Cricket and the English Hero

Clare Balding continues her investigation into how sport shaped Britain and Britain shaped sport. In this weeks programmes she looks at how sport unites us all when we get behind out national teams and no more so, than when the character of that team can be personified by one person. If there's one sport that embodies Englishness, it's cricket and in this programme she looks at how and why W.G.Grace, in the nineteenth century and Jack Hobbs, in the twentieth, became the epitome of a national sporting hero. Clare visits Lords Cricket ground and the Oval to discover more. She also talks to Professor Richard Holt from The International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University, Simon Rae, a biographer of W.G.Grace and broadcaster David Rayvern Allen. The readers are:Jo Munro and Brian Bowles. The programme is produced in Birmingham by Garth Brameld.

You can listen to Cricket and the English Hero online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Cricket and the English Hero is an episode from Sport and the British by BBC.

This episode is 13:17 long.

This episode was published on Feb 20, 2012.

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