CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD remembers English cricket’s 1945 resumption

In early April 1945, even while Hitler remained alive, directing phantom armies from his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery garden in Berlin, the impressively insouciant English cricket authorities decided it might be possible to stage a number of Test-level matches with Australia during the course of the summer.

The ensuing ‘Victory’ series presented its organisers with a significant feat of logistics. Many of England’s cricket grounds bore the scars of Luftwaffe bombing, while there was also the small matter of securing the services of eleven fit men to put into the field. Two of the nation’s leading prewar bowlers, Yorkshire’s Hedley Verity and Essex’s Ken Farnes, had fallen in action, while others had returned from years of captivity in far from ideal condition to play representative sport.

An especially poignant example was that of the repatriated 36-year-old Yorkshire player Bill Bowes. Tall and bespectacled, with a shock of wavy blond hair, the fast-bowling Bowes looked more like a gangling Nordic university professor (and, it was unkindly said, sometimes batted like one) than a professional sportsman. He represented his country 14 times before the war and just once afterwards, having lost over four stone in weight as a guest of the German Reich in the interim. Delaying his comeback until the middle of June 1945, Bowes managed to bowl nine overs for a Services team, following which he promptly left the field to be physically ill in the pavilion.

Later that month, we find him writing to the English selection panel, which had enquired about his availability for future matches against Australia, in a letter preserved in the archives at Lord’s:

Dear Sirs:
The weather up North has been so bad that last Saturday was the first time I have had a decent bowl – it was short, but I haven’t recovered yet – and even as I write it is again raining.

I met [fellow cricketer] Les Ames on Sunday, and if I had forgotten he refreshed my memory of those long Eng. v. Australia matches when he told me how tired he was after the first day. I feel tired now after only a few overs, and if I had to bowl again, and then again, well, quite frankly I do not yet feel equal to it …The doctors tell me that it is ridiculous of me to expect to get over a three-year period of under-nourishment in three months, so will you please consider me very doubtful for inclusion in any team?

Such was one example of the human cost of Hitler’s ruinous attempt to determine the matter of who might be allowed to live freely in Europe.

In the measured words of the 71-year-old Pelham ‘Plum’ Warner, the man primarily responsible for selecting the England team: “The project [of a 1945 series] seemed sound when initially advanced to me, but it proved harder to effect than ideal” – particularly at a time when such men had none of the benefits of our modern communications technology at their disposal. If Warner wanted to correspond with someone like Bill Bowes about a matter such as their availability to play cricket for England, he did so by writing them a letter, putting it in an envelope, affixing a stamp, taking it to the nearest pillar box and then awaiting developments. “It was not a task I [had] undertaken in the full awareness of the actual burden it might present,” Warner was later to ruefully admit.

Not the least of the matters demanding Warner’s attention in April 1945 was the question of who might captain England in the hastily arranged series with Australia. The peerless Walter Hammond had been the man in charge for his side’s last Test fixture before the war, a drawn match against the West Indies at the Oval. Hammond himself was clearly the best batsman England had produced since the Jack Hobbs era of twenty years earlier. Yet doubts about his fitness to ‘continue to assume the high honour of the England Test Match captaincy’, as The Times put it, remained. Hammond was then nearly 42, somewhere between muscular and heavyset, a chain smoker and a martyr to lumbago, with a love life that attracted a certain amount of what passed for tabloid scrutiny in those more reticent times. He had joined the RAF on the outbreak of hostilities, but in the event found himself playing a good deal of sport, and occasionally training new recruits, rather than assuming any more active role in Hitler’s downfall, while also coming to resolve a complicated home life that led to the terse Press Association report: “A decree was granted to Mrs. Dorothy Hammond, wife of the England star. Misconduct was alleged with a woman named Harvey.”

Hammond was perhaps fortunate, even so, to enjoy Pelham Warner’s unstinting respect and friendship, which had something of a father-son quality to it. In that elaborately formal age, when even routine business letters tended to open with phrases such as “Sir, I have the honour to state that consideration has been given to the matter of your application for overdraft facilities at this institution …,” and were topped-and-tailed either by the use of precise titles, or merely by surnames, the Warner-Hammond correspondence preserved at Lord’s is invariably of the ‘Dear Wally’ and ‘Yours ever, Plum’ variety.

Like Warner (the youngest of 21 children born to the-then 67-year-old Attorney General of Trinidad, where he, Plum, spent his early years) Hammond had grown up abroad. His father, a corporal with the Royal Artillery who seems to have been of the opinion that children should be brought up in mild fear of their parents, was posted successively to Hong Kong and Malta. The family returned to England just before the First World War, and Walter, an only child, was sent to boarding school. His father was killed fighting in France in 1918, and his mother seems to have been more concerned with her social status than in the daily welfare of her young son. She handed him over to tutors during the school holidays, starved him of love, and on the occasions they did meet beat him regularly. It’s surely not stretching psychology too far to conclude that this upbringing turned Hammond into something of a loner and a bully, “a dreadful little shit” as he admitted years later to a younger colleague, none of which should in the least detract from a proper acknowledgement of his obvious skills as a magnificent all-round cricketer.

After seventeen years as a professional player, Hammond had turned amateur in 1938, largely because this was then thought to be the proper status befitting England’s national cricket captain. The move gave him the curious distinction of leading out the notionally unpaid ‘Gentlemen’ in their annual grudge match against the more horny-handed ‘Players’ at Lord’s, having done the honours for the Players in an earlier fixture. But even someone as well versed in the nuances of the British class system as Hammond could perhaps mistake widespread respect for his sporting skills for broader social acceptance. Cricket has a way of finding the truth about people, and the evidence suggests that although the incumbent England skipper might look, behave and sound not unlike a proper gentleman, that did not necessarily mean that he would be universally treated as one. Hammond was and remained, in the blunt terminology of the day, ‘in trade.’ Walter Robins, a Lord’s grandee whose own personal charm came equipped with a sensitive on-off switch, once referred to him as “a jumped-up car salesman,” while the Clifton and Cambridge-educated Basil Allen, Hammond’s predecessor as captain of Gloucestershire, was on ground well beyond that when he spoke of his dislike of a “moody bugger” who took “no interest in other people’s lives unless they happened to be pretty girls.”

The author David Foot quotes an exchange of views on the subject between Allen and Pelham Warner while seated together at a match at Lord’s: “Basil, that Wally Hammond of yours really is a wonderful chap, isn’t he?” “If you want my honest opinion, Plum, I think he’s an absolute shit.”

Nonetheless, Hammond would duly return to lead England in the five Victory matches against Australia in the summer of 1945. The series was eventually tied two-all, with one draw, and huge crowds flocked to each of the 15 days’ cricket despite the generally atrocious weather. Hammond himself finished with a total of 396 runs, scored at an average of 46 that most modern players would kill for. It says something for his technical prowess that certain critics would interpret even those figures as evidence of his waning powers. A lesser batsman would consider them highly creditable, and of the century the England captain scored in the series’ second match, at Sheffield, the Wisden correspondent wrote: “The finest game of the season was memorable for a wonderful hundred by Hammond on the opening day, when the pitch was at its worst. He never neglected a scoring opportunity.”

The 18-year-old batting prodigy John Dewes was one of a trio of hitherto unknown schoolboy cricketers, alongside Donald Carr and the Honourable Luke White (always so rendered on the scorecards of the day), who to some surprise – including their own – found themselves asked to represent England in the summer’s third international fixture, played at Lord’s. Forty years later, Dewes remembered what had happened after he and his fellow debutants were summoned by the captain to join him at the White City dog-racing track late on the Saturday evening of the match.

“’When we got there,’ Dewes recalled,

“…we all sat down to a meal in the stadium, which was packed like Wembley on Cup Final day, the skipper at one end of the table, one or two others in the middle, and the three new boys down at the end. It was a bit like being back at school again. Then the racing itself began. From then on for the rest of the night we were basically Hammond’s runners. ‘Dewes!’ he’d call out. ‘Put a quid on dog number 5 for me.’ I’d walk up, collect the pound from the skipper, go to the window, pass it over, then go back and hand Hammond the slip. His dog didn’t win. Next race it was the same thing, only this time the skipper shouted: ‘Carr! Put this down on number 4,’ or whatever it was. And Carr did that. Hammond kept that up for about six races, alternating between the two of us, I might add with never a winner among them, and then on the final heat he shouted out ‘Mr. White!’ as if just now remembering his name. And Luke White said ‘Yes, sir?,’ went up, took the skipper’s money, passed it through the window for him, and trotted back with the slip. Still no joy for old Wally.

‘I suppose we could have objected,’ Dewes continued. ‘After all, putting money down on the greyhounds had nothing to do with our duties as Test cricketers. It would probably qualify as a sackable offence by modern standards. But that’s how it was in those days. I should say that like everyone else I admired Hammond the cricketer to the ends of the earth. He was one of the true giants of the game. But he could also be pretty snooty to those he deemed to be small fry, including some of his own teammates.

It’s a strange thought that while he and his fellow countrymen were playing representative cricket, the great Australian all-rounder Keith Miller was also still an on-call RAAF pilot attached to 169 Squadron at RAF Great Massingham that summer. There were rumours as late as the middle of July that his unit would be deployed to Burma to help fight the Japanese, and in the meantime, like other sportsmen-warriors, he continued to lead an almost clinically schizophrenic double life between the cricket field and the cockpit of a Mosquito fighter-bomber, dispatched on reconnaissance missions at the pleasure of the squadron’s commanding officer, Wing Commander Neville Reeves. In time, Reeves came to find his admiration for his famous subordinate’s undoubted coolness under fire tempered by certain reservations about his relaxed approach to military discipline, while Miller in turn found his CO tiresomely “tight-arsed.”

One untypically warm and dry afternoon in late July, Reeves ordered an unimpressed Miller aloft on a training flight, while, as if to rub salt into the wound, he took several of the other men under his command to practice in some cricket nets set up just off the end of the base’s main runway. Soon enough, Miller’s green-and-white camouflaged Mosquito appeared overhead. It did not go unnoticed by his colleagues on the ground that the plane’s starboard engine appeared to be on fire, and that thick clouds of smoke were pouring past the fuselage. There had been a mechanical malfunction of some sort, and now the plane spiraled down at a sickeningly steep angle for what seemed from the ground to spell certain doom for both Miller and his navigator, who were already far too low to bail out. ‘It looked like curtains for them both,’ Reeves later confirmed.

Back in the base’s control tower, Miller’s unmistakable voice came over the intercom. ‘I’m sorry, boys,’ he announced evenly, ‘but the plane’s buggered.’ As if in illustration, a few seconds later the Mosquito ploughed into a field just opposite the nets, its port wing shearing off in a ball of fire when it hit a steel fence post. Emergency vehicles raced to the scene, with Wing Commander Reeves at the head of an animated posse of men in cricket whites following close behind. By some twist of fortune, both the plane’s occupants were able to hurriedly unstrap themselves and walk away from the burning aircraft seconds before its fuel tanks exploded in a spectacular plume of jet-black smoke, with shards of twisted metal and bursts of sparks shooting up like an early fifth of November firework display. Wiping the grime from his face, Miller looked at the flannel-clad airmen gathered anxiously around him, nodded back to the smoking wreckage of his plane, and remarked casually, “Nearly stumps drawn that time, gents, I think.”

The Australian team left England in the middle of September that year in order to continue their progress homeward by way of a further series of matches in modern-day India and Pakistan. The actual results of their English tour, impressive enough in themselves, were perhaps of secondary importance to the part the whole venture played in bringing a semblance of normal life back to a public so hungry for its resumption. The tourists’ manager, Keith Johnson, caught some of the essential mood of the occasion when it came time to pay tribute to his team’s hosts. “I would like to say thank you to the cricket administrators, the cricketers and above all to the great cricketing public of Britain,” he remarked. “The matches this season will always be a pleasant memory to us, and if we have in any way contributed to the rehabilitation of the English way of life, then it was our honour and our pleasure to do so.”

Walter Hammond himself retired from cricket after a generally unhappy final tour of Australia over the winter of 1946-47, and in time emigrated with his second wife to South Africa. The popular consensus on him was that of a dazzling youthful talent – deemed by one critic to be the ‘Nijinsky of cricket’, almost spoilt by fortune – who later bloated in his Durban exile like Elvis Presley at Graceland. It’s a caricature, if one with a grain of truth. In February 1965, the England cricket team was playing a Test match down the coast at Port Elizabeth, and happily agreed to pass round the hat in order to take their old skipper out to dinner. In recent years, Hammond had both lost his job in the motor trade and been involved in a serious car crash, events that possibly served to further darken a personality already prone to the choleric.

The England wicketkeeper John Murray remembered:

We got to the hotel and there was Wally waiting for us. Everyone said a cheery hello and we told him we just had to nip in to another room to shake some hands, but that we’d be right out again and on our way to a slap-up meal. When we got back fifteen minutes later, Wally was gone. He left a note behind. It said he’d never been so insulted in all his life by our behaviour in making him wait for us. “I am a former captain of England, and you buggers have dishonoured the office” was the gist of it. He died just a few months later. All very sad.

Walter Hammond was just 62 at the time he suffered a fatal heart attack in July 1965. It may be unfair to judge him from a modern perspective in which it’s no longer fashionable to admire reticence, not to mention a certain hauteur, in our sporting heroes. But there were periods in the 1930s when Hammond was the complete cricketer, a batting genius who on his day was also a useful seam bowler and an electrifying slip fielder who once held 78 catches in a season, ten of them in a single match. He was beyond doubt the man best qualified to lead England in the series that did so much to restore a sense of sane, normal life in that summer of 1945. I continue to think of him as one of the nation’s greatest ever sportsmen, if also as a man who sometimes struggled to make taking an interest in lesser mortals seem less of an obvious burden.