Peter Cranmer was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 sportsman who captained Warwickshire

Warwickshire County Cricket Club

Warwickshire County Cricket Club is one of the 18 major county clubs which make up the English and Welsh domestic cricket structure, representing the historic county of Warwickshire. Its limited overs team is called the Warwickshire Bears. Their kit colours are black and gold and the shirt sponsor...

 in first-class cricket

First-class cricket

First-class cricket is a class of cricket that consists of matches of three or more days' scheduled duration, that are between two sides of eleven players and are officially adjudged first-class by virtue of the standard of the competing teams...

 and earlier in his career represented England at rugby union

Rugby union

Rugby union, often simply referred to as rugby, is a full contact team sport which originated in England in the early 19th century. One of the two codes of rugby football, it is based on running with the ball in hand...

. After World War II he gave up on rugby and focused purely on cricket.

Cricket

While primarily a specialist batsman, Cranmer was also a decent medium pace bowler. His highest score at first-class level was made for Warwickshire in his first year, an innings of 113 versus Northamptonshire at Edgbaston.

Cranmer, a Major, served with the military during the war and spent time in both Burma and Egypt. He ended up at India in 1944 and appeared in a cricket match for the Europeans team. Cranmer also performed particularly well with the ball in a first-class match for the Bengal Governor's XI when he took 7 for 52 against Services XI at Eden Gardens.

He had been appointed captain of Warwickshire in 1938 and remained in the role until 1947 before he retired, citing business commitments. One of his final innings as captain was in a match against the touring South Africans when he made 101 runs.

Rugby

Cranmer was capped for England 16 times and took part in their Triple Crown winning Home Nations Championship campaigns of 1934 and 1937. A centre three-quarter, he also captained his country twice. In 1936 he was a member of the English team which defeated New Zealand for the first time and helped to set up Alexander Obolensky

Alexander Obolensky

Prince Alexander Sergeevich Obolensky was a Russian Rurikid prince and an international rugby union footballer who played for England. He was popularly known as just "The Prince" by many sports fans.-Biography:...

's famous tries.

Later life

After leaving cricket, Cranmer became a journalist and worked with BBC Midlands. He commentated on two Test Matches for Test Match Special

Test Match Special

Test Match Special is a British radio programme covering professional cricket, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 , Five Live Sports Extra and the internet to the United Kingdom and the rest of the world...

, one in 1965 and one in 1968. Illness caused him to retire from his job in 1976 and he began to use a wheelchair when he had both legs amputated. He died in 1994 at his home town of Peacehaven

Peacehaven

Peacehaven is a town and civil parish in the Lewes district of East Sussex, England. It is located above the chalk cliffs of the South Downs approximately six miles east of Brighton city centre, on the A259 road...

, Sussex

Sussex

Sussex , from the Old English Sūþsēaxe , is an historic county in South East England corresponding roughly in area to the ancient Kingdom of Sussex. It is bounded on the north by Surrey, east by Kent, south by the English Channel, and west by Hampshire, and is divided for local government into West...

.