Saturday, November 10, 2018

11th November 2018


Cambridge Sports Tours on the 11th November 2018 remembering the sporting people of Cambridge who served and died in World War 1, one hundred years after it ended.

By way of preparation Cambridge Sports Tours asked via its social media for local stories to be submitted and the best one, submitted by Neil Harvey (Historian at Cambridge City Football Club) tells the story of Hop Halls. 

Hop Halls - Cambridge Town footballer
Hop played football for Cambridge St Mary's and Cambridge Town (now Cambridge City), making 161 appearances and scoring 73 goals including against Le Havre and Racing Club of Paris before the outbreak of war. Away from football, Hop worked at Cambridge University Press and married one of Sir Jack Hobbs (the famous cricketer from Cambridge) sisters. Hop Halls and Jack Hobbs both played football for Cambridge St Mary's, the top team locally in the early part of the 20th century, with Hop scoring his first goal in 1906 playing in front of 2,000 spectators on Parker's Piece. He also played for Cambridgeshire County, considered a major honour in those days, as well as a few games for Norwich City Reserves. In WW1 Hop served as a Driver with the Royal Field Artillery, and was killed tragically on the 29th March 1918 by a horse. The news of Hop’s death must have been especially tragic to the Halls and Hobbs families, however Jack was fortunate to survive the war but not without receiving some criticism for not signing up to fight as early as many other sportsmen. Jack was conscripted into the Royal Flying Corps on 12 October 1916 as an air mechanic, to maintain and repair biplanes, having worked initially in a London munitions factory. His cricket career with Surrey and then for England saw him make 61,237 runs, including 197 centuries and between 1908 and 1930 he played in 61 Test matches. He was the first cricketer to be knighted.

Searching for more local stories
Despite plenty of effort by the current historians at both Cambridge City, and Cambridge United they can find no other definitive evidence of other local football players serving and dying for their country – so if you are aware of any please let Cambridge Sports Tours know.

The most decorated local sportsman
Cambridge Sports Tours believes the most decorated sportsman with a local link was Bernard William Vann who won both a Military Cross in 1915 and then Victoria Cross in 1918, before being killed by a sniper later that year. He was the only ordained clergyman of the Church of England to be awarded the VC. Between 1907 and 1910, Vann had been a student at Jesus College, Cambridge and was a 1910 Cambridge University hockey blue. Before studying at Cambridge, Vann had played football for Northampton Town, Burton United and Derby County.

Footballs 'kicking off an advance' at the Somme
A further student who attended Jesus College was Captain Wilfred Percy Nevill who died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme aged nearly 22. In an effort to support and encourage the men he commanded, Captain Neville kicked off their advance with two footballs. Unfortunately Wilfred was killed by machine gun fire just short of enemy lines.

Rugby Union
John Argentine Campbell played rugby for Scotland and won three rugby Blues whilst at Cambridge, where he was a student at Trinity College. He also played cricket for Argentina in their first cricket Test match against England, and was one of the best Polo players in the world. At the start of WW1, given this talent with horses, he joined the Lancers, then the Dragoons. However, in a suicide attack, where the promised tank support did not materialise, he was injured and died a day later from his injuries, on 2nd December 1917.

Another rugby player was Frederick William Jervis Goodhue who despite being born in Canada represented Scotland and won nine caps over three seasons. He also won two rugby Blues in 1885 and 1886 whilst a student at Cambridge University, and was a founder member of the first Barbarians rugby team of 1890. As far as his involvement in WW1 is concerned Goodhue joined the Royal Fusiliers (23rd Sportsmen Battalion) in 1914 as a private, having given his age as 43, when he was actually 49. Although a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons he was discharged as unfit for trench life due to his age, in 1916.

As far as England Rugby Union internationals with local connections are concerned there were four who served and died in WW1 including Alfred Frederick Maynard who died on 13 November 1916 having been a student at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His father, William Maynard had represented England in their very first Association Football international verses Scotland in November 1872. 
Another England international was Reginald Oscar Schwarz, more commonly known as ‘Reggie’ who died 18 November 1918 from flu, having won the Military Cross and been mentioned in dispatches. He had been a student at Christ’s College, Cambridge (1893-95) and also played 20 Test cricket matches for South Africa, where he became the only player in Test match history to be dismissed off the bowling of Jack Hobbs.

Rowing
There were many rowers who served and died in WW1. Here are just three examples:

George Fairbairn was a British rower who competed in the 1908 Summer Olympics where he won a silver  medal. He was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, following his nephew Steve Fairbairn who was famous for developing innovative rowing training methods. During the First World War, Fairbairn served as a second lieutenant with the Durham Light Infantry and was killed in action, aged 26, at Bailleul.

Oswald Armitage Carver was a British rower who competed in the 1908 Summer Olympics where he won a bronze medal. He died of injuries received in WW1, with his widow, Elizabeth Hobart who he had married in 1911, later marrying Lieutenant-Colonel (later Field Marshal) Bernard Montgomery, famous for leading the British Forces in WW2.

David Louis Clemetson was one of a very small number of black officers serving in the British military during WWI. He was born in Jamaica, and later attended Trinity College, Cambridge in 1912, studying Law and rowing in the Lent Bumps. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Clemetson left his studies to serve in the Sportsmen’s Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, resulting in him being wounded and invalided back to England. He was then transferred to the 24th Welsh Regiment of the Pembroke Yeomanry. Lt. David Louis Clemetson was killed in action in Perrone in 1918.

Olympic medal and Nobel Peace Prize
There has only ever been one person who has won both an Olympic medal and a Nobel Prize. Philip Noel-Baker who had been a student at King’s College, Cambridge won a Silver Medal in the 1500m at the 1920 Olympics, and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959 for his work in disarmament. Despite being a very committed Quaker, when the First World War began, he and a group of other young (Quaker) Friends founded the Friends Ambulance Unit. He served in France and Italy and won the Mons Star, the Silver Medal for Military Valour and the Croci di Guerra. Given his experience of war, he later wrote “our generation must get rid of the militarization of the world… It is a deep-rooted and malignant disease for which palliatives do not suffice, and of which civilized society may die if it be not ended.”

'The bravest cricketer of them all'
A similar view was expressed in the context of the game of cricket by the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who had been a student at Clare College, Cambridge from 1905 to 1907. According to an article published in the Telegraph in 2011, Siegfried Sassoon should be considered ‘the bravest cricketer of them all’ firstly because of his physical, military bravery, when he led his men over the top several times in the First World War, including at the Somme, armed only with a pistol resulting in him being awarded the Military Cross in 1916 “for conspicuous gallantry”. However what set Sassoon apart was that he risked being shot when on leave from the trenches given his statement of protest against the mad futility of the First World War. This was read out in the House of Commons by an MP, and whilst pacifists such as Bertrand Russell had protested against the war, nobody had done so, having ‘been there and done that’. So Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart hospital, where he protested even more eloquently in his war poems, inspired by the company of Wilfred Owen, for example:

Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.
I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats.

As I finish this article let us be very grateful to the very many people connected with Cambridge who played sport, and served their country in WW1, some of whom gave their lives as the ultimate sacrifice.

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