BY THEIR FIFTH day in Berlin, Peter Robinson and Peter Terry had developed a routine. Play did not start until 11.30 and to avoid having to get up early the two boys had started having breakfast in bed. As he lounged in his on the morning of the 8th, Robinson wrote another letter to his mother in which he voiced doubts about whether he would play in the third and last match of the tour because Cyril Smith appeared to be recovering from his illness. He also confessed that he had spent forty-five Deutschmarks, mainly on taxis to and from the ground. Then he realized it was 9.30 a.m. – ‘I suppose I must get up!’
Back at the TiB-Platz, the sun was as merciless as the Gents batsmen – thirty degrees and not a cloud in the sky. Gerhard Thamer put himself on and almost immediately accounted for Captain Berkeley for 28; he followed this by trapping Whetherly lbw for a duck.fn1 The Berliners were proving once again that they would not submit meekly. But their fightback ended when the Major joined Dickie Williams and the pair built a half-century stand. When the Major fell for 29, William Deeley came in and carried on where his captain left off.
Williams completed his fifty and continued to nudge his way towards the first hundred ever scored on German soil. It’s unlikely to have made exciting viewing. Williams was a shy, retiring character who ran a glove factory and lived in Stourbridge with his two sisters Dolly and Daisy (therefore filling the role of Private Godfrey in our cricketing prequel of Dad’s Army). His batting reflected his character, cautious and workmanlike; he was ‘a dogged accumulator of runs’ according to his nephew. In a team of Cavaliers he was very much a Roundhead who brandished the broadsword rather than the rapier.
As a young man he had been good enough to earn a few matches for Worcestershire, where he became known to the Major, but he was not talented enough to make any sort of impression at that level. Over the course of thirty-seven matches and nine painfully mediocre years he only passed fifty twice, and one of those came in a dead match against Nottinghamshire when the opposing captain bowled his part-timers rather than Harold Larwood and Bill Voce. Like Geoffrey Tomkinson, he compensated for a lack of first-class success by scoring heavily in league cricket for Stourbridge. Few club records of that era have survived, but there is one old scorebook which records a match between Stourbridge and Old Hill in 1926. Old Hill had a new pro, a miner called Aaron Lockett whose ‘fast off-spin’ was often unplayable. As it proved that day: at one stage he had taken seven wickets for no runs, and he ended up with 10 for 14 as Stourbridge were bowled out for 26. Dickie Williams opened that day and carried his bat – for 0 not out! A heroic piece of resistance to gladden the heart of dour stonewallers everywhere.
According to Keith Jones, a Stourbridge member of long standing, one summer’s day in 1978 Dickie returned to Stourbridge CC for the fiftieth anniversary ceremony for the pavilion. A member of the club committee passed him the scorebook with the gruesome details of that match against Old Hill fifty-two years earlier. Dickie, aged seventy-four, handed it straight back with barely concealed disgust. ‘He chucked it anyway,’ he said, referring to Lockett.fn2
Williams completed his hundred and so carved a legend of his own – the first man to score a century in Germany. Perhaps it was watching him nudge and nurdle his way to this painstaking ton that prompted the man from Die Fußball-Woche to ruffle a few feathers by declaring that he found the breaks for lunch and tea the most entertaining parts of the game. ‘For a Cricket specialist this is, of course, blasphemy – but we were only joking! In fact breaks are something lovely and part of Cricket. In England during breaks the players and spectators come together for a relaxing “tea”. Cricket is, even though competitive, a very relaxing sport,’ he backtracked diplomatically.
Guido Menzel eventually bowled Williams for 104 and the Gents’ innings ended shortly afterwards: they had scored 240, an overall lead of 463. The Berliners walked out to the middle knowing that victory was impossible but hoping to bat for a draw, or at the very least salvage some pride. They began well enough: Egon Maus and Gustav Parnemann put together their first double-figure opening partnership of the series until the latter was bowled by C. S. Anton, who would become the latest of the Gents old guard to make a significant contribution. Parnemann’s dismissal led to the inevitable collapse: Mader, Bernhard Dartsch, Kurt Rietz, Zehmke, Guido Menzel and Gerhard Thamer all fell in quick succession. Maus resisted stoically, having learned the art of patience from watching Williams, spending more than an hour compiling his 35 until he became Anton’s fifth wicket, all bowled. By now the correspondent of Die Fußball-Woche was paying enough attention to note how the Gents had employed the same tactic of moving closer in to stop Maus from scoring from his glances and cut shots, forcing him to try and hit over the top.
The end couldn’t come soon enough for the Gents, who were struggling in the heat. Maus was only able to resist for so long because Peter Huntington-Whiteley, who had decimated the top order the day before, was too ill to bowl. Young Maurice had to leave the field for a short time too, and Peter Robinson wrote that he felt ‘absolutely rotten’. Were the cigars and cigarettes of the night before at fault? Peter didn’t think so. ‘I think it was a touch of the sun mingled with a bilious attack from the greasy food we get here,’ he told his younger brother in a letter. Charles Anton also complained of being unwell, which makes his five-wicket haul even more impressive.
Felix Menzel and Alfred Ladwig launched a brave if futile counter-attack. Fips was especially severe on the Major in scoring 26; he landed some lusty blows before Maurice finally got his man. Meanwhile Ladwig helped himself to 32 in a stubborn last-wicket stand with Bruno Dartsch, whom the Gents had permitted to play and bat as a substitute for the injured Kuno Lehmann. As the shadows lengthened across the Hasenheide, Dickie Williams bowled Dartsch to end the match. The FuWo correspondent was relieved the home side had shown some fight:
Fips Menzel with his gutsy attitude batted 26 runs and to everyone’s surprise, the two last men, Dartsch II and Ladwig, were so successful, that they increased the running score of the Berlin team from 104 to 150! This was more than we could hope for. The Berlin team played an excellent game. You have to remember that they are playing their game under difficult circumstances. For decades it is more or less the same players who play this game, so the expectations in the team are not very high and there is no competition to spur them on – one has to pay our Cricketers their respect! They can be very proud of their skills in this rather unknown sport.
Overall, despite another resounding defeat, the correspondent felt the cause of cricket in Germany had been furthered, though he then went on to list the reasons why the sport might never catch the German sporting public’s imagination.
The ‘Gentlemen of Worcestershire’ showcased their sport in a beautiful, impressing manner which not only showed the competitive side of the sport but was at the same time an interesting lesson in the art of Cricket! The Cricketers from Berlin had to acknowledge their inferiority but they proved to be intent and observant students. If Cricket will indeed gain support from central forces, just as the fans from Berlin hope it will, then one day at least a small part of their dream will become true. There are some basic difficulties which prevent the expansion of the sport in Germany. It is less external factors but rather the difficulties stemming from the difference in national characters, the difference between English and German temperaments. It is a great thing to strive for this ‘poised serenity’ which is the basic element of a magnificent mind – in England this is part of daily life, they have the expression ‘It’s Cricket!’ – but for Germans it is very hard to achieve this laudable skill! Or at least the English have a clear advantage over the Germans when it comes to striv[ing] for mental balance.
Monday, 9 August presented the Gents with their last off day of the tour, a chance to rest stiff and weary limbs and explore more of the city’s sights. In its tour preview, Das Fußball-Megaphon informed its readers the tourists would spend their spare days visiting Schloss Sanssouci in Potsdam and a ‘Reich’s Labour Service Camp’. These camps had originally been set up in the Weimar period to alleviate the effects of high unemployment but under Hitler and the Nazis had become a six-month compulsory service that prepared men and women for the Army and ultimately war; their main purpose was to indoctrinate young men and women in Nazi ideology. For reasons unknown the trip was cancelled. It’s unlikely that the Gents were too disappointed.
The trip to Sanssouci Palace went ahead, however. The Reichssportführer laid on official cars with drivers, each vehicle flying the Nazi flag of an eagle perched on top of a swastika. According to Young Maurice Jewell, when the cars approached a junction they sounded their ‘special’ horns and the police stopped all traffic so they could pass without hindrance. The police believed the cars were carrying high-ranking party dignitaries rather than a group of English cricketers and offered the Nazi salute.
Despite their eagerness to be courteous guests, some of the Gents were starting to feel a nagging disquiet. This wasn’t caused by events on the field – though the Berliners’ constant appealing and disregard for the delicacies of the game had been unnerving – but their experiences off it. For a start there were the everyday aspects of Berlin life at that time: SS men patrolling the street, buildings festooned with Nazi flags, anti-Semitic signs proclaiming ‘Jews Unwelcome’, all of which made them uneasy. We know Robin Whetherly was able to speak and read German and he may well have translated for his teammates. Even more alarmingly, according to Young Maurice, ‘Wherever we played, we could hear machine-guns firing.’ The senior Gents – Peter Robinson’s letters don’t hint at any consternation at all – sensed something was ‘odd’ and that Nazi Germany was a ‘strange country’.
It must have been a relief, therefore, to escape the city for a few hours to visit the former summer palace of the Prussian king Frederick the Great, in a time when the region was run by enlightened absolutists and not absolute nihilists. There were terraced gardens galore for Captain Berkeley to inspect, not to mention the three thousand fruit trees, greenhouses and nurseries laid out in the adjoining park. Inside the palace the Gents were able to admire its marble halls, rococo design, galleries and circular library.
Berlin was in the grip of a heatwave so the cars took those who wanted to swim from Potsdam to Wannsee (Peter Robinson had been hoping to swim in the Olympic pool at the Olympiastadion and had bought a new pair of trunks especially, but it appears permission was denied). The Strandbad Wannsee was an open-air lido, phenomenally popular with Berliners looking to escape the choking heat of summer in the city. It was also the site of a popular nudist beach, though there is no confirmation the Gents visited that area. Nor would they have seen signs prohibiting Jews from using the lido – they had been taken down ahead of the 1936 Olympics and would not reappear until 1938.
Wannsee had always been a place where people met and talked and had occasionally been the scene of political fights and scuffles between rival groups. The Nazis’ paranoia and lust for control meant they were unwilling to tolerate the idea of people gathering and chatting without scrutiny. Even something as simple as going for a swim or lying in the sun while the children played on the beach needed to be monitored. So they’d seized control of the entire complex and appointed party officials to run it. Its managing director since 1924 had been Hermann Clajus, a large, jovial man. The lido was his life: it had been built to his specifications and he had watched with enormous pride as it became a central part of Berlin culture. But he was a trade unionist and social democrat, which to Nazi eyes made him a dangerous traitor. There was no chance he would be allowed to hold a position of responsibility. In March 1933 he learned that he was to be replaced as manager and that it was likely he would be arrested. Rather than face that ignominy, he killed himself. Tragedies such as this were a daily occurrence in Nazi Germany: men and women would rather commit suicide than submit to Nazi brutality and watch as their lives were ruined.
This mania for spying on their own citizens extended to tourists and visitors, including the Worcester Gents. According to Charles Anton, wherever the team went, whether to a restaurant for a meal or the beach for a swim, even for a simple walk to the shops, they were watched ‘rather carefully’. A close eye was kept on them during their matches, presumably from the crowd, unless Thamer or one of the other players was tasked with finding out whether the Gents were up to anything secretive in the middle.
Sunned and relaxed, the team returned to the Adlon where they received some bad news: Cyril Smith’s illness had deteriorated and he had been rushed to hospital. The eventual diagnosis was pneumonia. For a few hours his life was in grave danger. He’d only survived because a doctor at the hospital insisted on an X-ray, which showed the presence of disease on both lungs and allowed them to begin treatment immediately. A few more hours without treatment and he would have died.
That evening the Gents returned to Haus Vaterland, though this time the junior members of the side were granted less freedom. ‘We came back after a very short time,’ Peter Robinson wrote, ‘as Major Jewell advised an early bed, in spite of the fact that I slept from 10.30 p.m. to 9.30 a.m. the night before.’ Perhaps the Major didn’t want anyone else to fall ill, or he was aware of how some of the younger members of the team had struggled to cope with the hot weather the day before and didn’t want them to burn the candle at both ends. Smith’s illness meant that Robinson would be playing the next day, which would give him the chance to improve on his abysmal form. His fielding had offered some consolation: ‘On Sunday . . . I caught a very good catch at 2nd slip but I missed a very hard one at close-in gully. The batsman could have knocked my head off where I was.’
When he, the other two Peters and Maurice Jewell returned to their rooms that night they discovered an envelope had been slipped under their doors. It was stamped with the eagle and swastika symbol and the address of the Deutsche Reichsbund für Leibesübungen, Fachamt Fussball (Football Office). It was an official invitation from the Ministry of Sport. (On both the envelope and in the letter itself, Robinson’s name had been handwritten and Michael Mallinson’s scratched out – an indication of how late his inclusion in the party was.)
Date: 9. August 1937
To celebrate the presence of the English Cricket team ‘The Gentlemen of Worcestershire’ the Reichsfachamtsleiter had initially invited you to the Hotel ‘Russischer Hof’ on the 11. August 1937.
Please note that the location has changed and the event will now take place on Wednesday, the 11. August at 8 pm in the Stadion-Terrassen of the Reichssportfeld station.
Reichsfachamt Football, Rugby, Cricket
Head: Signature (on behalf of) Hörbrand
After perusing the letter, they got their heads down. The next day’s match was the crowning moment of the tour – a chance to play at the prestigious Olympiastadion.
fn1 Another scorecard claims that Peter Robinson was sent in after Whetherly and was also out for a duck, but not the one printed in The Cricketer.
fn2 Aaron Lockett is of a breed the leagues know only too well: players who should have played first-class cricket but instead chose to carve their name into league legend. Not only was his bowling lethal in the right conditions, he could bat too. In 1928 he scored 154 for the Minor Counties against a touring West Indies team that featured Sir Learie Constantine. Lockett played until he was sixty-nine and was so dedicated to the game that in winter he converted his garden path into a concrete wicket to practise on.