A Game Sustained

34 Keeping going: 1914-1915 season. Armitage Bridge and Keighley Cricket Clubs both advertised for a groundsman. In Hull, the North Eastern Railway Clerks Cricket Club held its 42 nd annual meeting. As well as deciding to send a pipe and cigarettes to its members serving in the forces as a Christmas gift, it also agreed that its pavilion would be repainted and refitted for the coming summer. Harrogate Cricket Club, which already had eight or nine first-team players in the services and 50 to 60 members enlisted altogether, decided not to play friendlies against Yorkshire Cricket Council sides, but instead arranged a completely new programme. There was still life in many clubs. Making their contribution Despite these efforts to carry on, for many Yorkshiremen who had played cricket in the summer of 1914, there were more serious matters to contend with as they joined up, went through their training and went to fight. Like the rest of the country, the people of Yorkshire made enormous sacrifices and the local newspapers make grim reading from the autumn of 1914 as reports appeared daily of the deaths of more and more young men. Some had been county players. An early war hero was Major J.P.Wilson DFC, DSC, AFC, who had appeared for Yorkshire as an amateur with limited success in 1911 and 1912 but later won the 1925 Grand National. He was commissioned into the Royal Naval Air Service and in April 1915 took part in attacks on German positions near Zeebrugge, successfully destroying enemy submarines. In June 1915, he was part of a raid on the Zeppelin airship sheds at Evere in Belgium. As we have seen, Wilson’s better-known contemporaries, Major Booth andRoyKilner, also joinedup early in the conflict as members of the ‘Leeds Pals’, followed by wicketkeeper Arthur Dolphin. Kilner served in Egypt for the first part of the war but was injured and returned home, before later being sent to France. 31 Booth quickly rose through the ranks to be commissioned as a second-lieutenant before tragically being killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916.