Deep Backward Point

Henry Kelly in the Irish Times traces the great Ranjitsinhji’s Irish connection:

A few years ago while on holiday in Connemara, I spent an afternoon with Martin Halloran, then the last surviving member of Ranji’s staff at Ballynahinch. [..]

Martin remembers hearing [of Ranji’s death] with sadness and disbelief. “You’d meet people on the road crying their eyes out and we even convinced ourselves that he’d died on April 1st and one of the men said he was still alive and it was just his idea of an April Fool’s joke”.

Ranji never married, though Martin told me with a wink: “He always had a nurse with him”.

Great stuff.