Login
0
The Cricketers of Summer 1939
The declaration of war against Germany on 3 September 1939 brought an end to the second (and as yet, final) Golden Age of English cricket. Over 200 first-class English players signed up to fight in that first year; 52 never came back. In many ways, the summer of 1939 was the end of innocence. Using unpublished letters, diaries and memoirs, Christopher Sandford recreates that last summer, looking at men like George Macaulay, who took a wicket with his first ball in Test cricket but was struck down while serving with the RAF in 1940; Maurice Turnbull, the England all-rounder who fell during the Normandy landings; and Hedley Verity, who still holds cricketing records, but who died in the invasion of Sicily. Few English cricket teams began their first post-war season without holding memorial ceremonies for the men they had lost: The Final Innings pays homage not only to these men, but to the lost innocence, heroism and human endurance of the age.
The accomplished Sandford orders his material with sensitivity and relates his terrible tale with elegance and dignity. Yet such is the nature of the catastrophe of 1914 that the horror seeps through every page. It is a work of genuine significance.
13th March, 2017 in Military
Even in the early morning gloom and wrapped in a heavy overcoat, Ted Palmer recognised the man who came in out of the London rain for his first day’s work at a new office as a ‘Parisian dresser’, and, at least by repute, already established as his department’s most ‘active, intel…
17th December, 2015 in Military, Sport
Today, many biographers, historians and film-makers have a chilling certainty in the correctness of their judgments on the First World War. It wasn’t only an appalling tragicomedy in its making, they agree, but for the poor front-line soldier life in the trenches was one of unrel…
