Not Cricket

The Eton-Harrow Match of July 1939

Author

Anne Cunningham
July 20, 2024

While I was in London, I picked up a copy of 1939: The Last Season by Anne de Courcy. It’s ostensibly about the upper class social calendar in the last few months before the war, but really chronicles the gradual shift in focus from ordinary social life to the demands of duty. One notable change over the months was that debutantes had fewer and fewer young men to choose from at the balls and parties, as more of the escort contingent signed up to serve in the armed forces.

I’m familiar with the basic outline of the London Season from, say, Georgette Heyer novels, or Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers. My notion of it, therefore, dates farther back than the interwar period. I wasn’t expecting the Kennedys to pop up in the narrative quite as much as they did, though of course a lot of the Season involves events thrown by visiting dignitaries, and the Kennedy patriarch, Joseph Sr., was the American ambassador to the UK from 1938 to 1940. The Kennedy daughters were presented at court during their stay in the country.

There are many descriptions of balls and fancy dinners, such as the time the King and Queen dined with the Chamberlains at Downing Street and the very rainy Royal Ascot of that year. However, the event that jumped out at me, which occurred during that last summer before war broke out, was the Eton-Harrow cricket match. The drama of the match was such that it made international news. That is, the reaction to the match made the news, not the play or the score.

As De Courcy writes:

The match that opened on 14 July 1939 was remarkable for two things. Harrow beat Eton for the first time in thirty-one years; and more top hats were destroyed that afternoon than would have come to the end of their useful life in a normal decade. To appreciate the significance of this, in an age of public decorum when physical assault - let alone at one of the most elegant occasions of the year - was rare, it is necessary to understand the extraordinary chauvinism of the public schools. And in particular, the traditional rivalry between Eton and Harrow (the best-known public school after Eton), carried on only half-jokingly up to and including Cabinet level.

Winston Churchill was an Old Harrovian who attended a dinner at the Dorchester Hotel in the school cricket team’s honor, along with the former Prime Minister, Lord Baldwin. Some very powerful people were invested in the outcome of the match. The play went on for days, as cricket matches do, and as it became clear that the Harrow team could possibly pull off an upset, more and more Old Harrovians flocked to the capital to watch.

On the last day, as the Harrovians scored run after run, and came within sight of victory, the excitement—and anguish—in the crowd grew:

George Lyttelton, the Eton Housemaster, reported in The Times that the cheers from Harrow were now ‘the shout of them that triumph, the song of them that intend shortly to feast without misgiving.’ Finally, and fittingly, the captain of the Harrow Eleven, Anthony Lithgow, hit the winning shot, a straight drive to the Pavilion from the far end.

Instantly, the sedate grounds of Lords erupted. As Lyttelton put it: ‘The drought is over, the chains are burst, the clouds have lifted from the Hill. No metaphors can do justice to the feeling of long-depressed satisfaction with which lovers of cricket in general and this match in particular saw Harrow beat Eton by eight wickets.’

Physical action was clearly the only possible culmination of thirty years of pent-up emotion. A race between the groundsmen and police, and most of Harrow, was won by the latter; half a dozen of the bigger Harrow boys - including [Head Boy] Wyld, who sprang from the top of his carriage over the boundary rope - reached Lithgow and carried him in triumph above the heads of the crowd. Here, as women stepped hastily out of the way, top hats were bashed, and umbrellas broken. Soon ties, braces, buttonholes, or anything else bearing the once tauntingly superior blue of Eton, were ripped off and torn to shreds by triumphant Harrovians past and present.

By all accounts, this rough-housing did not start with the boys, largely because there were too many masters about; they joined in only after about twenty minutes, so that for a while it was the older men alone who indulged themselves in the form of score-settling.

In one incident an Old Etonian attacked an Old Harrovian clergyman, and two other Harrovians responded by throwing him down and “debagging” him, i.e., ripping off his trousers. This made the news as far away as Australia. From The Argus (Melbourne):

The Australian version of the story avoids the term “debagged,” presumably because people who are not British can’t be expected to be understand the term. This highlighted for me the fact that there was a British schoolboy term for this specific prank/assault, which suggests it was very common at these schools. This in turn suggests that although the kind of low-level violence visible on the Lords pitch was not usually on display at public events, it seethed behind closed doors at both Eton and Harrow. Such that even grown men who hadn’t attended for decades could still revert to their rampaging schoolboy selves, as if through muscle memory.

There is a famous saying attributed to the Duke of Wellington that “the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” The idea is that these schools trained the military and civilian leaders who established and extended the empire, and defended the realm. Thousands of Etonians and Harrovians entered the ensuing war in leadership positions, and hundreds were killed. As mentioned, the civilian leader who brought the country to victory—against the odds—was an Old Harrovian. Having read this account of the match Churchill attended, I’m curious if it he ever mentioned it in conversation or correspondence as a source of resolve.

The fight over cricket that erupted at a Society event, in a tale about the transition from a civilian to a military mindset, seems a bit on the nose as a metaphor. Yet that is what happened.