A few words to mark the final submission of pre-proof material to Bloomsbury for our three-volume edition of Alaudae, the remarkable Latin-language newspaper published by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs from 1889 until 1895 which I may have mentioned a couple of times. I am just as I release this post into the wild back home after walking the dog on Port Meadow. Many skylarks, alaudae, which must be a good omen.

In my very first encounter with Ulrichs, translating Alaudae Issue 27 a couple of years ago, I found myself not only turning his Latin into English and explaining what he was telling us about Latin at the end of the nineteenth century but also trying to understand his mistakes, which in a strange way I found as compelling as anything else. At the time I described it as like peering over Ulrichs’ shoulder as, for instance, he struggled to read a Cyrillic signature.

What follows is along similar lines. If Ulrichs was unfamiliar with the Russian language and script, and indeed with Russia in general, though also very keen to learn what he could about it, his view of Britain wasn’t so very different. The occasional remarks about Britain that we encounter in Alaudae offer a fascinating impression of a European’s perception of this island in the period of “Splendid Isolation”, the confident aloofness from the European continent that Great Britain cultivated at the zenith of Empire. It interests me that Ulrichs’ origins in Hanover–until the age of 12 his monarch was the same as Great Britain’s–seem to make no difference here: Britain remains to him an essentially strange, inexplicable place.

One thing Ulrichs is particularly intrigued by, albeit still quite uncomprehendingly, is the British love of sport. He is amused and bemused by the information that Arthur Balfour, the future British Prime Minister with whom Ulrichs exchanged letters, used to relax with a round of golf. Elsewhere Ulrichs observes how British sports had accompanied the British to far-flung colonies like New Zealand, but in the process he gets seriously confused between golf and another ball game played by the British home and colonial elites, lawn tennis.

Today, however, our concern is cricket.

In the penultimate issue of Alaudae from January 1895 Ulrichs published four Latin speeches by the long-serving Public Orator of Cambridge, John Edwin Sandys. He had been sent them by Sandys himself, and they were speeches marking honorary degrees bestowed upon significant individuals in the summers of 1893 and 1894. Sandys had in fact sent Ulrichs all twenty-one speeches he had delivered for honorands in ceremonies on June 13, 1893 and June 27, 1894, and from them Ulrichs selected four for the international readership of Alaudae. The first of these four, from June 1893, marked the award of an honorary LL.D. to the monarch of a princely state in India, the Maharajah Raol Sir Takhtsinhji Jaswantsinhji of Bhavnagar. Bhavnagar was located in the Kathiawar peninsula in north-western India and was one of many nominally independent princely states in India over which the British nevertheless exerted significant influence. Sandys’ Latin oration for the Maharajah can be found in The Academy, published four days later, and in Sandys’ collection of his Latin compositions for Cambridge, Orationes et epistolae Cantabrigienses,1876-1909 (Cambridge, 1910), p. 105—and will of course be available in Volume III of our edition.

But the speech as presented in Alaudae diverges somewhat from Sandys’ original. The last couple of sentences in Ulrichs’ version run as follows:

Juvat regem, de populo suo erudiendo tam praeclare meritum, titulo academico hodie decorare. Juvat etiam unum e popularibus eius inter alumnos nostros numerare.

I’ll hold off from a translation for a moment, but if you compare these two sentences in Alaudae with those in The Academy (above) and in Sandys (1910), you’ll notice that Ulrichs has missed out a bit. The full, original version reads, “It is our pleasure to adorn with an academic title a king who has registered such exceptional achievements in the education of his own people. It is our pleasure also to number among our students one of his fellow-countrymen who has distinguished himself in the game of the open field.” The underlined part, “in ludo campestri insignem” in Latin, is what has failed to make it into Ulrichs’ version. Now, Ulrichs had no qualms about abbreviating any Latin text he published. The finances of Alaudae were such that he had to be pretty ruthless to keep himself to his self-imposed length of, latterly, 16 pages per issue. This is in fact not the only part of Sandys’ speech for the Maharajah that he cut, but this omission was one that caused me no little difficulty when editing. Who was this fellow-countryman of the Maharajah, presented with no further identifying detail?

Consulting the Public Orator’s original proved to be something of a revelation, particularly with the notes Sandys helpfully provides in his 1910 collection. The Maharajah’s fellow-countryman “who has distinguished himself in the game of the open field” turned out to be quite a significant personage, the celebrated cricketer Ranjitsinhji, at the time of this ceremony a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in the cricket season of 1893 making his first major splash as an unorthodox and high-scoring batsman in the Cambridge University eleven.

Meanwhile “the game of the open field” was a way of expressing “cricket” in Latin favoured by Sandys whenever the need arose (and in Cambridge orations that was quite frequently: on pp. 88, 130, 143 and 225 of his 1910 collection, and there’s one example at least in a later collection of Sandys’ speeches and letters from 1909 to 1919). I should add that Sandys also uses “ludus campestris (or campester)” for polo and golf, but with suitable qualification. Thus he describes Pratap Singh, at the time Chief Minister of Jodhpur, as “in ludo campestri eques egregius”, “an outstanding horseman in the game of the open field” (p. 130), and credits the lawyer Robert Finlay with notable talent “ludi campestris Caledonici in certamine”, “in playing competitively the Scottish game of the open field” (p. 190). We can only imagine what he would have done with football or rugby.

Restoring those four words to the speech for the Maharajah and consulting Sandys’ explanatory footnotes doesn’t iron out all the difficulties, I should say. The phrase “unum e popularibus eius”, “one of [the Maharajah’s] fellow-countrymen” is tricky. “Popularis”, “belonging to the same country or people”, would most naturally imply that Ranjitsinhji was a subject of the Maharajah of Bhavnagar, but in fact he was from a separate princely state in Kathiawar, Navanagar–of which, furthermore, Ranjitsinhji would later become ruler. I don’t believe that Sandys would have allowed himself to confuse these two adjacent states, or for that matter that identifying a “popularis” in the broader sense of a “fellow-Indian” would have had any point as a conclusion of his speech. My preferred explanation is that Sandys perceives that Ranjitsinhji and the Maharajah shared a common origin in Rajput states in Kathiawar–and there was a certain cohesion between those states: both the Maharajah and Ranjitsinhji had attended the same school, for instance, Rajkumar College in Rajkot, a school established by the rulers of the Kathiawar states, with the encouragement of the British authorities, to educate the Kathiawar elite along the lines of British public schools. The Maharajah had in fact been its very first student. The phrase “unum e popularibus eius” thus perhaps means something like “one of his fellow Kathiawar Rajputs.” I am open to other explanations.

But it’s Ulrichs we’re really concerned with here. His version of the speech, lacking as it did “in ludo campestri insignem”, gave very little clue as to the identity of a student who was in Alaudae simply one of the Mahararajah’s fellow-countrymen. And it makes the speech fall rather flat as a consequence, I think. But it’s easy enough to explain why he left it out. Ulrichs found the British obsession with sports fascinating, but golf and tennis and cricket were never anything but a mystery to him, and “in ludo campestri insignem” might just as well have been in Russian. On Balfour’s love of golf Ulrichs had commented with some irony, “The road that leads to public glory seems mixed in your country with a wonderful kind of pleasure, a pleasure unknown to those mere mortals whom a harsher destiny has set down on this side of the English Channel.” Bemused by a politician playing golf, confused by multiple ball games played enthusiastically by the British on grass, and generally foxed by the British devotion to their eccentric leisure activities, Ulrichs thus simply omitted the great Ranjitsinhji from his newspaper.

Which I think you’ll agree just isn’t cricket.