Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Village cricketers kept going as best they could, hampered though they were by a shortage of players. With husky young batsmen and bowlers gone away to fight, teams tended to consist of veterans and schoolboys, although servicemen posted nearby could sometimes be drafted in to stiffen the ranks, and the Home Guard might furnish opposition. Lack of transport put a constraint on inter-village matches, and often a horse-drawn wagon was the only means of travelling to away fixtures. Scarcity of fuel also meant that outfields became more like hayfields, unless a horse-powered gang mower could be dragged out of retirement. Many grounds, rented from farmers, were not improved when the owners turned sheep or cattle onto them – and cowpats seemed to attract the ball like magnets. Players had some lucky escapes. At Bettisfield, a village in North Wales, a gang of boys had just drawn stumps after a game and gone to a nearby farmhouse for refreshments when a Spitfire in extremis came past at ground level, hit a bank and crash-landed in flames, killing the pilot instantly, on the field on which they had been playing.

  For all their difficulties, players remained cheerful – like the farmer in Kent who, when his barn was destroyed by a doodlebug, remarked, ‘Thank God it wasn’t the square!’ But some clubs, like that of Penn Street in Buckinghamshire and Gotham in the Midlands, had to close down for the duration because their fields had been requisitioned, the first for an army camp, the second for growing corn; and at Goldhanger, on the Blackwater Estuary in Essex, a searchlight unit took up residence on the square itself: its brilliant blue-white beams were so powerful that when they came on, it was possible to read newspapers anywhere in the village. Desecration of the pitch was bad enough; but a far longer-lasting loss was inflicted on the community when the fine old elms in The Avenue were felled to produce timber for the war effort.

  Golf also carried on – but games could be hazardous, as Luftwaffe pilots amused themselves by spraying courses with machine-gun bullets on their way home: on 15 September 1940 a Dornier 17 was shot down by a Spitfire onto the course at Barnehurst, in Kent.

  Taking place in the open, golf was a relatively safe occupation, as players could scatter in all directions and take cover in bunkers if an air attack threatened – and at least one Luftwaffe pilot made a positive contribution to a club’s facilities. On a clear evening in the autumn of 1940 a formation of German aircraft jettisoned ninety incendiary and high-explosive bombs on and around the Berkshire village of Sunningdale. One of these blew a large crater beside the eighteenth green of the Old Course, damaging the clubhouse and almost putting paid to James Sheridan, the fearless caddie-master, who had dived for shelter into a bunker nearby. Rather than fill the hole in, someone had the idea of shaping it into two new bunkers, and so made the approach to the green far more challenging. Throughout the war the Old Course was maintained as far as limited manpower and resources would allow, but military training on the New Course caused serious damage, and so much restoration work was needed when peace returned that no formal reopening could take place until 1950.

  Few clubs can have been as unlucky as the one at Newark, in Nottinghamshire. In 1939 the committee let the first nine holes of its course to a neighbouring farmer for grazing – a move which annoyed members so much that thirty-one of them (a sixth of the total) resigned. Then in January 1943 the local War Ag ordered the club to plough up the land – about seventy acres – for corn production. Members of the committee and a few co-opted members did what they could to maintain the remaining half of the course, mowing the greens themselves, and in the clubhouse the stewardess, Miss Robb, was instructed to conserve stocks by restricting sales of gin and whisky to half a bottle of each per week. All members were shocked when a Stirling bomber crashed onto the course on the night of 14 January 1945, killing five of the seven-man crew; but somehow the club struggled through and survived the war.

  Other celebrated clubs fared even less well. At St Andrews in Fife, where golf had been played for over 500 years (except when banned in 1457 by King James II, who thought that young men were giving too much time to the game, and not enough to archery practice), the Open Championship was abandoned between 1940 and 1945 because the fairways of the Old Course were being used as runways by the RAF. At Worcester Golf Club, in contrast, a fine crop of peas was grown on the fairway.

  One activity which achieved huge new popularity during the war was bicycle racing. Until then the sport in Britain had been crippled by the reactionary attitude of the National Cyclists’ Union, which had refused to allow races on roads until 1921, and even after that banned mass starts. When war broke out, and petrol rationing cleared the highways of most motor traffic, Percy Stallard, who had ridden for England in international events and was known as ‘the father of cycling’, strongly advocated that racing should be allowed on public roads. Getting no satisfaction, he took matters into his own hands and in July 1942 organized a mass-start race of fifty-nine miles from Llangollen (in North Wales) to his home town of Wolverhampton.

  He was acting in defiance of the rules, but secured the permission of every Chief Constable through whose territory the race would pass, arguing that, with scarcely any cars on the road, this was an ideal time for such an event. The NCU attempted to strike back by suspending him in advance, but he carried on regardless. The race went off without incident; forty riders started, fifteen completed the course and more than a thousand people watched the finish, at which the crowd was kept back by a cordon consisting of the Chief Constable of Wolverhampton, an inspector, a sergeant and fifteen uniformed policemen. The event raised £105 for the Forces’ Comfort Fund. Reacting furiously once again, the NCU banned not only the organizer but also his assistants and the riders who had taken part.

  A prickly character, and never one to admit defeat, Stallard responded by helping to create a new group, the British League of Racing Cyclists, whose first stage race was held over three days in Kent in 1944, on circuits round Tonbridge, and was interrupted by a spectacular interlude:

  During a ‘red alert’ warning all the spectators disappeared and the villages were absolutely deserted. The field of twenty-four riders were hammering along when two of our planes came in sight in hot pursuit of a doodle-bug. They flew parallel with the riders before banging away at the flying bomb and shooting it down into some woods. The next time the riders came through the village, the main street was again packed with cheering crowds, for the all-clear had been sounded.

  Another athlete whose career (and life) were cut short by the war was Prince Alexander Obolensky, a meteor among rugby players, whose parents had fled from Russia during the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. After school in Derbyshire he went to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read PPE, and his exceptional pace gained him a place in the University XV as a wing three-quarter. His exotic background, good looks and attractive personality earned him a reputation for extravagance – he was said to breakfast on oysters and champagne.

  On his first appearance for England at the age of nineteen, at Twickenham on 4 January 1936, when the home team won their first-ever victory over the All Blacks, he scored two tries, the second after an astonishing, diagonal, right-to-left run three-quarters of the length of the field, with one devastating change of direction, described by a sports writer as ‘a stupendous exhibition of the hypotenuse in rugby’. ‘Obolensky’s try’ became the most famous in the game’s history. Later that year he won three more caps for England, toured with the British Lions in Argentina, and from 1937 to 1939 played for the Barbarians. In 1939 he joined the Auxiliary Air Force, and on the outbreak of war went into the RAF as a pilot officer and was posted to 504 Squadron; but on 29 March 1940 – the day after he had been recalled by England for the match against Wales – he was killed when his Hurricane crashed as it tipped into a hollow while landing at Martlesham Heath in Suffolk.

  After a brief interval caused by the ban on public gatherings, horse racing started again with a meeting at Newmarket in October; but the resumption was not universally popular. In June 1940 uncharitable questions were
asked in the House of Commons. Did not racing take up much-needed transport? Spectators heading for meetings burnt up scarce petrol or occupied seats on packed trains. Was racing not a vast waste of money? Was it not tarnished by its seediness and its aristocratic overtones?

  Like many other racecourses, Epsom was requisitioned by the military, so on 12 June 1940 the Derby was held at Newmarket – and in the words of the racing historian Roger Mortimer, ‘The most extraordinary thing about the 1940 Derby was that it took place at all, coinciding as it did with the disintegration of the French resistance and the evacuation … of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk.’ The fact that the race was run, he concluded, was either ‘a tribute to national imperturbability’ or ‘a deplorable example of sheer lack of imagination combined with a refusal to face unpleasant facts’. What he did not mention was that the event had been preceded by a fierce debate among Ministers, four of whom spoke strongly in favour of ordering the Jockey Club stewards to cancel the race. It was saved by the intervention of Tom Williams, then Joint Parliamentary Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, who argued that cancellation would be a grave psychological error, in that it would disappoint many thousands of racegoers.

  For the rest of the war the Derby was held at Newmarket, with part of the course unfenced, and the horses running across the open heath. The 1941 race had a stormy passage. The original plan was to run it at Epsom, but in March it was announced that the event would be held at Newbury. There, however, the Town Council and Chief Constable objected to the plan, and the race was moved to Newmarket, where it was run at 2 p.m. on 14 June, a fine, hot day. Petrol rationing notwithstanding, the crowd was enormous; there were traffic jams on the road from London, and some of the punters, frustrated by delay at the turnstiles, stormed one of the gates.

  Afterwards more complaints were made in Parliament and in the newspapers about the waste of fuel, manpower and time – but, as Roger Mortimer pointed out, ‘Racing … in the minds of the more spiteful critics, was the sport of the rich, and therefore a suitable target’, whereas ‘the dogs’ and football were ‘the pastimes of “the people” and therefore immune from attack’. The fact that William Nevett, the jockey who rode Owen Tudor to victory in the Derby, was serving as a private in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps went some way towards stifling complaints – but it did nothing to appease George Orwell, who wrote in his diary on 25 April 1941:

  There are said to be still 2,000 racehorses in England, each of which will be eating 10–15 lbs of grain a day. i.e. these brutes are devouring every day the equivalent of the bread ration of a division of troops.

  Disappointment, rather than a riot, was the distinguishing feature of the 1942 Derby, again run at Newmarket. Thousands of supporters hoped that the outstanding colt Big Game, leased to the King by the National Stud, would be the winner. The King – who recognized the importance of maintaining bloodstock lines, and knew how much racing meant to the public – had been having a miraculous season. Big Game had won the 2,000 Guineas, and next day the King’s filly Sun Chariot (the favourite) had carried off the 1,000 Guineas. Then, on 12 June, his staff having skilfully arranged an agricultural tour of Cambridgeshire to mask his travel costs, he was able to watch Sun Chariot win the Oaks at 4-1, and, after a night spent aboard the royal train in a convenient tunnel, to be present for the Derby, wearing Field Marshal’s uniform and accompanied by the Queen. Alas, royal hopes were dashed: Big Game started favourite at 6-4 on, but faded badly and came sixth.

  Many other meetings were abandoned, as racecourses were requisitioned for military purposes or ploughed up for agriculture. Among those taken over by the Government was Newbury, which had been used as a prisoner-of-war camp in 1914–18, and now became a US Army supply depot.

  The 1940 Grand National was held at Aintree, as usual; but Flight Sergeant Mervyn Jones, who rode the winner, Bogskar, had been given special leave to take part, and many of the crowd were in uniform. In 1941 Aintree became an American military base, and no further races took place there until 1946.

  In 1940 the National Hunt meeting at Cheltenham was restricted to two days, and part of the course had been ploughed. The Gold Cup was won by Roman Hackle, owned by one of racing’s most recognizable characters, Miss Dorothy Paget. Described by Roger Mortimer as ‘a unique and remarkable personality’, the second daughter of Lord Queensborough was then in her thirties, and owned Golden Miller, the only horse to have won both the Gold Cup and the Grand National. ‘Her appearance was distinctive,’ wrote Mortimer, ‘and no one could ever have accused her of being a slave to fashion.’

  Stout and ungainly, she invariably wore a blue felt hat and a long blue coat that eventually terminated within easy reach of her ankles. Her face, large, round and pallid, was framed in hair that was dark and austerely straight. She had a disconcertingly retentive memory, a sound knowledge of bloodstock breeding, and she habitually betted in very large sums indeed.

  Miss Paget lived a reclusive existence at her home in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, where she kept unconventional hours and ate prodigiously, and she was prone to explosive outbursts of temper. But she poured huge amounts of money into National Hunt racing, and gave the sport a much-needed shot in the arm.

  The Gold Cup took place again at Cheltenham in 1941 and 1942, but in 1942 there was an extraordinary finish. At the last open ditch the two leading horses both fell, and Red Rower, who was lying third, almost toppled over them. He recovered, but was overtaken by Medoc II, who won by eight lengths.

  In September that year the Government declined to sanction National Hunt racing during the next season, and steeplechasing did not start again until January 1945. Then, with war news better, the Gold Cup, run at a one-day meeting on 17 March, attracted an immense crowd, in spite of petrol shortages and the general difficulty of travel. The race was won by Red Rower, who had clearly forgotten his earlier setback. By then only three other courses – Windsor, Wetherby and Catterick – were in use, and of the seventy-nine courses licensed by the National Hunt Committee, only forty-seven remained. Some were resuscitated, but sixteen, including those at Aldershot, Derby, Totnes and Gatwick, never opened again.

  Greyhound racing also came under attack from politicians. On 13 June 1940 the persistent critic Glenvil Hall, MP for Colne Valley, asked Sir John Anderson, Secretary of State for Home Affairs: ‘Is the Right Hon. Gentleman aware that this afternoon 30,000 or 40,000 people are attending dog race meetings, at a time when Paris is fighting for its very life?’ Another MP, Mrs Tate, echoed him: ‘In Oxford Street yesterday there were boards chalked with details of Derby betting, and alongside of them another saying, “Paris a besieged city”. Does not that offend against public decency?’ Anderson said he recognized the strength of feeling on the matter, but added: ‘It is necessary to give consideration to the forms of relaxation available to the workers.’

  For most people, fancying horses and dogs did not offend against public decency. The Government maintained, and most people felt, that a certain amount of frivolity must be allowed to ease the stress of war, and that racing was therefore not only acceptable, but positively beneficial. Yet Hall persisted. In another question he asked:

  Is the Hon. Gentleman aware that many of these racing greyhounds are fed upon brown bread, whole meal, eggs, fresh meat, brandy and many other things, amounting to many hundreds of tons per year, and does he not think it is grossly unfair that foodstuffs should be wasted in that way while poultry keepers, for example in my own division, cannot get supplies?

  Hall’s vapourings were in vain, for greyhound racing was immensely popular: Mass Observation calculated that during 1939 twenty-two million people passed through the turnstiles at dog tracks, and enthusiasm continued unabated throughout the war, especially among night workers, who, having slept when they came off shift in the morning, could relax at meetings in the afternoon.

  Football also flourished throughout the war. Millions of punters filled in their Unity football coupons every week, hopin
g to win the maximum prize of £11,000 for an investment of one penny, and big matches attracted enormous crowds – 85,000 for the League South Cup Final at Wembley in 1944, and full houses of more than 140,000 for Scotland v. England games at Hampden Park, Glasgow. The great Stanley Matthews was a magnetic attraction wherever he appeared, whether for the RAF (which he joined in 1940 as a physical training instructor), the England wartime team, or his own club, Stoke City. Young Tom Finney – for many fans the most magical dribbler of all time – was called up into the Royal Armoured Corps and fought in Egypt and Italy before returning to make his debut for Preston in 1946. Matt Busby, who played for Liverpool, took charge of a British Army team sent out to raise the morale of troops in Italy.

  One admirable feature of wartime sport and games was that they raised large amounts of money for charities. In 1943 the Duke of Gloucester, President of the joint Red Cross and St John fund, announced that since the inception of the fund in 1939 sport had already generated the splendid sum of £1,000,000 (£50,000,000 in today’s values). Indoor activities were by far the biggest moneymakers. A combination of whist, bridge and dancing contributed £365,000; next came billiards, with £80,000, then darts and bowls (£72,000). Outdoors, football produced £70,000, golf £67,000, greyhound racing £50,000, and cricket £22,000.

  No one reacted more vigorously to the vexations of war than Richmond Golf Club, which produced a new set of temporary rules:

  Players are asked to collect Bomb and Shrapnel splinters to save these causing damage to the Mowing Machines.

  In Competitions, during gunfire, or while bombs are falling, players may take cover without penalty for ceasing play.

  The positions of known delayed-action bombs are marked by red and white flags, at reasonably, but not guaranteed, safe distance therefrom.