONE THAT OFTEN REQUIRES THE HELP OF A SATNAV
“Stone walls do not a prison make…”
From the 1998 year book.
Writer’s name was withheld on the grounds that should an inmate be released James Pickles (oops) was a marked man!
Most cricket clubs have regulations of some kind. You can see them on disintegrating paper notices stuck to dressing room walls with rusty drawing pins, or on smart notices nailed above the entrance to the pavilion. Little rules and requests which the visitors are expected to oblige and adhere to. Please do not tamper with the sightscreen, they state. Please clean your boots outside. No spikes in the pavilion. It’s all part of the social cricket scene, as much as vast home-made teas and dodgy local umpiring. Today though, was slightly different. Today we are to play Patmoor, a new fixture arranged at the last minute through the Cricket Conference.
“No books. No aerosols. No audio or video tapes,” announced a large lady with a mammoth bundle of keys dangling from her belt. “No non-safety matches. No sharp cutting objects. No plastic bags.” We went under the arch of the metal detector one at a time. “No mobile phones, no electrical equipment.” Security cameras stared at us from the ceiling. Guards shuffled round. We were locked inside one of Britain’s most notorious high-security prisons. How could we have known that Patmoor stood for PATients of BroadMOOR Hospital for the Criminally Insane!
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From the 2003 year book.
By John Behar
One of the obvious characteristics of Kensington Cricket Club is the diversity of its membership. A broad cross-section of the global community can be found sporting the red gold and blue on any given Sunday during the season. Once members people tend to remain members, even when international bureaucracy forces them to retire to their homelands often on the other side of the world. Thanks to the internet staying in touch is not difficult, and so it is that we find ourselves a global community with members in almost every quarter of this increasingly small round world.
Despite this it did come as some surprise to discover club connections not just beyond the bounds of space but also beyond the bounds of time itself. Allow me to explain by way of anecdote. Picture the scene, two veterans of the club who have known each other for many years and share a vast catalogue of cricketing memories; they are good friends. One is clearly Indian, and the other clearly English, both modern men, of the modern world, one a banker, the other a documentary film producer. They go for a drink, conversation is as it usually is between old friends, patchy verbal exchanges punctuate the otherwise steady flow of beer.
Then something happens, a friend of the Indian gentleman turns up and joins the conversation. He asks the Englishman, whom he has never met before, some fairly basic questions about his origins and before you know it the Englishman is talking about stuff even his old Indian pal has never heard before …
KENSINGTON CRICKET CLUB 