Dimming of the Day

50 dinner with the Kaiser – but perhaps it is indicative of the general sense of paranoia. The leading counties were not playing in this round, but Frank Woolley made a fine 117 for Kent against Leicestershire. Yorkshire’s troubles continued, Notts at the close of the second day being 287 ahead with four second-innings wickets left. That was all The Times had to say, as compared with long accounts of the Royal Navy v The Army, Mr Leveson Gower’s team’s innings win over Oxford and the first day of Eton v Winchester. On Monday 29 June The Times reported the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo. The paper thought that this might lead to difficulties for the Slavs, and was sympathetic to the Emperor himself. There was no suggestion and no reason to suppose that this was in any way a critical event for the rest of Europe. The British royal family postponed a state ball and ordered a week’s mourning. On the back page of the Daily Mirror on Saturday 4 July is a picture of Gavrilo Princip being led away by Austrian guards, but for the Mirror , the main story occupying most of three issues, was the death of Joseph Chamberlain. Chamberlain’s greatest achievements were in municipal Birmingham, but it was the notion of Imperial Preference that appealed to the owner of the Mirror . The Daily Mirror was not tremendously interested in sport. It had originally been intended as a paper for women: its main selling point now was its pictures (which included many of young women frolicking on beaches). Its cricket scores were a mixture of full and summarised scores, taking second or third place to racing and boxing. Of course betting had been illegal since 1906: the publication of runners and riders (and odds) in detail indicates that it was very much alive. Every factory had its bookie’s runner. Some of the regional papers seemed to take the news from the Balkans more seriously. The assassination dominated the Welsh papers the following morning, with stories of further Suffragette disturbances in Hyde Park and at Llandaff Cathedral sidelined as the newspaper editors focussed their attention on events in Sarajevo. ‘There is no longer any doubt that the crime was the result of a pan-Servian plot’ wildly proclaimed the Western Mail , ‘conceived with diabolical cunning and carried out with callous determination’. For the next few days, the same paper carried details of the funeral arrangements in Vienna, as well as news that the Secretary of the Austro-Hungarian Legation at Belgrade had sent a despatch to Vienna accusing Serbia of complicity in the assassination. On 29 June the Derby Evening Telegraph published the scores of Repton School v Old Reptonians (Repton, of course, being the local Public School). J.Howell made 202* for the school (it remained a school record for 94 years). Howell, the school captain, played for Surrey 2 nd XI and the Public Schools in August, scoring 82 and 78* for the Rest against Lord’s Schools. He died in Flanders on 25 September 1915, just 20 years old and another Second Lieutenant. Wisden said of him that he was ‘potentially an England batsman’ and that ‘among all the young cricketers who have fallen during June 1914