Dimming of the Day

31 Opening Moves With a proper sense of localism the Chelmsford Chronicle of 8 May found room to report that O.C.Bristowe of Great Beddow had scored 104* for Christ Church against Trinity College at Oxford. Orme Bristowe in fact played a few games for Essex in 1913 and 1914, chiefly as a leg-break bowler, though 1914 was his last first-class season. It had been an encouraging start for Leicestershire to win their first game, but immediately after this they went on to play Hampshire at Southampton. Neither county was very strong, having finished tenth and fourteenth respectively in the previous year, but Hampshire actually won this game by an innings and 105 runs, Jaques, Newman and Kennedy bowling Leicestershire out for 134 and 63. Newman and Kennedy would go on carrying the Hampshire bowling for years and years, but Arthur Jaques was an amateur plucked from local club cricket for Hampshire Hogs, a team at the gentlemanly end of things, after failing to get into the XI at Cambridge. He had been born in Shanghai and the 1911 census shows him living on “private means”: he volunteered and died at Loos in September 1915. Hampshire, home to Portsmouth and to Aldershot, had traditionally strong service connections. Lieutenant Cecil Abercrombie, for instance, had played with some success for Hampshire in 1914, but was away on naval duties in 1914 and was to die at Jutland. Tit-bits , advertising in the Daily Express on 4 May, was offering a £1000 prize in a great new easy cricket competition, for placing four champions on one coupon. In the same issue of the Daily Express there is amazement at the growth of the FA Cup (500 entries for 1914/15). Interestingly the Express too gives the teams in advance for the Cambridge Seniors’ Match. In its pre-season rumination it remarked, Cricket is British of the British. Other British sports – football, golf, lawn tennis – are making more and more headway abroad and our supremacy therein is being seriously challenged. Not so cricket. It is a game so essentially British that no other nation can approach within measurable distance of us. One might note that the Empire (or some of it) seems to be included here. On 5 May The Times was reporting, in a mildly paranoid manner, a new bigger and faster German airship: at about the same time there were several reports of airships being seen at night over the eastern counties of England. They seem to have been the UFOs of their day rather than sightings of real airships, and in fact the fear of German invasion and German technology at the time was of much the same sort as the fear of Martian invasion, more titillating than a real threat. That would change, as by 1915 Zeppelin raids on the eastern counties were a reality. The following day The Times tells us that Mr. J.S.F.Morrison had scored 231 in the Seniors’ Match at Cambridge, possibly telling the selectors more than they needed to know. He had won his blue in 1912 and had played in early matches for the University in 1913, but before the Lord’s match had