Cricket At Waterloo

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30739, 1 May 1965, Page 5

Cricket At Waterloo

cricket match to be played in Brussels on June 18 will celebrate a double anniversary. It will be one of the more specifically British highlights of the 150th anniversary celebrations of the Battle of Waterloo; and it will commemorate the first recorded game of cricket played in Belgium. The match will be played between a team of Household Cavalry and a team fielded by the cricket section of the Brussels British Sports Club. Scheduled for the anniversary day itself, it will recall that June day before the battle in 1815, when the Brigade of Guards, unaware of Napoleon’s rapid advance, played cricket on a field in the wooded outskirts of Brussels. Today, a lawn in the heart of the Bois de la Cambre, a popular Brussels park, marks the spot where the game was played. On official maps of the Belgian capital, it is marked “Pelouse des Anglais” —the English lawn. But neither the match to be played on June 18, nor another, on the next day, will take place on the site

of the eve-of-Waterloo game in 1815. As a result of recent landscaping of the site, the Pelouse des Anglais, which was fiat at the time of the battle of Waterloo, now slopes steeply down towards an ornamental lake. The matches will therefore be played in the ground of a private sports club. It is hoped, however, that there will be a ceremony at the site of the original match. Perhaps the most moving ceremony of all, however, on June 18. will be one in the little chapel of a former chateau at Hougoumont, a hamlet on the battlefield. The 18th century chapel standing in the centre of the chateau’s courtyard, still bears the scars of battle on its fireblackened walls. While the battle raged round Hougoumont for 10 hours, hundreds of wounded British soldiers were taken into this chapel which had been turned into a regimental first aid post. There, on the rugged stone floor, they had their wounds tended—or died. On June 18, a memorial service will be held in this chapel. Detachments from 35 British regiments which took part in the battle will be lined up outside and a drumhead service will be held in the open air.