News from the Gulf…more pain and wretchedness:
More horrors flashing hourly on the screen;
More lives destroyed. I switch off in distress,
Scanning my Wisden shelves, calm fields of green.
Switched off… I fondle ‘1891’,
Escaping back one hundred years ago,
Feasting on Grace, Briggs, Shrewsbury, Peel, Gunn;
Safe from our modern catalogue of woe.
‘The Golden Age’: I turn the years, engrossed
With ‘Ranji’, Fry, Rhodes, Trumper, Bosanquet.
Joining that far off ‘soundless-clapping host’
Convinced their world’s bright sun would never set.
Through thickening volumes, boasting peace and plenty,
Age of the Raj, securely I proceed;
Through years romanticized by G.A.Henty,
On to the youthful Hobbs, Hearne, Woolley, Mead.
Then four thin, shrivelled Wisdens break the spell:
No hard-fought Tests now, waged with bat and ball.
The green fields yield to bloodied fields of Hell.
Four volumes paint the grimmest ‘Test’ of all.
The Great, the lesser and the scarcely known
Stand in the Roll of Honour, for the scythe
By which a generation’s youth was mown
Embraced Brooke, Beasley, Hutchings, Neale, Booth, Blythe.
Escaping back from Wisden, I reflect
Upon the message of those death-filled shelves:
Each Golden Age is fated to be wrecked.
The Fault? The fault is surely in Ourselves.
Morgan Dockrell (with kind permission of The Cricketer)
Written at the height of the First Iraq War (‘Desert Storm’) in February 1991. A.H.Neale (Old Columban) was killed in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) on 22 January 1916, and J.J.Beasley, who had been an undergraduate at TCD, in the Dardanelles in August 1915 at the age of 19. C.Blythe (November 1917) was perhaps the outstanding left-arm spin bowler of the 1900-1914 era, while K.L.Hutchings (September 1916) and M.R.Booth (November 1917) had achieved success at Test level. Rupert C.Brooke, who had performed well for Rugby School, receives the following accolade from Wisden: ‘He had gained considerable reputation as a poet.’
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