Father Time Falls — A Barrage-Balloon Cable at Lord's, 1944

MCC had agreed in 1939 to make Lord's available to the RAF and the National Fire Service. The Nursery Ground was levelled for the balloon site; the practice ground for fire-engine parking. Cricket continued in front of the pavilion through every summer of the war.

By 1944 a 1,000lb bomb had already cratered the Nursery Ground (October 1940) and the V-1 'doodlebug' at the RAF v Army match (29 July 1944) had narrowly missed the playing area. Father Time's fall was the third significant damage event in five years.

Lord's had been requisitioned in 1939 as the RAF's No. 1 Aircrew Reception Centre. Volunteers and conscripts queued through the Long Room to be processed; St John's Wood was effectively a barracks. Part of the Nursery Ground was given over to 903 Squadron Balloon Barrage, whose hydrogen-filled balloons floated on cables several hundred feet up to deter low-flying German aircraft.

In an autumn gale (often dated to early September 1944, though MCC's archives are cautious about the exact day), one of the cables sheared and whipped across the ground. It snagged the Father Time weather-vane sculpted by Herbert Baker in 1926 — a 7ft Old Father Time stooped over a stumps-and-bails set — at the apex of the Grand Stand. The figure was wrenched off its mounting and dropped into the seating below. Maintenance staff salvaged it; it was restored by Baker's studio after the war and remounted.

“The most high-profile damage to Lord's came not from the Luftwaffe but from a barrage balloon.”

Father Time was repaired by Baker's studio and re-installed atop the Grand Stand after the war. He was moved again, to the new Mound Stand, in 1992, and to a new perch on the Pavilion in 2017.