Field of Shadows

David Taylor | 12:00am BST 04 October 2014

Published: 2014
Pages: 259
Author: Waddell, Dan
Publisher: Bantam Press
Rating: 4 stars

I recently rejoined the Maidstone library, after an interval of a few years which saw the facility relocated to a far less convenient spot on the edge of town, and naturally on receiving my card headed for the sports section. The available titles on cricket were disappointing – the predictable autobiographies by the usual big names – but this one caught my eye too. Subtitled ‘the remarkable true story of the English cricket tour of Nazi Germany 1937’ it is an account of a trip to one of cricket’s most unlikely outposts that until now has been virtually forgotten.

The journalist and novelist Dan Waddell has, in his own words, ‘been a cricket fanatic since he witnessed his first England batting collapse aged six.’ A useful club player himself – and still active, as captain of Acton 2nd XI, this isn’t his first book on cricket, but I’d be very surprised if he’s written a better one. The tour was undertaken by an amateur side called the Gentlemen of Worcestershire, captained by former county skipper Maurice Jewell and including a number of club cricketers from the area, some of whom were on the fringe of the county side. The exact circumstances of the arrangement of the trip are unclear, but appear to originate from the visit to England the previous year of Hans von Tschammer und Osten, Germany’s Minister for Sport, who was entertained at Lord’s. It seems likely that Major Jewell was present at the match and lunch he attended and had the opportunity to chat with the Minister.

The background to the tour, of course, was the inexorable rise of the Nazi party in Germany, which by 1937 had effectively silenced all opposition (there’s a harrowing account of the treatment meted out to a journalist who’d written for a left-wing publication). Adolf Hitler had apparently taken a brief interest in cricket before deciding it insufficiently manly for German youth – he was unimpressed that batsmen normally wore pads – but there was a cricket scene of a sort in the Berlin area, which is where the Gentlemen played all three of their matches. Two contrasting characters are written about in detail – the autocratic captain Gerhard Thamer, who is said to have responded to a dropped catch in the outfield by walking up to the hapless fielder and knocking him to the ground (the sports Minister remarked – “I heard about that incident. But I understand it was a very simple catch”) and the altogether more pleasant Felix Menzel, the best player in the Berlin side, and one of the most fanatical amateur cricketers it is possible to imagine. Menzel was still looking for a game in the ruins of Berlin in 1945, and for at least a decade afterwards.

The locals were outplayed in each match of course, but the scores are somehow of lesser significance than the matches being played at all. Waddell conveys the real sense of menace of the time – the umpire was one of Germany’s best players, but almost certainly prevented from playing because he was Jewish – and one wonders, while reading of the various functions that the visitors attended and the welcome they received, how much of that atmosphere they picked up on. It’s not hard to imagine a team of sportsmen playing today in North Korea and seeing only what the authorities wanted them to see. And the research for the book is simply marvellous, befitting the journalist behind it. One man tracked down, the son of one of the younger players, had no idea that his father took part in the tour, as he never mentioned it. It was covered in the Cricketer at the time, and today the scores can be found on Cricket Archive, but you can understand in the aftermath of war the players being reluctant to discuss the time they were guests of the Nazis.

Incredibly, there was a tour the following year, by a team from Somerset, but the details of that are sketchy, as no scores have survived. And then all of Europe was plunged into six years of carnage and chaos. Cricket clubs existed in Germany in the 1950s, when the veteran Menzel was still playing, but the game died after that, and nowadays is the province of expatriots from the subcontinent.

I read this absorbing book in three days and thoroughly enjoyed it. I recommend this inspiring tale as the antidote to the expected score-settling and mud-flinging from the forthcoming book by KP Pietersen.