When the English cricket team toured Nazi Germany – and got smashed

Why have the Germans never been any good at cricket? This entertaining account of the MCC’s 1937 tour to the Fatherland gives some clues. Any country po-faced enough to have a ‘Society for the Encouragement of Playing Ball’ will struggle from the start. Certainly the Germans back then seemed to understand neither cricket’s equipment (‘why so much luggage?’ asked one reporter of the tourists) nor its terminology — later, during the war, letters home from British PoWs about games at their camp were censored because ‘OMWR&A’ was thought to be code. It actually stood for ‘overs, maidens, wickets, runs and average’.

At the darker end of this book’s territory, Dan Waddell provides good evidence that the Germans sent their best ever cricketer to his death in Auschwitz (he’d made the mistake of being Jewish). Team spirit was also a problem: one player responded to a fielder dropping a catch off his bowling by marching over and felling him with a right hook. The MCC tourists later advised their hosts that this might not be the best way forward. ‘Yes, I have heard about the incident,’ replied an official. ‘But I understand it was a very simple catch.’

The book is too good, however, to trade in simplistic myths. We’re reminded that the Nazi flag was flown during a 1937 Davis Cup tennis match at Wimbledon. Later that summer the MCC players gave the Hitler salute in Berlin without any of the controversy England’s footballers attracted for doing the same thing the following year. Despite the ‘Jesse Owens vs Hitler’ headlines that have since been attached to the 1936 Olympics, the athlete found the dictator a ‘man of dignity’. Owens reserved his disdain for his own president, Franklin D.