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.