A Game Sustained

174 Concluding thoughts: Cricket, Yorkshire and the Great War cricket was seen as having particular moral and character- building features which were needed at a time of war. In March 1915, Lord Hawke asserted: cricket is a very material asset to the nation. It claims no national honours or recognition, and it is all the better for that, but it plays a very considerable part in national life, and in development of character...You see, as a game, cricket is supremely unselfish. You find precious few rogues in cricket. 121 The following summer, J.J.Booth claimed that ‘The calibre and grit of our men on the battle-field were due to cricket and sports generally in a far greater measure than many of them realised.’ The skills and ethos of cricket was thus seen as a factor in the war effort. As Roy Kilner put it in a letter quoted by the Sheffield journalist, J.H.Stainton, ‘Ours will be a different race of men in England when the war is over, through the lessons which our men are learning from those who have learned them on our cricket fields.’ Some of this was pure rhetoric and jingoism. One writer in the Hull Daily Mail, for example, claimed in 1916 that the British Army had ‘turned the military text books inside out... The erstwhile happy-go-lucky cricketer and footballers of young Britain have proved themselves irresistible, even to the vainglorious veterans of the Prussian Guard.’ Yet there appears to have been a practical side. In 1916, some men interviewed for commissions in the Royal Naval Air Service were surprised to be questioned about their skills at cricket and football. The reason givenwas simply that the authorities had found that men who had excelled in these games had ‘developed a keener eye and are more competent in the gentle art of bomb-throwing.’ Catching was also considered a skill of use in wartime. One popular enemy bomb was nicknamed the ‘cricket ball type’ and was often thrown to and from trenches if time allowed. During the campaign in the Dardanelles, British soldiers reportedly caught them as if they were on the cricket field, although it was said that this practice ended when Turkish soldiers realised what was happening and cut the fuses shorter!