Wisden tribute to fallen cricketers of first world war

[Ajaxer]

p200

CAPT FITZWILLIAM BARTELT (Somerset Light Infantry) died in hospital in Calcutta on September 11, 1916, aged 28. He was in the Bath College XI in 1903 and 1904.

Friedrich (Fritz) Wilhelm Bartelt, sometimes spelt Bartlett, was from a Prussian family and it appears that because of this he was posted away from the main war zone. He died from food poisoning and his body was repatriated. He is buried at All Saints, Corston, Somerset, where his father presented a peal of eight bells in 1917 in his memory on condition that they be rung every year on September 23, his birthday.

Anyone near enough to hear the bells tomorrow?

[David_Underdown]

I won't be in earshot. However, if it's succesful a report will appear here http://www.bb.ringingworld.co.uk/search.php?place=corston in the next few days. You're probably already aware that he's named on the 4th Battalion SLI memorial in Bath Abbey (photo here https://www.flickr.com/photos/13706945@N00/14985530739/in/photolist-oQdLcD/, and some more details in the comments).

There were barely any new bells cast during the war, so a full ring of 8 in 1917 is really quite unusual. I've been trawling through the wartime issues of The Ringing World for my research, I don't recall seeing Corston mentioned (but I'm only up to September. I can have a quick look to see if there is a report of them being hung and opened, this list http://www.cccbr.org.uk/felstead/tbid.php?tid=1319 shows that the first peal on the bells was 30 December 1918, there will be a report of that which may give additional info.

[Ajaxer]

Colin Blythe, well loved cricketer, was killed on this day in 1917, aged 38.

He was an epileptic and was often unfit to play for England, but fit to die for his country.

Wisden said: "The loss is the most serious that cricket has sustained during the war."

No better man could represent all the cricketers who gave their lives for freedom, as we honour their memory.

[Ajaxer]

Colin Blythe bowling at Canterbury 1906

[Fattyowls]

Not forgotten

Pete.

[The Scorer]

I've come across another 1914 themed cricket book.

This is "The Final Over - The Cricketers of Summer 1914" by Christopher Sandford. This is a review from The History Press:

"August 1914 brought an end to the ‘Golden Age’ of English cricket. At least 210 professional cricketers (out of a total of 278 registered) signed up to fight, of whom thirty-four were killed. However, that period and those men were far more than merely statistics: here we follow in intimate detail not only the cricketers of that fateful last summer before the war, but also the simple pleasures and daily struggles of their family lives and the whole fabric of English social life as it existed on the eve of that cataclysm: the First World War. With unprecedented access to personal and war diaries, and other papers, Sandford expertly recounts the stories of such greats as Hon. Lionel Tennyson, as he moves virtually overnight from the round of Chelsea and Mayfair parties into the front line at the Marne; the violin-playing bowler Colin Blythe, who asked to be moved up to a front-line unit at Passchendaele, following the death in action of his brother, with tragic consequences; and the widely popular Hampshire amateur player Robert Jesson, whose sometimes comic, frequently horrific and always enthralling experiences of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign are vividly brought to life. The Final Over is undoubtedly a gripping, moving and fully human account of this most poignant summer of the twentieth century, both on and off the field of play."

It sounds like a good book, although the figures in the review seem to be very low when compared to those quoted above in post 146.

Be that as it may, has anyone read this book and, if they have, would they recommend it, please? Thank you.

I've just finished this, and I thought that it is a good book.

It's the story of the 1914 season, and as the reviewer above says, traces the players who featured in a big way and a small way during the season. Whilst doing so, the author then gives details of each one's war service, if they died where this was, and if they survived what happened to them after the war. The book also contains the story of some of the cricketers who were household names but too old to serve (e.g. Dr W G Grace) and who died during the war.

There is quite a bit of repetition in terms of when some of the players died, but I think that this is pretty well unavoidable given that the players in question were heavily involved in cricket in 1914.

The author credits Captain Daniel George Harold Auckinleck of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers with the "honour" of being the first cricketer in alphabetical terms to be commemorated by Wisden. Captain Auckinleck, who played for Winchester in 1894 and 1895, was killed in action on 21st October 1914. The paragraph ends with the comment that there would be 1,684 more obituaries before the end of the war.

Finally, there is an appendix which gives a select list of cricketers killed in the war. This includes twelve Test Cricketers, including Colin Blythe (England), Tibby Cotter of Australia and Reggie Schwartz of South Africa. The second part of the list is of First Class Cricketers killed, and numbers 228 in total. This list includes a lot of people who didn't have a long career; for example Lord Bernard Gordon-Lennox is included on the strength of his one match for Middlesex. There are, though, others who did have a long career and were pretty well known, e.g. the Hampshire pair of Arthur Jaques and Robert Jesson.

It's worth reading if you can get hold of a copy!

[Ajaxer]

You may want to read this review of Sandford's book.

The appendix is simply the list scraped from Wiki. It is incomplete.

The review is generous to my book.

You will have to make your mind up about Sandford's research.

He tells a lot of good stories, but that is what many of them are: stories.

http://www.cricketweb.net/cricketbooks/9194.php

Book Review

The Final Over: The Cricketers of Summer 1914

Published: 2014

Pages: 256

Author: Christopher Sandford

Publisher: The History Press

Rating: 1.5 stars

By Martin Chandler

18 Oct 2014

One of the most extraordinary things about the Great War which started 100 years ago is that no-one saw it coming. The political agenda in the summer of 1914 was conflated with the suffragettes, strikes and the Irish problem. There was so much noise at home that the bullets at Sarajevo were hardly heard above the din.

So it's a surprise to be told that in May 1914 at the annual meeting of the MCC - where surely the people who were running the country gathered - Lord Hawke set out plans for fixtures with the public schools "in the event of war". These are Christopher Sandford's words at the start of a chapter headed "Midsummer". He then expands on his lordship's exact words.

But no plans were being made "in the event of war" in May 1914. Sandford has taken the words from the MCC's AGM a year later in 1915 when the war had been raging for nine months. It is perhaps the most egregious of the mistakes that litter this book, although there is no lack of choice.

Sandford quotes from Wisden throughout the book. But sometimes this just compounds Wisden's errors. He begins by noting that the first entry alphabetically in the obituaries of the 1915 Wisden is Capt D. G. H. Auckinleck. However, thanks to Andrew Renshaw's magnum opus Wisden on the Great War (WOTGW), we know that Wisden misspelt his name and it should be Auchinleck.

One of the first men to die chronologically was Arthur Hughes-Onslow, within a fortnight of the outbreak of war, although he is not mentioned until page 179. We are told he "suffered a heart attack and died while riding his horse up the gangway to the troop ship waiting to take them to France". This is extra detail to his Wisden obituary which says he was taken "fatally ill" on the ship. But WOTGW explains that "fatally ill" was a euphemism which obscured the fact that he shot himself.

It's a suicide that eluded David Frith - but one that did not, was Somerset's Percy Hardy who cut his throat in a lavatory at King's Cross station. According to Sandford: "By all accounts, Hardy was a loner: married but childless." But not by Frith's account: he says Hardy left behind a widow and two children, 11-year-old Frederick and Winifred, aged nine. He pondered: "What torment might he have felt at leaving May and the children to their fate?"

Sandford is a fine writer and the subject matter is fascinating, but this book is discursive, disjointed and sometimes repetitive. For example, the death of Geoffrey Davies, who scored a hundred for Essex in the county's final match before the season was suspended, is covered on page 90 and again on page 176. His description is firstly "tall and lean" and later "tall and slim".

Musing on the Essex men who fell, Sandford states: "If Hampshire held the unenviable record of losing more men in the war than any other county, Essex almost certainly came in next on the list." That "almost certainly" is not only lazy but plain wrong: Essex lost six men who had played First Class cricket, which puts the county well down the list. Sandford states: "Kent lost a total of twelve players during the war." The number is eight. Essex and Kent are among the eleven counties whose losses were in single figures and contradict his comment: "No county club lost fewer than ten men."

Another misleading statement is the assertion: "Not surprisingly, all the counties lost money during the war." Ironically, the fact was that the lack of cricket during the war, bringing cost savings not least in wages, allied to the continuing support of members, rescued some counties that in 1914 were teetering on bankruptcy. Worcestershire held a meeting in the very week that war was declared to consider a committee recommendation that the club be wound up. Fortunately an amendment was carried to soldier on, after members heard that four counties had agreed to contribute GBP20 for two years, and others had responded positively. Members also dipped into their own pockets to guarantee further amounts. Two years later, the annual meeting was told: "The accounts showed a balance of GBP419, this being the most satisfactory report in the history of the club." Somerset reported: "So generous was the support given by members in 1916 that the committee reduced the club's debt to GBP112, which sum they hope to clear off." Middlesex said in 1916: "The accounts for the year were entirely satisfactory, a surplus of GBP243 being added to the same sum brought forward from 1915." Other counties found themselves in a similar happy financial position.

Sandford mentions Harold "Foster" in passing without giving Forster credit for being the most decorated first-class cricketer with two DSOs and two MCs; the index compounds the error by muddling him with H. K. Foster.

It may be that Sandford does better with those who survived the war: they are less easy to check. But while he correctly says that reports of the death of the former Rugby schoolboy John Poole were premature, he states "he ended his life as an ostrich farmer in Rhodesia". In fact, Jack Poole left Rhodesia in 1929 - we're unsure about the ostriches - joined the diplomatic service in Sudan, and in due course, after being captured while fighting a rearguard action at Calais in May 1940, endured five years in PoW camps where he became a valued member of escape committees. His very full and extraordinary life, which merits half a dozen pages in Renshaw's book, finally ended in 1966, some fifty years after his Wisden obituary.

Sandford says that Robert Shaw, whose two brothers were killed, "survived the war, played cricket for Hampshire and the Combined Services, and died in his bed in England at the age of 95". He did not play for Hampshire.

He tells a nice tale of a match at Lord's in July 1918 between an Australian XI and the Church and refers to the "fast bowling of a young Barnet divinity student named Wilfrid Lord". He adds, quite unnecessarily and wrongly: "He was never heard of as a cricketer again." You only have to open Who's Who of Cricketers or click on Cricket Archive to discover he played a couple of First Class matches for Middlesex in 1919 and also that summer in a little known, but First Class, game for Demobilised Officers (so he had been in the forces) against Army and Navy. He played a lot of his cricket at Lord's - was he a relation? - and we find him again on Cricket Archive playing a second eleven game in 1924 for Sussex at Hove, where he died in 1960. It only takes a modicum of research to hear of him as a cricketer again.

Another survivor, Lionel Tennyson, provides a common thread as Sandford quotes throughout from his war diaries, and these are of interest, albeit Tennyson tells the story of his war at some length in From Verse to Worse and some of that material is replicated in Alan Edwards's excellent biography, Regency Buck.

Fans of Colin Blythe, another man who makes many appearances in the book, may be less happy with the portrait Sandford paints of him. The popular conception of cricket's most high-profile casualty is that he was much loved by players and spectators alike. Sandford lumps him with the slow left-arm awkward squad which includes, in his book, the likes of Phil Edmonds, Phil Tufnell and Monty Panesar. It's surely pertinent to explain he suffered from epilepsy, which meant that sometimes he was not fit enough to play for his country, although he was considered fit enough to die for it.

Some things in the book merely irritate, like "the two Charles, Fry and Mead" or the reference to the "town" of Norwich, a slur on that fine city. But at the end of the book is a ten-page appendix described as "a select list of those cricketers who fell in the war". This is simply scraped, word for word, fact for fact, from the list on Wikipedia. "The publisher would be glad to hear of any names to be included in future editions of the book."

One wonders if they will turn to Wisden on the Great War and copy the well-researched list that is supplied there by Steve Western. That book, as we have said before, should inspire others to go and dig even deeper into the stories of the men whose memory it perpetuates. It's a pity that Sandford did not have it to hand when he was writing The Final Over, because he really needed to do some more research.

[The Scorer]

Thanks for posting this review, which is interesting.

I wasn't aware of the number of mistakes, although as I read through the book, I was (as I said earlier|) aware of the duplications. I did think when I posted the information on the list that it wasn't correct, but I had no way of knowing how incorrect it is. It's disappointing that a new book contains so many errors, especially ones that could have been checked and corrected fairly easily.

[Ajaxer]

A nice accolade from the Guardian in its review of best sport books of 2014:

"Edited by Andrew Renshaw, Wisden on the Great War (John Wisden) is the cricketing equivalent of a Commonwealth war cemetery: page after page of cricketing lives lost between 1914 and 1918.

"Not just the 1,788 casualties whose obituaries appeared in the celebrated Almanack during the war, but many others whose stories subsequently came to light.

"Read it and weep at the sense of waste."

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/03/best-sport-books-2014

[The Scorer]

That sounds great. Seen a "cycling" VC in the Ashcroft collection yesterday. The chap rode for a team still racing the roads of the west county. I can't say I found any "cricket" VCs mentioned.

PM Will be sent later as off to lunch with the outlaws

Do you still want a copy of the cycling articles in this booklet, please?

If so, PM me with your e-mail address, and I'll send it on.

Thanks.

[rugbyremembers]

Pete,

Would it be possible to get a hires copy of the Turner/Kendall pic as above? They feature in a new book I'm writing about rugby/WW1.

Source will be credited. My email address is in my profile, methinks. Cheers

Stephen

[Fattyowls]

Pete,

Would it be possible to get a hires copy of the Turner/Kendall pic as above? They feature in a new book I'm writing about rugby/WW1.

Source will be credited. My email address is in my profile, methinks. Cheers

Stephen

Stephen, it will be my pleasure. The photo was actually taken by my old friend Kevin McDonnell who is a season ticket holder at Gloucester; I am sure he will be thrilled. I'll try and locate your email address and send it over.

Pete.

[rugbyremembers]

Stephen, it will be my pleasure. The photo was actually taken by my old friend Kevin McDonnell who is a season ticket holder at Gloucester; I am sure he will be thrilled. I'll try and locate your email address and send it over.

Pete.

In which case Kevin will be pleased to hear that Gloucester also feature in the book! I have had of necessity to be selective about the 'England' chapter, but Gloucester and Liverpool are the two clubs that get the most space.

best wishes and thanks

Stephen

[Michelle Young]

I’m finding The Final Over rather heavy going. As previously mentioned, there are a lot of errors.

Michelle

[Guest]

Michelle- Wisden does not have errors- It has "wides" or "no balls"