Strathmore Cricket Union: the first 90 years a history 1928-2018

27 CHAPTER THREE CRICKET IN THE SHADOW OF WAR Whether anyone was prepared to admit it or not, the country in the mid and late 1930s lived under the shadow of war. In 1914 the outbreak of war caught everyone by surprise, but from as early as 1934 onwards, it became slowly apparent that Germany was wanting another go and that no real way, other than military might, existed to stop the dangerous little demagogue who had few scruples in breaking the Treaty of Versailles and of demanding parts of Europe when he felt like it. The “Hang The Kaiser” jingoism of the 1920s had died down, and quite a few people in Great Britain now agreed that Versailles had been harsh. That did not however justify Hitler’s demands. He was a man who would not be satisfied, even by reasonable conciliation. And yet the word “war” was so repugnant. Any visit to Lochside Park, Guthrie Park, Forthill or any other Strathmore Union ground in the mid- 1930s would reveal quite a few men, no longer young perhaps but not yet old, with maybe one leg or with hideous burn marks on their faces or even, now and again, a blind man sitting “watching” the cricket as a friend told him what was going on. Some had been fine cricketers in 1914. These were the permanent reminders of what war was really all about. No-one could be blamed for not wanting that again, yet the late 1930s were an almost inevitable drift or lurch towards that end, as, with the inexorability of a Greek tragedy when the Gods have made up their mind that something horrible is to happen, the world saw Abyssinia, Spain, Austria, Czechoslovakia and eventually Poland point the way, like a succession of grim reapers, to another cataclysm. But, paradoxically, cricket flourished as never before. Perhaps people were trying, like ostriches, to bury their heads in the sand. Nationally the Ashes series were waited for with tremendous enthusiasm as England gradually foundmen like Hammond and Hutton who could counter-act Bradman, and at the local level, with Brechin now broken (although not permanently), other teams like Arbroath and Strathmore strove to fill the vacuum, and attendances continued to be high as cricket learned how to hold its own in the new world of radio, cinema, music and motor cars. By the mid-1930s the recession had now eased its evil grip, as more and more people found themselves back in work with, locally, jute now in great