Herr Howzat?

Field of Shadows: The Remarkable True Story of the English Cricket Tour of Nazi Germany, 1937. By Dan Waddell. Bantam Press; 259 pages; £16.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

THE evidence is a bit thin, but it seems that Adolf Hitler was not a cricket-lover; apparently, he thought batsmen who wore pads were sissies. However, the Nazi Reichssportführer, Hans von Tschammer und Osten, was. Gratified by a good lunch at Lord’s with MCC, England’s premier cricket club, he invited an English team to play a German XI. Three games were played in Berlin in 1937, and, unlike England’s football team which was photographed a year later raising a cringe-making Nazi salute, the English cricketers offered a rather muted Sieg Heil.

Some skilled detective work by Dan Waddell, an occasional crime-writer, reveals this unlikely story in an eccentric and improbably entertaining short book. MCC chose as the leader of the tourists Major Maurice Jewell, a former captain of Worcestershire when captaincy was an occupation that was reserved for amateur players. He was in his early 50s, and his team was the Gentlemen of Worcestershire. They were gentlemen of leisure, as he was, or successful businessmen with time to spare, or the sons of such men; four of the team had actually played first-class cricket—as amateurs. The only advice given by Lord’s was not to hand a propaganda coup to the Nazis by losing.

The English won three games easily. The German players were short of experience (the LBW rule utterly defeated them). Their strength was a bowling attack led by Felix Menzel, who had first played against an English team before the first world war.

Cricket breeds fanatical followers, and Mr Waddell believes he might have found in Menzel a prize specimen. Shortly after the British army arrived in Berlin in July 1945, Menzel and four companions walked out of the ruins and asked an officer if he would arrange a game of cricket for them. Such undying devotion to the game in a singularly hostile environment, says Mr Waddell, means that, among cricket obsessives, no one can lay a glove on Menzel. Fancy that; and him a German, too.