by Mayukh Ghosh
Cricket during the second world war has been recorded and written about by many of the eminent writers on the game.
The first piece in Stephen Chalke’s The Way It Was dealt with the summer of 1946 and how cricket began after the war.
Much later, Chalke wrote a long piece on cricket during the second world war, and it was published in Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2010.
Chalke’s writing is hard to match and hence the pieces created a greater impression than some of the books devoted to this subject.
There have been good books, though.
Eric Midwinter’s The Lost Seasons was published in the late 1980s. Midwinter’s father suffered badly during the war and his son, later becoming a social historian, always had a strong opinion on those six years.
In 1994, Ian Wooward wrote his slim but very informative volume Cricket Not War about the Victory Tests.
A decade and a half later, Mark Rowe wrote The Victory Tests. He met some of the Australian airmen who were in Britain in Bomber Command in the 1939-45 war, including some of the Victory Test Australians.
And now, another ten years later, we have perhaps the most comprehensive book on cricket during World War II. Its writer, John Broom, too has a story to share about the writing of the book.
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“The roots for this book can be traced back to my father.
“He was born in 1916 and as a boy would go down to Castle Park in Colchester whenever Essex were playing there to watch the likes of Ken Farnes, Stan Nichols and Peter Smith during festival week.
“As a young man during the war, he served with the Royal Army Medical Corps in North Africa, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany.
“I was born in 1970 and knew little of his youthful and early adult activities. What I was brought up with, however, was a deep love of cricket. Test Match Special on Radio 3 long wave was the soundtrack of our summers, with the television on but the sound turned down. Sunday afternoons meant a pleasant John Player League encounter with commentary by Jim Laker and Peter Walker.
“Each August, we – my mother, father and I – would travel to Scarborough to watch the cricket festival. I would keenly collect the autographs of county and Test players. My eagle-eyed parents would also spot former greats of the game enjoying the festival cricket, so my old books are adorned with the likes of Bill Bowes, Len Hutton and Norman Yardley. Had the war turned out differently, perhaps the name of Hedley Verity would have been written therein too.
“As a youth I devoured cricket biographies – less so of contemporary players of the 1980s – but the 1930s fascinated me. I read up everything I could about the Bodyline series and wrote to several players who had taken part in that controversial series. I still treasure replies I received from Les Ames, Bob Wyatt, Gubby Allen and Harold Larwood. I wanted to write newspaper articles and books about cricket, but life took a different path.
“My father died in 1991, taking the memories of his wartime years to his grave, or so I thought. It had never felt right to dig too deeply into the subject of his past life. People of his generation did not at that time speak too much about their war experiences. Those memories were better internalised, left in the desert sands or the Normandy bocage.
“I continued my love of cricket and developed a career teaching history in schools. Inside the desire still persisted to want to contribute something lasting to the world, to write something worthwhile. But I could never quite work out what that should be.
“A chance find in 2006 changed all that. I was given a collection of 170 of my father’s wartime letters and other wartime memorabilia that had been found in the house of a distant relative. His eloquence, deeply-held Christian beliefs and assertive take on life fell of every page of his precisely written prose.
“It was as if he had spoken to me from beyond the grave. I had been given this information to achieve something worthwhile. There was now a purpose to my reading and research. I returned to part-time academic study and was awarded a PhD by the University of Durham for my thesis on Christian Culture in the British Armed Services during the Second World War. I was then fortunate to be commissioned to write books on various aspects of twentieth century war and culture.
“This was all very satisfying but that boyhood dream of writing something about cricket which would be published and read by fellow cricket lovers remain unfulfilled.
“Then in 2019, my interest in the contemporary game having waned somewhat due to its removal from terrestrial television in the UK, I sat down to watch the World Cup Final between England and New Zealand. The gripping ebbs and flows of that match need no repeating, but after its finale I knew that something special had happened. The reaction of Kane Williamson, the defeated captain, in its understated decency and nobility reminded me of the Second World War veterans I had been fortunate enough to meet during my doctoral research, and of the numerous stoic responses to adversity I had read about.
“Losing a cricket match can never come close to the tragedy of war. But a lightbulb suddenly switched in my head and I hammered out a book proposal on my laptop which brought together my two areas of deep passion and longstanding reading and research.
“So Cricket in the Second World War: The Grim Test was born. It all seemed to fit. There was no book in cricket’s rich and extensive literature solely devoted to covering the game’s myriad aspects around the world. There were fine books on certain aspects of wartime cricket, such as Eric Midwinter’s The Lost Seasons and Mark Rowe’s The Victory Tests, but on the whole the period had been glossed over in the game’s historiography.
“As mentioned above, I had read extensively about 1930s cricket as a teenager. On reflection, my knowledge of the game seemed to have a pause button pressed in 1939, with things only picking up again with Hammond’s ill-fated tour of Australia in 1946-7 and Bradman’s Invincibles. The lives of those greater and lesser names of the 1930s had not been paused though. They had been thrown into the maelstrom of global conflict. Cricket had stopped, so I thought, with a few inconsequential service matches taking place in the wartime years. However, once I started reading through the pages of wartime editions of The Cricketer, going through the chapters of the wartime years in cricket memoirs and biographies and delving into online and private archives, the richness of the game in Britain and across the globe shone through.
“Sadly, but serendipitously, the bulk of the book was written during the Covid lockdowns of 2020-21. Sadly because I was unable to visit the various archives across the country that I had planned to. Serendipitously as the lockdown removed the need for a three-hour daily commute to work and curtailed most of my other leisure activities, thus affording greater time for reading and writing.
“What also shone through during the writing of the book was the generosity and enthusiasm of the cricket world. Cricket twitter was a mine of contacts, of information, of well-wishers and of deep love of the game. I was also fortunate to make contact with people whose family members had shone in wartime cricket, such as Harry Crabtree, and who were perhaps unaware of the significance of their relatives’ contributions to the sustenance of the game.
“Never one to leave a stone unturned, I sought out the eminent cricket historian David Frith to provide a foreword for the book. This was with some trepidation. He has written about cricket with erudition and a trenchant passion for several decades. As a youth I used to read avidly his Wisden Cricket Monthly magazine and several of his books. I need not have worried. He could not have been more encouraging.
“The 50-year-old me looked back on the 15-year-old me, the boy who loved reading about cricket now being gifted the opportunity to write something about it. Not only authoring a book about the game, but one about the period with which he had become immersed through the unexpected connection with his father’s youthful self. It all seemed to fit.
“Whatever comes next in terms of research and writing, this book stretches across the decades for me. Back to the 1970s and 80s when we watched cricket on the television as a family, and my father took me to the final day of a certain Test Match at Headingley in 1981. Back to the 1940s when he had carried a copy of E.V. Lucas’s The Hambledon Men across North Africa in pursuit of Rommel and his Afrika Korps. And back to the boy who had watched the Essex heroes of the 20s and 30s in Colchester Festival weeks.
“My father came back from the war to continue his love of cricket and to pass it on to me. One of those players he so admired as a youth, the inestimable Ken Farnes, famously did not.
“It is an honour to have written a book which draws together those threads and serves as a testament to the stoic souls who endured The Grim Test.”
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A meticulously researched book that should be read by everyone with an interest in the history of the game.
The final line of David Frith’s charming little foreword says it all: “John Broom has done a very fine job of gathering material for this book. His researches have stretched across a wide landscape. If any reader is failed to be moved by the drama and poignancy here, it will not be the author’s fault.”