LIves in Cricket No 31 - Walter Robins

83 Chapter Ten The War Years On 3 September 1939, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announced that Britain was at war with Germany and Kathleen recorded in her memoir: Immediately war was declared, all the young men rushed to get in the Forces. The Territorials had already been called. I remember Ian Peebles and Jim Swanton coming to stay with us on their way to join their respective units, both in uniform. Many of Walter’s cricketing pals went into the Army; Walter’s brother, Vernon, a regular soldier and married to a general’s daughter, might have seen him enrolled into his Regiment, but Walter had no experience at all of soldiering, even less of sailing. He fancied the R.A.F. Eventually Walter got his call-up and was drafted to Uxbridge as Pilot Officer P.T. This did not please him greatly, but at least he was near enough to get home from time to time. As everyone knows, the summer of 1940 was grim and we were all convinced there was to be an invasion. Walter left me a service revolver on the window seat in my bedroom overlooking the golf course! Nevertheless, cricket was still being played and the one-day matches arranged at Lord’s were a huge success, thanks to the efforts of Warner who declared that ‘if Goebbels had been able to broadcast that the War had stopped cricket at Lord’s it would have been valuable propaganda for the Germans.’ Robbie appeared in four one-day matches at Lord’s in August and in the match in September between a Lord’s XI and a Middlesex XI. Some children had been officially evacuated abroad to safety and other parents sought opportunities to do the same privately. Kathleen remembered: ‘Walter wrote to my Uncle Arthur in California; we had met him when they were in England on holiday the year we got engaged and asked him to have the children and me and vouch for us as evacuees.’ Robbie was posted to St Athan in Wales while arrangements were being made for Kathleen and the two children to travel; eventually they got to San Francisco and lived with relatives for six months in California, before continuing to Australia where they stayed with Tom Ramsay, the chairman of the Kiwi shoe polish business. He and his wife Mimi lived near Melbourne and were great friends of Kathleen and Robbie who had arranged all of Kiwi’s international insurances. Robbie was still in Wales but managed to get to Lord’s for three matches in the summer of 1941 before hearing that he was being posted to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, on the east coast of Canada. The R.A.F. were opening a new station for training and a place for British-