A Game Sustained

109 Struggling through to the end: 1918 had once been the home of the Beverley Cycling and Athletic Club and the Beverley Cricket Club. He remembered fondly a time on that ground when he had carried the bags of Ranjitsinhji and Fry, who had played there during a stay in the town, but now looked favourably on the new use. Others were alarmed at the scale of the damage, ‘Old Ebor’ arguing that reconstructing cricket pitches would be an early task after the war. He thought that currently: the cry of the nation’s food is too potent to permit any criticism to be of value. But the time will come…when it may be possible to regard the physical needs of the younger generation as of much importance as a plethora of potatoes. 71 Other cricket grounds were used in different ways. In the Huddersfield area, fields by the banks of the River Colne, some of which were ‘formerly nurseries of county cricket’, were taken over by factories and rows of standardised sheds for production of material for the war effort. On occasions, clubs got compensation. Among the awards made by the Defence of the Realm Losses Commission were payments for use of Hull Cricket Ground (£261) and to York Cricket and Bowling Club (£120). Another challenge for the game was the shortage of fuel, which made travelling to games increasingly difficult and led to legal action against those who breached fuel regulations. At the start of June 1918, for example, a Rowland Winn Mortimer, a professional at the Elland Cricket Club, appeared in court on a charge of using petrol contrary to the law. On Whit Tuesday he had travelled by car with his wife and two other cricketers to Sowerby Bridge for a match. He was not entitled to use petrol or a petrol substitute on that day as he was a professional cricketer only on Saturday afternoons. His defence was that there were no convenient trains and he was using the car for his profession, but he was still fined £2. Ernest King, an Elland amateur, was summoned for a similar offence of using a motor cycle to get to Sowerby Bridge, and he too was fined.