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England and an Australian XI played out a Victory Test after VE Day
oleh Elliott Ramm (2020-06-02)
The response from the crowd, said Keith Miller — the great Australian all-rounder — was the most emotional thing he had heard on the cricket field.
Williams was part of an Australian Services team chosen for five ‘Victory Tests' against England to celebrate the end of the war in Europe. After being shot down in the Libyan campaign, he had been in German captivity for years, where he spent the time teaching braille to blind POWs.
367,000 fans crammed in to Lord's, with others turned away, to watch England play Australia
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He was a fast bowler, though he now weighed nearly five stones less than before the war and drank water and glucose between overs to keep up his strength. Above all, he was a hero — and Lord's knew it.
‘He was given a great ovation that compared with anything ever given Bradman, Lillee or Richards,' Miller later said. ‘But it was not the sort of clapping and cheering that greets a hundred. This was different. Everyone stood up. They all knew about Graham's captivity.'
Seventy-five years on from the matches that marked sporting Britain's first attempts to return to normality, it is tempting to reach for parallels as the ECB tries to get cricket going again amid a pandemic.
But it would be wrong. If England and West Indies end up playing a biosecure Test match in early July, it will have been barely three and a half months since the start of the lockdown.
In May 1945, English sports lovers had not seen any serious cricket for nearly six years.
Australia icon Keith Miller said the crowd's response was the most emotional noise he'd heard
With the Oval unfit until the following season, Lord's staged three of the games, deemed first class but not official Tests.
Because of rationing, spectators were advised to bring their own food. It didn't deter them: across the series, 367,000 fans crammed in, with thousands turned away.
When Len Hutton and Cyril Washbrook walked out to open England's innings, the crowd let out a roar that was, wrote RC Robertson-Glasgow in The Observer, ‘partly for the players and partly for cricket as a general principle'.
Before the game at Sheffield's Bramall Lane — which had staged its only Test back in 1902 — German POWs touched up the paintwork. At Old Trafford, they reportedly had to wash 5,000 items of crockery stored under the pavilion since 1938.
In his book The Victory Tests, Mark Rowe explains that the POWs were forbidden by The Hague Convention to work ‘excessively hard', so they downed tools at 4.30pm, ‘leaving hundreds of dishes unwashed'.
The prisoners may even have been Italian, not German, but no one seemed too fussed: cricket was back.
There were some good players on show. England boasted a strong batting line-up including Hutton, Washbrook, Wally Hammond, Bill Edrich and Les Ames.
England boasted a strong batting line-up including Wally Hammond, Bill Edrich and others
But their bowling, deprived by the war-time deaths of Hedley Verity and Ken Farnes, was weak.
In the series opener, the new ball was shared by Alf Gover and John Stephenson, both 38.
Australia had only one player with Test experience, captain Lindsay Hassett, although Miller showed off his exceptional talent, top-scoring with 514 runs.
Despite the apparent imbalance, the series was shared 2-2, with the tourists — comprising players from the Royal Australian Air Force and the Australian Imperial Force — winning the first and third matches (both at Lord's), 유로88 and England winning the second and fifth, in Sheffield and Manchester.
The tourists won the first and third matches, both at Lord's, with the series ending in a draw
Always bearing in mind Miller's often-quoted observation that ‘pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse', players on both sides laid aside the competitive edge so central to the Ashes.
With the Australians chasing 107 in 23 overs to win the first game, for instance, England's fielders rushed into position to ensure their opponents weren't beaten by the clock.
The Victory Tests were about reasserting a way of life.
As flight lieutenant Keith Johnson, the Australians' team manager, put it: ‘If we have in any way contributed to the rehabilitation of English cricket, then it was our honour and our pleasure.'
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