Australia
1919-10-15
Roy Park, who had served as a doctor with the Australian Army Medical Corps in France, returned to club cricket in Melbourne in late 1919. Within fifteen months he would play a single Test for Australia at Melbourne, face one ball, be bowled for a duck, and never play another. The 1919 comeback is the start of one of cricket's strangest career arcs.
England
1919-05-03
When the County Championship resumed in May 1919 after the four-year wartime break, the MCC introduced an experimental two-day match format with extended hours of play. Player exhaustion and a string of unsatisfactory finishes — many matches drawn, several rushed — led to the experiment being abandoned after a single season.
Surrey
1919-09-01
Jack Hobbs returned to first-class cricket in May 1919, aged 36 after a four-year war-imposed break, and immediately scored 2,594 runs at 60.32 in the experimental two-day season — confirming that the world's leading batsman had picked up exactly where he had left off in 1914.
South Africa
1918-11-18
Reginald Schwarz, the South African leg-spinner who in the 1900s helped pioneer the googly attack with Faulkner, Vogler and White, died of influenza at Étaples in northern France on 18 November 1918 — exactly one week after the Armistice. He was 43.
Australia
1917-10-31
Albert 'Tibby' Cotter, the fastest bowler Australia had produced before the war and one of the Big Six who walked out in 1912, was killed in action at the Charge of Beersheba on 31 October 1917. He was 33. He had taken 89 wickets in 21 Tests.
England
1917-11-08
Colin Blythe, the slow left-arm spinner who had taken 100 Test wickets for England and been the heart of Kent's championship sides, was killed by a German shell while laying railway track behind the lines near Ypres on 8 November 1917. He was 38.
England
1916-07-01
Major William Booth — Major was his given name, not a rank — Yorkshire all-rounder and Test cricketer, was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, while serving with the 15th (Leeds Pals) West Yorkshire Regiment. He was 29.
Warwickshire
1916-07-22
Percy Jeeves, the Warwickshire fast-medium bowler whose name P.G. Wodehouse borrowed for the most famous butler in English fiction, was killed in action at High Wood on the Somme on 22 July 1916. He was 28 and had no known grave.
England
1916-09-03
Kenneth Hutchings, the dashing Kent batsman who had toured Australia with England in 1907-08 and scored 126 at Melbourne, was killed by a shell at Ginchy on the Somme on 3 September 1916. He was 33.
Worcestershire
1916-07-07
William 'Billy' Burns, the Worcestershire fast bowler and middle-order batsman who once took a hat-trick against Gloucestershire and bowled out the Australians at Worcester in 1909, was killed near Contalmaison during the Battle of the Somme on 7 July 1916. He was 32.
England
1916-08-01
Although first-class cricket stopped in England between 1915 and 1918, schoolboy cricket — including the Eton-Harrow and Oxford-Cambridge fixtures, where age and conditions allowed — continued in modified form through the war, providing a thread of continuity through four otherwise empty seasons.
England, Australia services
1916-07-15
From 1915 onwards, charity and services cricket became the only first-rank cricket in England — featuring matches between Royal Navy, Army, RFC, Dominion troops and ad-hoc 'England' XIs raised from cricketers not in uniform. The proceeds went to war funds and the matches kept the game in the public eye.
England and beyond
1916-04-15
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 1916, published in spring 1916 and edited by Sydney Pardon, ran the longest obituary section in the publication's history — listing dozens of first-class cricketers killed in the first eighteen months of war and including W.G. Grace, Victor Trumper and A.E. Stoddart in a single calendar year.
Australia
1915-06-28
Victor Trumper, the most adored batsman of cricket's Golden Age and to many Australians the finest stylist the game has produced, died of Bright's disease at his Sydney home on 28 June 1915. He was 37 years old. The funeral procession through Sydney was one of the largest the city had ever seen.
England
1915-10-23
William Gilbert Grace, the Victorian giant who had effectively invented modern batsmanship and dominated English cricket for forty years, died at his home in Mottingham on 23 October 1915. He was 67. The Zeppelin raids over London in his final weeks were said by family to have agitated him beyond endurance.
England
1915-04-04
Andrew Ernest Stoddart, the only man to captain England at both cricket and rugby union and twice an Ashes-winning skipper in the 1890s, shot himself at his St John's Wood home on 4 April 1915. He was 52. His suicide was reported sympathetically in the press and quietly recorded by the inquest as the act of a man in poor health and worse spirits.
Tasmania
1915-09-25
Alfred Williams, a Tasmanian all-rounder who had played first-class cricket for the state before the war and enlisted with the AIF, was among the earliest Australian first-class cricketers to be killed on the Western Front, falling in action in late September 1915. He was in his late twenties.
England
1915-07-23
Edmund Wilson, a Cambridge Blue and amateur batsman who had played for Yorkshire before the war, was killed in action near Hooge in the Ypres salient in July 1915. He was 25.
England
1915-04-01
From spring 1915 the MCC closed Lord's to first-class fixtures and made the ground available to the war effort. The pavilion was used as a wartime club for officers, parts of the outfield were dug for vegetables, and at various points the ground hosted military drills, hay storage and ammunition depots.
England
1915-04-15
In April 1915 the MCC formally announced that no County Championship would be held in 1915. With Test cricket already gone, the suspension marked the start of four consecutive lost first-class seasons in England — the longest gap in the history of the County Championship.
England
1915-08-15
Frank Foster, the Warwickshire left-armer who had taken 32 wickets on the 1911-12 Ashes tour as Sydney Barnes' new-ball partner, was injured in a motorcycle accident on military duty in August 1915. He never played first-class cricket again. He was 26.
India
1915-01-01
While Bombay's Quadrangular dominated Indian cricket headlines in the 1910s, Calcutta Cricket Club — founded in 1792 and one of the oldest in the world — continued as the centre of cricket in eastern India, hosting touring sides through the war and providing a meeting point for the British and increasingly Indian elites of Bengal.
England
1914-08-27
On 27 August 1914, four weeks into the war, W.G. Grace published an open letter in The Sportsman urging that first-class cricket be suspended. The letter — 'I think the time has arrived when the county cricket season should be closed' — effectively ended the 1914 season early and shamed any club still playing into stopping.
Yorkshire
1914-09-01
Yorkshire were declared County Champions for 1914 with the season abandoned in late August. The title was their seventh and the last for any county before the four-year break for war. The team contained Hirst, Rhodes, Hobbs's friend Major Booth and Roy Kilner — half of whom would not play first-class cricket again.
Surrey
1914-08-26
Jack Hobbs scored 2,697 first-class runs at 58.63 in the truncated 1914 season, including 11 centuries. He was 31, at the absolute peak of his powers, and would not play another full first-class season until 1919, by which time he was 36.
England
1914-07-01
Frank Woolley emerged in the years 1910-1914 as the most beautiful left-handed batsman in cricket — Kent's all-round star, England's middle-order hope and, after the war, one of only nine men to score over 50,000 first-class runs.
Middlesex
1914-08-01
Patsy Hendren made his Middlesex debut in 1907 and through the 1910s grew into one of the most popular cricketers ever to play at Lord's — short, jovial, brilliantly quick in the deep, and a batsman who would eventually score 170 first-class centuries.
Australia
1914-02-15
Charlie Macartney established himself in the 1910-1914 period as Australia's most dashing pre-war stroke-maker after Trumper — a small, neat batsman with a back-foot drive so destructive that English crowds would later nickname him 'the Governor-General' for the way he carried himself at the crease.
Surrey
1914-08-25
Tom Hayward, the Surrey opener who had partnered Jack Hobbs for nearly a decade and been one of the leading English professionals of the Edwardian age, played his final first-class season in 1914. The interruption of the war meant he never had a proper farewell match.
England women's clubs
1914-07-01
The White Heather Club, founded in 1887 in Yorkshire, continued through the 1910s as the most prominent organised women's cricket club in England, playing exhibition matches and serving as the bridge between Victorian and modern women's cricket.
Warwickshire
1914-05-15
Frank Field, the Warwickshire fast bowler who partnered Frank Foster in the championship-winning side of 1911 and continued to lead the county attack until the war, was one of the underrated workhorses of the early 1910s — taking over 100 wickets in three consecutive seasons.
Australia and England
1914-07-30
Albert Trott, the only batsman ever to hit a ball over the Lord's pavilion and a Test cricketer for both Australia and England, shot himself at his Willesden Green lodgings on 30 July 1914 — five days before Britain entered the war. He was 41, ill, in debt, and had left a hand-written will on the back of a laundry bill bequeathing his wardrobe to his landlady.
South Africa vs England
1914-02-27
Sydney Barnes took 49 wickets in four Tests on the 1913-14 tour of South Africa — the most by any bowler in any series in Test history. He missed the fifth Test in a pay dispute. The figure has stood for more than a century and remains the great unbroken individual bowling record of Test cricket.
South Africa vs England
1913-12-26
Sydney Barnes took 8 for 56 and 9 for 103 — match figures of 17 for 159 — at the Old Wanderers in Johannesburg in the second Test of the 1913-14 series. The figures were the best in any Test match for the next 42 years, only surpassed by Jim Laker's 19 for 90 at Old Trafford in 1956.
South Africa
1914-03-01
South Africa's celebrated googly attack of Reggie Schwarz, Bert Vogler, Aubrey Faulkner and Gordon White peaked in the 1905-06 home series and on the 1907 tour of England. By 1910-14 — the period covered by the Triangular Tournament and the 1913-14 Barnes series — the foursome had broken up and South Africa had no comparable bowling resource.
Kent
1913-09-01
Kent won the County Championship in 1909, 1910 and 1913 — three titles in five seasons, built on the bowling of Colin Blythe and Arthur Fielder, the batting of Frank Woolley and Ken Hutchings, and the wicket-keeping of Fred Huish. The pre-war Kent side is widely regarded as the strongest in the county's history.
Yorkshire
1913-09-01
Schofield Haigh, the Yorkshire and England fast-medium bowler who had taken over 2,000 first-class wickets and had been the unsung partner of Hirst and Rhodes for two decades, retired from first-class cricket at the end of 1913 with worsening health. He died in 1921, his Yorkshire colleagues said, partly of grief at the war losses.
England
1913-04-01
Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard, the amateur fast bowler, big-game hunter and Country Life writer, spent the 1910s in a near-evangelical public campaign to revive English fast bowling — arguing that the game was being dominated by spin and slow bowlers and that England would lose Tests until it produced new pacemen.
Australia vs England
1912-02-09
Jack Hobbs (178) and Wilfred Rhodes (179) put on 323 for the first wicket at Melbourne, setting a Test record that stood for 22 years and remains England's highest opening partnership against Australia more than a century later.
Australia
1912-03-21
Six of Australia's most senior cricketers — Warwick Armstrong, Victor Trumper, Clem Hill, Tibby Cotter, Vernon Ransford and Hanson Carter — refused to tour England for the 1912 Triangular Tournament after the Board of Control insisted on appointing its own manager rather than the players' choice, Frank Laver.
England, Australia, South Africa
1912-08-22
The first attempt at a three-nation Test tournament — England, Australia and South Africa playing a round-robin in England in 1912 — was destroyed by the wettest summer on record, a depleted Australian side stripped of its Big Six, an outclassed South Africa, and crowds that simply didn't turn up. No comparable multilateral Test event was attempted for decades.
India
1912-09-01
The Bombay tournament — long contested between Europeans and Parsis — became a Triangular in 1907 with the addition of the Hindus, and a Quadrangular in 1912 with the addition of the Muslims. Through the 1910s it grew into the most important regular cricket event in India and the immediate precursor of all-India representative cricket.
Australia
1912-02-03
On 3 February 1912 Clem Hill, Australia's captain in the 1911-12 Ashes, and his fellow selector Peter McAlister came to blows in Bull's Chambers in Sydney during a stormy selection meeting. The 20-minute fistfight was one of the most extraordinary administrative incidents in cricket history and a direct precursor of the Big Six dispute.
England, Australia, South Africa
1912-08-31
The 1912 Triangular Tournament was played in the wettest English summer since records began in 1766. August 1912 was the coldest, dullest and wettest August of the entire 20th century. With pitches uncovered and Tests three days long, much of the tournament was a sodden farce.
South Africa
1912-08-15
South Africa in the 1912 Triangular Tournament were a catastrophe. Captained by the English-born Frank Mitchell, they lost all three of their Tests against England — by an innings, by 174 runs and by 10 wickets — and one of two against Australia. The performances confirmed that the googly era was over.
Australia
1912-08-22
Australia's 1912 Triangular side, captained by 42-year-old Syd Gregory after the Big Six refused to tour, was the weakest Australian Test party ever sent to England. They lost the deciding Test at the Oval, finished second in the tournament and effectively lost a Test generation overnight.
Australia
1912-05-01
Syd Gregory was 42, semi-retired and on his eighth tour of England when the Australian Board recalled him to captain the depleted 1912 Triangular side. His tour was personally distinguished — he played his 58th Test, a then-record — but the team was beaten and Gregory never played another Test.
England
1912-08-22
Charles Burgess Fry, the polymath athlete who had played football for England and held the world long-jump record, captained England through the 1912 Triangular Tournament — winning all six Tests, taking England to the title and ending his Test career undefeated as captain.
South Africa and England
1912-06-10
Frank Mitchell, born in Yorkshire and a former England rugby international, was selected to captain South Africa in the 1912 Triangular — one of the most extreme cases of cross-national selection in cricket history. South Africa lost all five of their Tests under his leadership.
Australia vs England
1912-03-01
England's seam pair Sydney Barnes and Frank Foster shared 66 of the 95 Australian wickets to fall as Plum Warner's MCC side, captained by Johnny Douglas after Warner fell ill, lost the opening Test in Sydney and then won four in a row to take the series 4-1.
Australia vs England
1911-12-30
On the opening morning of the second Test at Melbourne, Sydney Barnes reduced Australia to 38 for four with an opening burst that took out Bardsley, Kelleway, Hill and Armstrong for a single run. Australia still won the match, but the spell entered cricket folklore.
South Africa, Australia
1910-12-15
George Aubrey Faulkner of Transvaal was — by Wisden's 1910 reckoning — 'the best all-rounder in the world'. He averaged 60.55 in the 1909-10 series at home v England, then made 732 runs at 73.20 (including 204) on the 1910-11 tour of Australia, where South Africa lost the series 4-1. A googly bowler and middle-order batsman, his career spanned 1906 to 1924.
England, Australia, South Africa
1910-06-15
The Imperial Cricket Conference, founded at Lord's in June 1909 with England, Australia and South Africa as founding members, became operationally active through 1910-1914 — the body that scheduled the 1912 Triangular and would in time become the modern ICC.
England
1910-12-15
Wilfred Rhodes had begun his Test career in 1899 batting at number eleven for England; through 1910-12 he was promoted up the order until, on the 1911-12 tour of Australia, he was opening with Jack Hobbs. The transformation produced one of cricket's great opening pairs and culminated in the 323-run stand at Melbourne.