Book Review: The Final Innings - the Cricketers of Summer 1939 by Christopher Sandford

When I was approached with a view to seeing a review copy of this book, I got my affirmative reply off inside two minutes.

Christopher Sandford is an excellent and popular writer, as well as an outstanding researcher. He has written several biographies of cricketers and celebrities and The Final Over, about the cricketers of 1914, was an excellent and enjoyed predecessor to this work.

The Final Innings pays homage to the men who played cricket in that final year before the outbreak of World War Two, using unpublished diaries and memoirs, as well as personal recollections and letters. Over two hundred first-class cricketers signed up to fight in the first year of the war and 52 of them never came back.

It is a quite wonderful read, though I was always likely to enjoy it, given my love of both cricket and social history. The way in which the author has interwoven events on the cricket field with those elsewhere is engaging and the book holds the reader's attention from first to last.

As the summer progressed, the outbreak of war became inevitable and it has often been recorded as the summer that ended the innocence. There was little innocent about some of the activities recorded here, with both Godfrey Evans and Bill Edrich, cricketing legends both, enjoying a summer where they lived life to the full and spent considerable time in local hostelries and in the company of an array of women. An attempt to enjoy life while they were able to, as no one knew how the future would pan out, which was perhaps as well. While cricketers were not especially well rewarded financially, their status appeared to be such that there were usually women to be found in their down time.

A rich array of characters flit across the pages. Ken Farnes, as diametrically opposed a fast bowler to the stereotype as one could imagine, quoting the classics, teaching for most of the summer then unleashed on unsuspecting batsmen in the holidays. A man with an outstanding physique and a liking for showing his impressive abdominal muscles to team mates, he never returned, killed in an air crash on his first unsupervised night time flight.

The stories of both Bill Bowes and Hedley Verity are well known to the cricket enthusiast, the former never the same physically and the latter to die on Italian soil. Less known players like Laurie Eastman catch the eye, dying from what appears to have been shock after an air raid, but also believed to have been suffering from cancer. Yet this book is far from a simple roll call of the dead.

It is more a celebration of life and of the human spirit. With war inevitable, people and certainly the cricketers made the most of what might have been their last matches, which in many cases it was. The closing weeks of the season were played out against a back drop of military call ups, buildings taken over by the Ministry of Defence and barrage balloons being installed around the grounds of the country. The West Indian cricket team, who are followed around the country on their tour and encountered plenty of casual racism along the way, cut short their final matches and got a boat home from Glasgow. The boat that they should have taken, the SS Athenia, left from Liverpool a week later and was torpedoed, with the loss of many lives.

It is a masterful piece of work, one that I enjoyed so much that I will read it again, and soon.

I would highly recommend it as a purchase, with both author and publisher to be commended for a wonderful addition to any cricket collection.

The Final Innings: The Cricketers of Summer 1939 is written by Christopher Sandford and published by The History Press. It is priced £20 and available from all good book shops.