Dimming of the Day

88 August 1914 Surrey and Middlesex both gained ‘brilliant’ victories. Surrey bowled out Yorkshire for 315 to win by an innings, while Tarrant beat Lancashire single-handed. The game had looked evenly poised overnight but he took seven for 71 to bowl Lancashire out for 131 and then scored 101 not out in a score of 145-0 for a ten-wicket victory. So the top of the table was unchanged, with Surrey narrowly ahead of Middlesex. Hampshire, 153 behind on first innings, beat Derbyshire by 15 runs with Newman taking seven for 64. The top six in the batting averages were all professionals and Colin Blythe now topped the bowling. S.G.Smith, though, was seventh in batting and second in bowling. Finally on 18 August the papers were able to report that the BEF was in France and advancing to a great battle along the Marne. Middlesex made 284 against Nottinghamshire (J.W.Hearne 104, Hendren 88) and Nottinghamshire were 82-4. George Pitts, an amateur fast bowler born in Newfoundland, made his Middlesex debut and dismissed George Gunn. This and the next match would constitute his first-class career, though in 1922 he spent about a month in the summer playing for MCC. 6,000 people watched Yorkshire score 386-3 against Sussex, with B.B.Wilson 204* and Rhodes 104*. Ben Wilson played no first-class cricket after the War, though oddly enough he turned out for Taranaki in 1927/28 at nearly 50 years old and indeed made 80 in a first innings of 138 as they lost to the Australians by an innings and 177. Kent scored 272 against Lancashire in a game that should have been the first in the Dover Week but together with the following one had been transferred to Canterbury as the Crabble ground had been taken over by the military. Northamptonshire beat Essex and William Wells scored 119 in 95 minutes, his highest score in a first-class career that lasted from 1905 to 1926. Cricket was resumed at the Oval (prisoners of war having so far failed to arrive) with the Young Amateurs of Surrey meeting the Young Professionals. For the amateurs J.H.Strachan of Charterhouse scored 122. He played only one first-class match – for the Free Foresters in 1926. On 19 August The Times refers to the ‘sudden and decidedly unexpected advance of the French into Alsace-Lorraine’. It also reports from a correspondent on the difficulty of obtaining information with reporters being kept well away from the action. The Expeditionary Force, it reports, is being carried by rail to ‘certain places’. The Belgian government was moving to Antwerp and was happy it could hold out there for a year. It carried a report of an Alsatian deserter from the German army saying that the Germans were disorganised and starving. For the first time since the declaration of war The Times carried the scores of two matches in full. At Lord’s Middlesex, 81 runs ahead on the first innings, were 294-3 in their second, Harry Lee having made 139. His career