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The Nobel winner who played cricket in India
Indo-Asian News Service

London, Oct 13 (IANS) British playwright Harold Pinter, who won the 2005 Nobel Prize for literature Thursday, was the chairman of the Gaities Cricket Club, a wandering side that toured India in 1996-97 and played matches at Delhi, Agra, Mumbai, Jaipur and Udaipur. 

The club's players are mainly drawn from theatre and the arts. It was founded in 1937 by Musichall artist Lupino Lane, whose company was then based at the Gaiety Theatre here. 

After his death, the club was captained by his son Lauri Lupino Lane who was later succeeded by Harold Pinter in 1972. 

The Gaiety Theatre has now been demolished, but a plaque marks its site in the Strand and the cricket club continues to thrive.

One of Pinter's best-known cricket poems was published in the Guardian in June 1995: 

"Cricket at Night"

They are still playing cricket at night
They are playing the game in the dark
They're on guard for a backlash of light
They are losing the ball at long leg
They are trying to learn how the dark
Helps the yorker knock back the off-peg

They are trying to find a new trick
Where the ball moves to darkness from light
They're determined to paint the scene black
But a blackness compounded by white
They are dying to pass a new law 
Where blindness is deemed to be sight

They are still playing cricket at night

Pinter also held strong views on politics.

Michael Billington, author of "The Life and Work of Harold Pinter," writes: "Pinter remains to his credit, a permanent public nuisance, a questioner of accepted truths, both in life and art. In fact the two persistently inter-act." 

When US-led hostilities in Iraq began in 1993, Pinter wrote:

"God Bless America"

Here they go again, 

The Yanks in their armoured parade 
Chanting their ballads of joy 
As they gallop across the big world 
Praising America's God. 

The gutters are clogged with the dead 
The ones who couldn't join in 
The others refusing to sing 
The ones who are losing their voice 
The ones who've forgotten the tune. 

The riders have whips which cut. 
Your head rolls onto the sand 
Your head is a pool in the dirt 
Your head is a stain in the dust 
Your eyes have gone out and your nose 
Sniffs only the pong of the dead 
And all the dead air is alive 
With the smell of America's God.