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Commonwealth War Graves Commission Playing the Game - Cricket and the Two World Wars During the two world wars cricketers from all over the world redirected their sporting energies and passion towards the war effort. A huge number of them were never to return. Cricket in the First World War On the outbreak of war in 1914 hundreds of amateurs playing county cricket who held commissions in the Territorial Army joined their regiments, while many professional cricketers had enlisted as volunteers before it was decided, as late as January 1915 that the following summer’s Championship matches would not go ahead. The buildings at Lord’s, Old Trafford, Trent Bridge and the county grounds of Derbyshire and Leicestershire were given over to accommodation for army units and military hospitals, while many cricket clubs turned their grounds over to agricultural use to aid the war effort. Balls Park in Hertford remained a hayfield until 1920. Cricket and the Second World War The Second World War began just as the 1939 cricket season was ending. Lord’s was requisitioned by the War Office and taken over by the RAF, and there were to be no more Test or county matches until 1946. MCC, however, continued to stage one-day games at the ground throughout the war, raising money for charities such as the Red Cross. There was drama at Lord’s in 1940 when, during the Blitz, the ground was hit by a thousand-pound bomb which failed to explode but left a massive crater on the outfield at the Nursery End. Then in July 1944 a Makeshift cricket ball made from ‘doodlebug’ threatened to come down somewhere near where the crater string by Allied Prisoners of War had been. It eventually landed in the vicinity of nearby London Zoo. Cricket at Shell Green, Gallipoli, 1915. Major George Macarthur Onslow of the Australian Light Horse (batting) being caught out. Shells were passing overhead all the time the game was in progress. The game was an attempt to distract the Turks from the imminent departure of allied troops At Lord’s, MCC employees assisted outside their working hours, together with a few of the Club’s members, by making eighteen thousand hay-nets for horses. Despite the war, cricket managed to continue in the form of contests between army regiments and other service units at both The Oval and Lord’s, and the latter also staged public-school matches as well as, later A barrage balloon at Lord’s, 1940 in the war, many charity matches between representative services sides The Oval was also commandeered by the War Office and prepared for which featured some of the game’s leading figures. use as a prisoner-of-war camp for German parachutists, with wire cages erected on the playing area. No prisoners ever arrived, however, and British troops on the Western Front did their best to organize a cricket when the threat of an invasion diminished, the ground was used as an match of sorts whenever they could. In his celebrated biography anti-aircraft gun-site, then as a barrage-balloon and searchlight base, and Goodbye To All That, the poet Robert Graves describes a game, in which finally as an assault course. he top-scored with 24, between officers and serjeants at Vermelles in France on 24 June 1915, in an enclosed space which concealed them from the enemy’s sight. The equipment was improvised, the wicket being a bird-cage with a dead parrot inside. Machine-gun fire aimed by Cricketers who served and died in the the Germans at a British aeroplane ended the match prematurely, the two world wars bullets dropping dangerously from a great height. In each of the two wars the most distinguished cricketer to die was a A few months later there was another battlefield cricket match, this time slow-left-arm bowler – Colin Blythe and Hedley Verity, respectively. in a different theatre of war, which looms large in Australian folklore. There were other coincidences, too, for they were both 38 years old and The bat of Sjt. K. Piggott, Their troops played a major role in the ill-fated campaign against Turkey were conspicuously decent, modest men who attracted universal respect RAMC, 1917. Sent out to on the Gallipoli Peninsula which ended with the gradual withdrawal of all and popularity. But not every cricketer who lost their life in the world him by Mr Lottinga of MCC Allied troops by night over several weeks, elaborate steps being taken to wars was as famous as Verity or Blythe. it was involved in "an conceal from the enemy what was happening. One distraction took the unpleasant incident of bomb- form of a cricket match staged by the Australians, in full view of the In 1899, at the age of 13, Arthur Edward Jeune Collins scored 628 not dropping" and never used. A Turks and with shells passing overhead, to present an appearance of out in a house match at Clifton College, which remains the highest replacement was sent! normality and a continuing presence, whereas the reality was that individual score ever recorded anywhere in the world. It was not a thousands of men were being evacuated from the beach every night. prelude to sporting greatness, however, for on leaving school he embarked on a career in the regular army, and as a captain in Albert Cotter (Australia) the Royal Engineers met his death in the First Battle of Ypres Genuinely fast, and Australia’s leading bowler of his on 11 November 1914. He is commemorated on the Menin day – he took 89 wickets in 21 Tests at an average of Gate Memorial to the Missing, Belgium. 28.64 – ‘Tibby’ Cotter toured England in 1905 and 1909. His overall career tally in first-class cricket was Another case of what might have been is that of Norman 442 wickets at 24.27. While serving in Palestine as a Frank Callaway, who is the only player to have scored a stretcher-bearer in the 12th Australian Light Horse, double-century in his only innings in first-class cricket. The Trooper Cotter, whose brother John had been killed First World War denied him the chance to build on that in France 27 days earlier, died on 31 October 1917 at spectacular start with New South Wales, and he was killed the age of 33. When using his periscope in the while serving with the 19th Australian Infantry Battalion on 3 trenches, he raised his head above the parapet in May 1917. He is commemorated on the Villers-Bretonneux order to obtain a clearer view with the naked eye Above: Hedley Verity’s England Cap Memorial to the Missing, France. and was instantly killed by a sniper. He is buried in Beersheba War Cemetery, Israel. The Test Roll of Honour Twenty-one of the hundreds of first-class cricketers lost in the two World Wars were Test players. Nine of them played for England, nine for South Africa, two for Australia and one for New Zealand. That the list is dominated by players from three countries is explained by the fact that no other nation was Denis Andrew Robert Moloney (New Zealand) granted Test status until 1928 and that, of the 274 Tests played ‘Sonny’ Moloney was a bespectacled all-rounder whose three Test appearances, in which he before the Second World War, only 42 had involved countries averaged 26 with the bat, came during the New Zealanders’ 1937 tour to England. In all first- other than England, Australia and South Africa. class matches on the tour he scored 1,463 runs, average of 34.83, took 57 wickets with his medium-pace bowling at an average of 26.68, and fielded with distinction. He was wounded and taken prisoner during the First Battle of El Alamein while serving as a Colin Blythe (England) lieutenant in the 20th Battalion, New Zealand Armoured Regiment, and died in captivity on 15 July 1942, aged 31. Originally buried by the Germans, his body was reinterred some months The period leading up to 1914 is often referred to as cricket’s later in El Alamein War Cemetery, Egypt. Golden Age, and the Kent and England left-arm spinner Colin ‘Charlie’ Blythe (in the painting, left) was one of its greatest players. His career record in first-class cricket was phenomenal – 2,503 wickets at an average of 16.81 – and 17 of those wickets were taken in a single day when he destroyed Northamptonshire with figures of 10 for 30 and 7 for 18. In 19 Reginald Oscar Schwarz (South Africa) Tests he took exactly 100 wickets at 18.63, and only a nervous The status of South African cricket received a dramatic boost in disposition and a susceptibility to epileptic fits prevented him the Edwardian era through the success of a quartet of googly from representing his country on many more occasions. bowlers, the pioneering member of which was the modest and retiring Reggie Schwarz. He was born in England and capped as a Despite his delicate constitution, Blythe enlisted in August rugby-union player before going to South Africa. In 20 Test 1914, attained the rank of serjeant and in September 1917, matches he took 55 wickets at 25.76, and altogether in first-class while on attachment to the 12th Battalion, King’s Own cricket 398 wickets at 17.58. Yorkshire Light Infantry, went out to face the horrors of the Battle of Passchendaele as an engineer working on a military He began his First World War service in German South-West railway line.