Dimming of the Day

7 (1979) as well as underlining the nation’s proximity to social upheaval in 1914, writes of ‘a widespread attitude’ that it might all blow over, quoting especially young men, among them, Harold Macmillan, J.B.Priestley and – ‘I was not emotionally aware of any close risk of catastrophe’ – Hugh Dalton. As late as 27 July the Manchester Guardian wrote, ‘the European war which has been talked about for so long that no one ever believed it would ever come’. This links, by extension, with what Niall Ferguson in his very comprehensive and perceptive account The Pity of War (1998) terms ‘the myth of war enthusiasm’. While never pretending there was not across Europe an energetic thrust for war, he again points to an equivocation. In converse to the jingoistic crowds that flocked through London following the announcement of war, there were, at all levels, grave doubts about the decision. When it came to volunteering, there was an initial reluctance more among the working than the middle classes. In the mainstream phase of volunteering up to February 1916 some 40% of those in the financial sector, commerce and the professions had joined up, compared with 28% of manual employees. Even taking into account the average better health of the former and the somewhat frail efforts to retain some of the latter in essential war industries, this is a massive divide. There were, of course, within these figures all kind of nuances; miners were over-represented and textile workers under-represented in volunteering and the Scots volunteered more readily than the English and the Irish less so. How this might have played itself out in cricketing terms is a moot point, except to suggest that an aspect of the middle class eagerness to fight was clearly bound up with the public school ethos – ‘the voice of the schoolboy rallies the ranks’ – and its persistent affirmation of sport and duty. All but eight of the 539 boys who left Winchester between 1909 and 1915 volunteered, although hunting rather than cricket – ‘a mounted….picnic in perfect weather’ in Siegfried Sassoon’s phrase – was the appropriate game: to men like Francis Grenfell, German soldiers were a species of fox or bear to be hunted for sport. Given the then preponderance of the middle classes in the cricketing fraternity, it might well be that cricket suffered as that 1914 summer wore on. Those first two aspects – how war was perceived and how people judged its importance – are by way mainly of background canvas and characterisation. The third consideration is much more specific because it involves a closer scrutiny of the actual few weeks in question, namely the short period between the declaration of war on 4 August 1914 (but war was not declared against Austria-Hungary until 12 August) and the end of the cricket season. Here an almost diary-like finesse is required to trace the effects of war on cricket. That very declaration was touch and go until the last hours. Asquith’s Liberal cabinet was bitterly divided on the issue, with several members offering their resignations as late as 2 August and the government near collapse. Belgian neutrality was the official reason for the cabinet pulling back from the brink and, apart from John Morley and John Burns, Foreword