Something interesting for the History Buffs in the family:In 1937, five boys were famously snapped standing outside Lord's. But who were they, what were they doing there – and what happened to them?
By 1937 Eton and Harrow had been playing each other at cricket for 132 years. Their annual match was, and remains, probably the oldest regular fixture in a game that has the richest and longest traditions of any team sport played with a ball. It lasted two days and attracted big crowds – over 30,000 during its Edwardian heyday. To use a violent modern image, a bomb dropped on this crowd would have obliterated many of the most powerful people in England.
Male spectators wore toppers and tails, and women their summer hats and frocks. The Harrovians and Etonians themselves came in their most formal outfits – "Sunday dress" as Harrow called it – which only a very able student of the English social system could differentiate. The pupils at both schools wore, with minor variations in style, the clothes that at some point in the 19th century had become the uniform of the well-dressed English gentleman: a top hat, a tail coat, a silk waistcoat, a cane.
On the morning of Friday 9 July 1937, Peter Wagner and Thomas Dyson stood dressed in this way outside Lord's. They were Harrow pupils, aged 14 and 15, and this was the opening day of the match. The event had lost some of its social eminence in the years since the great war, but the crowd strolling into the ground that morning was still large and smart. Local boys, porters for the day, unloaded wicker hampers from spectators' cars and carried them into the stands. There were quite a few photographers about. But where in this melee was the Wagner family: Peter's father, mother and older sister?
The Wagners had made an arrangement. Peter and his friend Dyson (known as Timmy or Tim) would come down from Harrow with their cases packed so that, after the day's play was over, they could go straight to the Wagners' Surrey house for the weekend. A little before the match started at 11am, the two boys would meet the Wagner party at the Grace Gates. There could be no mistaking the rendezvous: the Grace Gates were easily the most splendid entrance to Lord's, remodelled in the previous decade to honour the memory of the legendary Victorian cricketer. This was also the first entrance that the Wagners, motoring east up St John's Wood Road, would see.
The two boys waited, the minutes ticked away. No sign of the car. Peter had started at Harrow barely three months before, at the beginning of the summer term; Tim had arrived the previous year. They were in different forms and different houses – Peter at The Park and Tim at West Acre. Peter was the smaller and the younger and also, perhaps, the cleverer boy, because he had won a scholarship and Tim had not. They knew each other through their parents, who had met on a cruise. We can speculate that waiting gave Peter more anxiety. Now the burden of responsibility (his parents, their lateness) made him turn his back on Tim and stare westwards down the likely route his parents' car would take....
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