by John Lazenby
It was no different for those who reported on it. The droll Pollock started a diary in an effort to make some sense out of the general morass, but gave it up in the end (‘It had too many libels in it, for one thing’). He had very few distinct memories of the 1939 season, he explained, other than that he knew war was coming any day: ‘That conviction was always uppermost in my head, dulling all else.’ His newspaper, the Daily Express, however, was still assuring its readers, even at this late hour, that there would be no war. Hutton remembered that, in the build-up to the season, ‘it took us all our time to keep back the dread thought of approaching war’. Yet, playing at The Parks in early May, with ‘the beautiful old trees as serene as ever’ and the sun shining, he was suddenly overtaken by the notion that perhaps all his fears were exaggerated. ‘Our minds see-sawed between hope and doubt,’ he wrote.
West Indies toured England that summer, after an absence of six years, and brought a much-needed dusting of Caribbean magic to the sombre mood. The last time the countries met, in the winter of 1934–35, West Indies had claimed their first series triumph against England, 2–1; no one would be underestimating them. The self-taught George Headley was a batsman to rival Bradman and Hammond, while Learie Constantine, at the age of 37, remained the most dexterously gifted all-rounder in the world: a wonderfully inventive, unorthodox batsman and a dangerous fast bowler, who cunningly adapted his pace as he grew older and could turn his hand to wrist or finger-spin. He was probably the greatest fielder the game has known – the Australians nicknamed him ‘Electric Heels’ – and he captivated crowds wherever he played. ‘Anyone who ever watched him will recall with delight his particular parlour trick,’ Wisden wrote. ‘When a ball from him was played into the field, he would turn and walk back towards his mark: the fieldsman would throw the ball at his back, “Connie” would keep walking and, without appearing to look, turn his arm and catch the ball between his shoulder blades. No one, so far as can be ascertained, ever saw him miss.’1
The weather was bitterly cold during the early weeks of the season and a snow storm interrupted a West Indies’ practice session, shortly after their arrival. ‘The snow amazed one or two members of the side, who had never seen it before,’ Hammond wrote. Not surprisingly they made an indifferent start, losing heavily in their first game against Worcestershire, where it was a battle just to stay warm, let alone keep a rampaging Reg Perks at bay; the England fast bowler returned match figures of 11 for 75. Further defeats quickly followed against Surrey and Glamorgan. However, the visitors perked up as the temperatures rose and, after a resounding victory over Middlesex by an innings and 228 runs, went into the first Test at Lord’s in late June with their confidence restored and with Headley and Constantine – the latter having performed handstands in the field against Middlesex to the delight of the spectators – in exultant form.
There were only five survivors from the timeless Test (Hammond, Hutton, Paynter, Verity and Wright) when the England selectors announced their team for Lord’s. The most conspicuous omission was undoubtedly that of Edrich. As Wisden commented: ‘There can surely be no parallel for a batsman failing in eight consecutive Tests and yet keeping his place, but one would expect that, when he had at last justified the selectors’ confidence, he would have retained it.’ Like all cricketers during the summer of 1939 Edrich felt its untold pressures – ‘Playing with one eye on the bowler and one on the sky for raiding German bombers was difficult’ – but he still managed to hit seven championship centuries, averaging close to 50, and ‘play some of the best cricket of his life’. Hardly surprising, either, that in such a vein of form he confessed to feeling as if he was somehow invisible to the selectors.
His biographer, Alan Hill, suggests that, ‘despite his revival, he was required to serve a season of penance’, though he does not elaborate further. As it transpired, of course, it would prove to be far longer than that. Writing in his autobiography Cricket Heritage, nine years later, Edrich concluded, ‘My final big score in South Africa had not been impressive enough alone, and plenty of runs in county games did not wipe out the accusation that had been so freely levelled that I had not got Test match temperament.’ Within a few months he would demonstrate that those accusations could not have been wider of the mark. Whatever Edrich may have lacked as a cricketer or a man, it was most certainly not temperament, nor nerve for that matter.
Ames was also missing from the team, but his absence was more straightforward. In May, after being advised by his doctor that his back would not stand the strain of keeping wicket on a regular basis, he took the decision to put away the gloves and concentrate exclusively on his batting. ‘By that time it was becoming pretty hard work to combine the two jobs,’ he admitted. Gibb might have been the selectors’ first choice to take over behind the stumps had he not chosen to take a year off. Farnes’s appearances were limited by his teaching commitments and responsibilities as a housemaster at Worksop College, and he played only eight first-class games that summer. Valentine, meanwhile, continued to flourish as one of the most attractive batsmen on the circuit, yet seemed destined to never play a Test in England.
The Test matches were allotted only three days and Hammond, despite his strong resistance to long drawn-out cricket, did not approve. ‘It is almost impossible to finish a game between international teams in three days,’ he insisted (he might have added that it could not always be done in ten days either), ‘and the tendency of the victor is to then play for a draw once a Test has been won. This undoubtedly spoils cricket.’
Nonetheless, some 55,000 people passed through the turnstiles at Lord’s, the Test generated four centuries and any number of scintillating strokes, before England wrapped it up by eight wickets with 35 minutes to spare on the final day. Despite the tourists’ defeat, the game was a personal triumph for Headley: the batsman, dubbed ‘The Black Bradman’, scored a century in each innings to repeat the trick he performed against England at Georgetown in 1930. His legion of faithful admirers back home in Jamaica conversely referred to Bradman as ‘The White Headley’ – a clever juxtaposition and one that, in the view of Wisden, amounted to a pardonable exaggeration. Hutton, though, marvelled at much of Headley’s strokemaking and revealed that he had never seen a batsman play the ball so late (not even Bradman) nor with such freedom. Denis Compton, having wintered with Arsenal, hit 120 on his return to Test cricket and put on 248 for the fourth wicket with Hutton, who scored 196 just three days after celebrating his 23rd birthday.
The weather was miserable throughout and, for the second time in three months, England found themselves concluding a Test match to the ominous rumble and crackle of thunder – a sound that, on this occasion, was heavy with symbolism. The threat of encroaching war was impossible to avoid. The slogan ‘National Service – have you offered yours?’ confronted crowds on the hoardings as they made their way to Lord’s; inside the ground they were faced with the variation, ‘National Service – are you playing?’ Hammond was called on during the Test to make several appeals for men to volunteer; on other occasions, music rang out over the loudspeakers for the crowd’s entertainment – the first time anyone could remember that happening at Lord’s. It was far from normal service.
The weather turned decidedly sour again for the second Test in Manchester over 22–25 July and cheerless temperatures, rain and bad light, unforgiving even by Old Trafford’s standards, reduced play to barely two full days. ‘Only heroes would come to Old Trafford in an English summer,’ Hammond remarked. And plenty of them did, as it turned out. The England captain had to make more appeals for volunteers, this time from an RAF van inside the ground, recruiting, in his own words, ‘young men against the dark future’. Inevitably the game fizzled out in a predictable draw. Yet, despite the paucity of cricket, the public’s hunger for the game remained ravenous and as many as 28,000 showed up during the three days, including 11,000 on the Saturday who waited patiently in the cold and rain when only 64 balls were bowled.
During August Far
nes returned for Essex in the County Championship, and a compelling case could have been made for his inclusion in the final Test of the summer at The Oval. He had kept himself extremely fit during the school term, bowling in the nets whenever the opportunity arose. He also appeared for the Gentlemen against the Players at Lord’s in July. An elemental force of nature at his best, this was a fixture that rarely failed to stir his blood. He was distinctly quick in the Players’ first innings, ripping out three batsmen in just six balls to capture five for 78 from 19 overs. In seven games for his county he picked up a further 33 wickets, including five in an innings on three occasions, and completed a hat-trick – the only one of his first-class career – against Nottinghamshire in the penultimate round of championship matches before the start of the Second World War. Raw pace, as Robertson-Glasgow reaffirmed in Wisden, was a priceless commodity, and in his ‘Notes on the 1939 Season’ he lamented the fact there was not a bowler in English cricket ‘to cause the wicketkeeper’s gloves to go off like a paper bag, or the spectators to suck in the long-drawn breath’. He added that, ‘There was one, ‘K. Farnes, of Essex. But he was a full-time schoolmaster, and had betaken his art at half-pace to the practice nets.’
Farnes’s late burst of form did not propel him back into the England team, and Worcestershire’s Perks was summoned to The Oval instead. Once again the in-form Edrich and Ames – the latter scored the fastest century of the season against Surrey in 67 minutes – had failed to sway the selectors. More surprisingly, Paynter and Verity, the batting and bowling mainstays in South Africa, were left out. The MCC party to tour India that winter had already been named, though no one expected them to travel. It was not even remotely close to full-strength, and therefore hardly representative. Hammond, Yardley and Valentine among others had declined invitations, and Jack Holmes, England’s manager in South Africa, would captain a side that included Hugh Bartlett.
The Oval might easily have passed for a fortress when the third Test got under way on Saturday, 19 August. There were barrage balloons overhead – ‘silvery shapes of cruel omen’, as Constantine graphically described them – and an anti-aircraft gun mounted on a tractor. The players learned that the weapon was kept permanently on the move to deceive German spies into mistaking the city’s four guns for a greater battery. The Oval would later be requisitioned and adapted as a prisoner-of-war camp. The author Derek Birley pointed out that, according to some, its architectural style rendered it a natural choice for the role. During the game Constantine recollected seeing ‘hard and frightened faces; there was the drone of flying to be heard, unusual then in London; khaki and naval blue and a sprinkling of Air Force uniforms showed everywhere among the crowds’. But there was also glorious sunshine for once, and the runs gushed: 1,216 over three days. Hammond struck 138, his 22nd Test century to eclipse Bradman’s number, and Hutton ended the game with an undefeated 165, giving further notice of his ‘ripening greatness’, almost a year to the day since his world-record 364 against Australia at the same ground.
The highlight of the West Indies batting was a shimmering 79 from Constantine, an innings that had all the fanfare of a grand and final fling. The Trinidadian clattered 11 fours and a six off 92 balls from an attack that sadly lacked Verity’s guile and control. So spectacular was his hitting that at one point Hammond stationed nine men on the boundary, but still failed to stem the onslaught. Wisden, in particular, waxed lyrical: ‘He revolutionised all the recognised features of cricket and, surpassing Bradman in his amazing strokeplay, he was absolutely impudent. With an astonishing stroke off the back foot Constantine thumped Perks for six to the Vauxhall end – a very long carry. Seldom can there have been such a spread-eagled field with no slips . . .’ He was dismissed, attempting another soaring six off Perks; the ball climbed so high, Hammond recalled, that the wicketkeeper Arthur Wood, having tracked its trajectory all the way from his position behind the stumps, ended up almost catching it in the pavilion.
After trailing West Indies by 146 runs on the first innings, England easily played out a draw, reaching 366 for three to claim a series victory in the process. Hammond and Hutton put on 264 for the third wicket at 80 runs an hour, as if to give the crowd something golden to cherish before the curtain came down on Test cricket for seven years, and the lights went out. ‘Everyone knew the war was only weeks, or days, away,’ Hammond wrote. It was heady batting, and a crowd of almost 10,000 left The Oval yearning for more.
It was not to be. The following day, 23 August, Germany and Russia signed a non-aggression pact, in which the two countries agreed to undertake no military action against each other. The news landed with the shocking force of a bombshell, and left the door open for German troops to march into Poland unopposed. With the noose tightening around Warsaw and events unravelling at terrifying speed across Europe, the pragmatic decision was taken to cancel the remaining four matches of the West Indies tour. Four days later the party sailed from Greenock for Montreal on the SS Montrose, declining Sussex’s plea to play their match and ‘keep the flag flying’; the two teams were scheduled to meet at Hove over three days, starting on 26 August. The waters were already infested with U-boats, and Howat makes the point that had West Indies relented they might have boarded the next ship, the SS Athenia, which was torpedoed in the Atlantic without warning on 3 September2.
Sussex and Yorkshire contested the last County Championship game of the 1939 season at Hove on 30 August–1 September. The stumps had been pulled early in the two remaining fixtures between Lancashire and Surrey at The Oval, and Leicestershire and Derbyshire at Aylestone Road, Leicester, but at Hove the decision was taken to play on. The championship had maintained its hold on the public until the end and, despite the anticipation of war, there was no shortage of vigorous cricket or individual fulfilment.
In his retrospective on the season, written during the first few months of the war, Robertson-Glasgow concluded that many had turned to cricket as they would an old friend, one ‘who gives you a seat, a glass of beer, and something sane to talk about’. But the time for sanity was long passed, and the season had already acquired the glow of nostalgia; to look back on it was like ‘peeping curiously through the wrong end of a telescope at a very small but very happy world’, Robertson-Glasgow ventured. ‘It is a short six months since Constantine gave the England bowlers such a cracking at The Oval, like a strong man suddenly gone mad at fielding practice, but it might be six years, or sixteen; for we have jumped a dimension or two since then in both time and space.’
The denouement at Hove is remembered above all things for the bowling of Verity, whose figures of seven for nine from 48 balls delivered Yorkshire their 20th championship victory of the season, by nine wickets. Sussex had capitulated in their second innings for only 33 in the space of 11.3 overs. Their batsmen can be forgiven for having their minds on other matters, though that is not to take anything away from Verity: as ever he was immaculacy itself and obtained considerable turn from a wicket that was breaking up under a blazing sun. Yet he did not appear to derive any great satisfaction from his performance. Indeed, Alan Hill writes that he was ‘unusually subdued, not even offering the characteristic twinkle of a smile at his latest conquest’. Afterwards he could only wonder quietly ‘if I shall ever bowl here again’. Having predicted that war would come, and last for six years, his touching expression of doubt seemed almost to carry the weight of premonition.
Verity had arrived at the end of a remarkable run of form: against Kent at Dover, a week earlier, he captured match figures of nine for 80, and a few days later produced another significant haul, seven for 51, to rout Hampshire in Bournemouth. His nine for 117 during the Brighton and Hove Cricket Week took his tally of wickets for the season to 191 at 13.13 off 936 overs, and put him far and away at the head of the first-class bowling averages for the second time in his career. In the words of J. M. Kilburn, the polished correspondent of the Yorkshire Post, it was, despite the strident noises off, ‘cricket of uncommon quality’.
&
nbsp; Yorkshire had already sewn up their seventh championship title of the decade by the time they played Sussex, and their visit to Hove was no more than a simple case of applying the trimmings. Middlesex had kept them honest throughout, finishing as deserving runners-up, while Gloucestershire and Essex were third and fourth respectively. Hammond, in his first season as county captain, topped the first-class batting averages for the seventh successive year (2,479 runs at 63), just ahead of Hutton (2,883 at 62), and his leadership was singled out by Wisden for ‘setting a fashion in enterprising cricket and a spirit of adventure which made Gloucestershire second to none as an attraction’. In the summer of 1939, Edrich recalled, ‘the counties fought as hard and doggedly as ever, but feverishly. Cricketers are used to playing with one eye on the clock – but, that season, we were watching the remorseless hands of a bigger clock move towards the hour of destiny, and we knew it.’ That hour had already struck and, when Yorkshire’s Wilf Barber hit the winning runs at Hove on the afternoon of 1 September, German bombs were falling on Warsaw and the invasion of Poland had begun.
Understandably the spectators were reluctant to leave at the end of the game and, instead of drifting slowly home with their thoughts as they would normally have done, found any excuse to linger and talk. During the day’s play they had applauded politely though not wholeheartedly, as if they were watching yet not watching. In the pavilion, among the rows of deck chairs or around parked cars, where there was the constant crackle of wirelesses, war was the all-consuming topic and the figures on the field appeared almost ghostlike. ‘Lots of spectators bought scorecards as mementoes, probably thinking that this was the last cricket they would ever see,’ Hutton observed. ‘Friends crowded into the pavilion and both dressing-rooms to say goodbye.’ The journalist Pollock was among them. ‘Len Hutton, champion batsman of the year, was looking very pale and serious,’ he noted. ‘He won’t get his 3,000 runs for the season now.’
