THE SCENE AT LORD'S

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 14, 17 July 1939, Page 8

THE SCENE AT LORD'S

The scene at Lord's on Saturday when Harrow defeated Eton at cricket for the first time in thirty-one years, picturesquely recorded in the cable news today, was typically English in the sense that it could hardly have happened anywhere else in the world. Eton and Harrow, the two most famous public schools iv England, have been playing each other at cricket for over a hundred years, and the annual match at Lord's is one of the events of the London season. All society gathers there, with an array of Old Etonians and Old Harrovians (wearing their old school ties), their wives and daughters, and the boys of the two schools in their distinctive dress, the Etonians with the top hat and the Eton jacket and the Harrovians with their low-crowned, wide-brimmed straw hats, ll is an occasion like the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, but more exclusive. Eton's uninterrupted series of victories for over thirty years had tended to rob the match of its sporting aspects and turn it rather into a purely society spectacle, as brilliant as any in the season. Here statesmen and captains of industry, financial magnates, and pillars of the Church come to forget their troubles in the contemplation of the national game and recall old memories with a younger generation at the wicket. Then suddenly Harrow proceeds to wipe ofl' the stain of long defeat and wins the match. When the winning run was hit. reports the cable. Lord's "became a well-dressed bear garden. Grey-headed City men and pillars of county society had their 'toppers' [kicked from their hands when they | took them off to cheer Harrow."

From that it came to blows, and "a distinguished Old Etonian-punched a clerical Old Harrovian," more joined iv the free-for-all, the schoolboys themselves took part, and the ladies suffered in the fray. What would the foreigner think? ""Riot on a cricket ground,"' ''England's ruling class divided over subtle question camouflaged as cricket," one might imagine hostile critics saying, indicating a confirmation of their contention that England is split from top to bottom. Nothing of the sort; merely a boiiing-up of the animal spirits and the keenness over a game, an ebullition of ancient sporting rivalry with many parallels in the past, of which the Boat Race j rag, on the night of the race, is the ! most obvious example. Not an [edifying spectacle, no doubt, to the j sedate, but easily understood in the light of sporting history. If the English take their pleasures sadly, they lake their sport with zest. Per--1 haps it was this that prompted Wellington, an Old Etonian, to say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Lord Baldwin, an Old Harrovian, in one of his addresses, said of this spirit: It is to this that Englishmen owe so largely the careful cultivation of their physical growth. They let the body grow, undisturbed by mental storms, until they get into their early twenties, and then they go out into the world able to graft the sane mind on to the sane body. They have not worked out their minds before they , come to tackle the problems of the wox*ld. jlt is this vigour that comes out in ! the scene at Lord's, and Lord Baldwin j had so high an opinion of its virtues ; that he could say: When tlie call came to me to form a I Government one of my first thoughts iwas that it should be a Government |of which Harrow should not be ashamed. ... I will, with God's help, do nothing in the course of an arduous 1 and a difficult career' which shall cause any Harrovian to say of me that I have failed to do my best to live up •to the highest ideals of the School.

Such is the psychological background of the scene at Lord's.