Letters home: Cricketers' correspondence from the battlefields

FROM THE ARCHIVE: Cricketers’ correspondence from the battlefields of the Great War is limited but often shows how much the game meant. David Frith reports

"It is very kind of you to send these things along, and they tend to make this life a little more tolerable."

The great Australian batsman Charlie Macartney was writing from the fury and horror of the Western Front in 1917 to a friend back in Sydney. He was serving with the Australian 3rd Division Artillery, manning the big guns and doubtless praying to be spared from the Germans’ return fire. In accordance with military regulations he gave as his current address: “Somewhere”.

Letters written (in pencil, of course) by famous cricketers at the Front are very rare. In this one, recently purchased, Macartney permits himself just one comment on the strains of war: “I wish with you that this business would finish, and finish quickly as it must be awfully trying for you over there.”

Has a cricketer ever penned such a selfless sentiment? He says he is well and promises to see his friend if granted further leave.

^{Great Australian batsman Charlie Macartney in action. Top: A solider writes a letter during World War One}

There are no clues here to support the theory that the highly strung post-war Macartney, Australia’s finest batsman between Trumper and Bradman, was seriously affected by his war experiences, although the conflict still had a year to run.

Soldiers had to learn to live with the surrounding death and disfiguring injury. Only a few months earlier young Norman Callaway had been blown apart during the horrors of Bullecourt, two years after he had scored 207 for NSW against Queensland in his one and only first-class knock. He and Macartney put on 256 for the fifth wicket.  

In 1916, also destroyed by shellfire, was Kent’s Kenneth Hutchings (I knew a man who witnessed this atrocity). He had scored a glorious century for England at Melbourne in 1907-08. It was he who dubbed Macartney “the Governor General” (and it was Macartney who dismissed him as England nudged towards a pulsating one-wicket victory).

By way of eerie connection Hutchings’ 126 was terminated by the bouncer bowler Tibby Cotter, who was killed in Beersheba on October 31, 1917. Macartney may not have been aware of Cotter’s death when he wrote this letter. Cotter was the only Test cricketer lost by Australia during the Great War. Uniquely in cricket literature a photograph of his corpse appears in Max Bonnell’s 2012 biography of him.

Six months after this letter Macartney was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal for gallantry under enemy fire. Having nipped across the Channel a few times to play in morale-boosting matches in England, he did not join the famous AIF cricket team after the war because his father had died and Charlie wanted to be with his family.

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There were later absences from first-class cricket and there was one report of him alone on the upper balcony of the SCG pavilion, quietly weeping. In the early 1950s I had the briefest of meetings with the reclusive Macartney in Bert Oldfield’s sports shop in Sydney: a personalised autograph by a small, nuggety man who then turned and walked past the full-length cut-out figure of Cotter to return to his office upstairs.

Oldfield himself had been critically injured in the war. A metal plate was inserted in his head close to where Larwood’s bouncer struck him in the Bodyline series.

There are other surviving letters from the Front which paint a telling picture. Harry Altham was a schoolmaster, historian, batsman, coach and beloved friend of everyone in cricket. As a major in the King’s Royal Rifles in 1915 he wrote candidly to his fellow Winchester master Rockley Wilson (contents kindly made available by John Woodcock).

In a 1915 letter Altham described how a German sniper had bagged two British soldiers that day: “but I think they know where he is, and my catapult is going to deal with him at dawn tomorrow.”

He goes on: “It’s the first time I’ve had to do without cricket, and I pray God it may be the last . . . we have lost at least 90 officers and over 4,000 men . . . if you hear people sneer at the 14th Division, give them the lie for the sake of the good fellows who are gone. Poor Joe! . . . he was killed by a stray bullet walking back through a wood to his Headquarters. Geoff Dowling [Melbourne born Sussex batsman, killed at Hooge, Belgium] too you will have known. Jack Wormald [Middlesex batsman] did splendidly: I hope he gets a DSO . . . an unending stream of ambulances has been passing us going up to Ypres . . . The sound of our 9.2s floating overhead with the leisurely purr of a distant express rejoices the heart. It gives one the same sense of inevitability as seeing [SF] Barnes run up to the wicket.”

A scene from the war

Altham’s devotion to cricket is a recurring theme: “Geoff Colman [Oxford Blue 1913-14] and I played cricket today – high road – cut down bat and solid rubber ball – both in very fair form. What wouldn’t I give for the chance of one season’s cricket.

"It’s rather stupid, but I have always been very ambitious as a cricketer, though not in the least ambitious in life generally … By the way there is one thing I’d like you to see to for me: if I’m outed, I’d like all my cricket books to go to Webbers Tent for future Lord’s: they may serve to while away some wet hours, and I’d like somehow to be connected to the cricket of the place. I’ll tell my mother, and I’d be ever so grateful if you’d see it through for me, will you?”

Major Altham survived, having earned the DSO, Military Cross and three Mentioned-in-Dispatches, and in a very active life was a much admired master at Winchester for 47 years. He had batted for Surrey before the war and for Hampshire afterwards and he wrote a history of cricket, serialised in The Cricketer, which was regarded as essential for any keen cricket-lover. He became chairman of Test selectors in 1954 and MCC president in 1960.

The summer before the deluge of war

There were some familiar cricket names among the teeming ranks of the war dead: “Charlie” Blythe, Kent and England’s wonderful slow left-armer; Warwickshire’s Percy Jeeves, who was an England prospect; Leonard Moon, who played Tests in South Africa in 1905-06 and, unable to face any more combat, shot himself during the fighting in Greece in 1916.

The wartime cricketer most highly honoured of all was AC Johnston. A career soldier, he played for Hampshire between 1902 and 1919, by which time he carried a limp from war injuries. Four times he was hit. Five times he was mentioned in dispatches. And he was awarded the DSO for his efforts on the Somme and a bar after Ypres, becoming in 1917 the youngest general in the British Army.

Some colourful letters home from Alex Johnston take a special place in my collection. Handling them causes a shiver.

“Yesterday,” he wrote, “the old Bosche gave us quite a doing…his aeroplanes bombed our transport lines.” Typically, of his generation his remarks are notable for understatement.

“They also gave us a big dose of gas shell yesterday evening, which I always dislike; and when they mix it up with heavy stuff which knocks in doorways and shakes up the place generally, it is rather a nuisance.”

A battlefield image from the war

He continues: “Some of these fellows are feeling a bit sorry for themselves after the gas but it has not affected me…He’s a good soldier the old Bosche. These raids on London are rather a nuisance, but I don’t think the Germans have a more useful ally than the English papers, and they make me perfectly ill to read them.”

His battalion had a triumph, taking 130 prisoners and 14 machine guns at a cost of three killed and 40-odd wounded: “Isn’t that extraordinarily good?” Then, faced with the strongest challenge yet, “we were up and over that steep slope, through Messines and its tremendous defences”, progress he branded as simply “wonderful”. He learned from German prisoners that many had fled the area.

Johnston thanks the family for their congratulations on his latest decoration and Aunt Jean for the cake and kidney puddings: “Tell Dorothy that I will try and get that photo of myself on my horse.”

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When he returned to cricket, one of his wounds having left one leg four inches shorter than the other, there were objections to his use of a runner in county cricket. Thereafter he played club and wandering cricket.

These were real battles, life-and-death business. Today’s cricketers should reflect on the absurdity of war-like menaces and verbal and physical aggression out in the middle. And yet, in comparisons between cricket and real warfare, one of the most extraordinary examples of visible apprehension by a former 1914-18 war hero concerns airman AJ “Johnny” Evans, who had daringly escaped several times from German prisoner-of-war camps.

When this Hampshire and Kent batsman was awarded his one Test cap, in 1921, he was sighted on the balcony at Lord’s before going in to face Australia’s fearsome Gregory and McDonald. His knees were knocking.

David Frith’s grandfather served in the East Surrey Regiment in the Great War, in which two of his great-uncles died.

This article was originally published in the summer 2014 edition of The Cricketer

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