It is part of the irony of the dark high summer of 1914 that few ordinary Britons had any inkling of an imminent threat of war that might directly involve themselves until almost the last moment, and that by the time they did so events had already conspired to transform Germany’s idea for a lightning-fast attack on France from an option into an inevitability.
The start of hostilities came as a far greater shock to London than it did to Berlin, St Petersburg, Vienna or Paris. Things began in earnest only on Friday 31 July, when the financial markets panicked. Over the bank holiday weekend, military personnel on leave were recalled to their units, the band of the Royal Irish Rifles received its immediate mobilisation orders while in the middle of a concert at Tunbridge Wells, and Edward Grey told the German ambassador that any violation of Belgium ‘would make it difficult for the Government here to adopt an attitude of friendly neutrality’. Germany’s failure to pledge that it would not enter Belgium, Grey had added, ‘has caused an unfortunate impression’. The normally imperturbable Foreign Secretary spoke these words with some heat, it was later reported, ‘taut and shrill with emotion, the Adam’s apple dancing up and down his narrow neck’.
On the fourth Sunday after the teenaged assassin had finally succeeded in firing two shots into the royal car at Sarajevo, German cavalry units began moving into Luxembourg to seize bridges and rail lines leading into both Belgium and France. In London, the paper-boys shouted ‘War Special!’ and sold large-scale maps of Europe, helpfully marking the ‘contestant nations’ in red and black. According to the Daily Telegraph journalist Philip Gibbs, soon to become a noted war correspondent, ‘in Fleet Street, editors were emerging from little dark rooms with a new excitement in eyes that had grown tired with proof-correcting … it was a chance of seeing the greatest drama in life with real properties, real corpses, real blood, real horrors with a devilish thrill in them.’
On 31 July, the schools match at Lord’s began in a steady drizzle in front of a crowd of over 5,000, perhaps an indication of how many people tried to cling to normality. While the young cricketers ran from the field in the rain at Lord’s, ministers were now finally confronted with the accelerating pace of aggression in Europe. The new French premier René Viviani admitted he was in a state of ‘frightful nervous tension’ which, as his War Minister described it, ‘became a permanent condition during the month of August’. The French naval secretary, a medical doctor with no previous government experience, appears to have had a nervous breakdown and had to be abruptly replaced. Viviani later remarked that the war seemed to him to have ‘come like thunder out of a clear summer sky’, and that until almost the last moment ‘the French people and the newspapers they read were preoccupied’ with other affairs.
As the Foreign Secretary addressed the House of Commons on the crisis on the afternoon of 3 August, bank holiday Monday, a crowd of 8,650 sat in sweltering heat at Lord’s to watch two more teams of schoolboys play cricket. ‘It was curious,’ Grey himself later wrote, ‘how at this hour, the normal and unhurried poetry of English life went on.’ The few official public remarks on the situation up until then, Churchill felt, could easily have come ‘from the secretary of a firm of provincial lawyers reading the minutes of the last meeting’.
To the schoolmaster and future cricket scholar Harry Altham: 'The outbreak of the war will always be associated in my mind with Lord’s. I was up there watching the Lord’s Schools v. The Rest match, and can remember buying an evening paper on the ground and reading in the stop-press column the opening sentences of the speech Grey was then making in the Commons, and subsequently travelling down from Waterloo to Esher, where I was staying with the Howell brothers, and seeing in the blood-red sunset over the Thames an omen of the years to come.'
A case can be made for saying that that match at Lord’s was as good a symbol as any of how some of Britain’s most gifted, and seemingly privileged young athletes would be cut down in the spring of life. The Times later thought the game had ‘the peculiar character of that summer written all over it’. It certainly personified the point about how the old men make the wars and the young ones fight them.
Christopher Sandford is the author of The Final Over. 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.