Dimming of the Day

11 Foreword Crusades there was sheer impulse. Nonetheless, in practical effect, there was no substantial volunteering before the end of August, very close to the end of the cricket season. In looking at the effect on recreational cricket as the summer of 1914 slowly gave way to the autumn, one has to blinker the eyes to hindsight. We all now know what a tragically gory and largely senseless exercise the First World War was. Those living at the time when war broke out did not. They expected that, if war came, it would be in A.J.P.Taylor’s words ‘an act of state….. With which ordinary citizens had little to do.’ They were in for one of the most terrible collective shocks ever inflicted on the British people; ordinary citizens had much to do in that the war came to affect every home in many ways. It took a month, maybe two or three months, fully to understand the significance of this sea-change and those few weeks coincided with the end of the cricket season. It was to be a traumatic experience, so much so that I have advanced the hypothesis elsewhere that, for entirely negative reasons, the First World War is probably the most salient event in the history of English cricket. Yet, for those first few weeks in August, no one quite understood what was about to occur and that may well have affected, one way or another, the fate of local club cricket. Eric Midwinter