Schoolboy Cricket Continues Through the War — 1915 to 1918

The Eton-Harrow match dated to 1805 and had become an annual fixture at Lord's. Oxford-Cambridge had been at Lord's since the mid-nineteenth century.

By summer 1915 most of the regular adult fixtures had been cancelled but the schools committees were determined to continue.

The famous public school fixtures had a complicated war. The Eton-Harrow match at Lord's was suspended for the first three full war seasons (1915, 1916, 1917) but revived in scaled-down form in 1918 once the patterns of attendance and travel had settled. Oxford v Cambridge at Lord's followed a similar pattern — scaled back, sometimes cancelled, sometimes played informally between sides drawn from those who had not yet been called up. School cricket within institutions like Eton, Harrow, Marlborough and Tonbridge continued throughout the war, with masters keeping the games going as much for the morale of the boys as for the cricket. Many of the boys playing were within months of being called up themselves; school memorials at every public school of the era list extraordinary numbers of recent leavers killed in France. The continuity of school cricket is the thread by which the game was kept alive in England through 1915-1918, and from which the 1919 first-class revival drew its first generation of new players.

“The school grounds were where the game was kept alive.”

By 1919 the school cricket pipeline had been thinned by deaths but not broken. Several first-class debutants of 1919-20 were boys who had played their last school cricket in 1916 or 1917.