HM Martineau’s private band of English cricketers: The first serious cricket team to fly

In April 1939 HM Martineau’s private team flew out to Egypt to play a handful of matches, thus becoming the first serious cricket team to use air travel. Arunabha Sengupta looks back at the pioneering tour as well as the air travels that followed.

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Tussle at the Gezira

April, 1939

The Gezira Sporting Club had been curved out of the Khedivial Botanical Gardens, and as a result acacias and soothing gardens spread in the backdrop as the men in white went about their business on the green.

It was a private England side that had been in the country for 17 days now and had already played eight matches, mostly against local clubs and the British Army teams. This was the first time that they were taking on a representative Egypt side. Bob Appleyard — the forgotten England hero

Well, sort of. Only Abdou Hassanein was a native Egyptian, and the rest were cricket loving ex-pats. The level of enthusiasm was high. Hubert Martineau’s team was by no means anything close to national strength, but there were some more than useful cricketers — the most notable among them Test cricketers Bob Wyatt and Freddie Brown.  Scotland — no win thus far, but cricket is definitely their cup of tea

The Egyptian team did splendidly to produce a close, keenly contested tussle. Richard Parkhouse was an expatriate schoolmaster who would play for Glamorgan twice that summer, but unfortunately not manage a run in the only innings he would bat — against Hampshire. In this game, he scored a serene 110 to help the hosts tote up 316 as Brown spun his leg-breaks to dismiss eight batsmen. When the Englishmen batted, local boy Hassanein snapped up four wickets, but Brown top-scored with 79 to obtain a 47 run lead. 1975 World Cup: Jeff Thomson wanted for assault and battery

In the second innings, the former Kent batsman Cyril Hamilton, now posted in Egypt as a member of the British forces, played a well paced innings of 56. But Brown spun his leg-breaks again to capture four wickets and captain Martineau, his slow-left arm coming into play on the deteriorating pitch, took four more. The hosts did well to put up 255, but it was not enough.  The former Oxford and MCC cricketer David Walker set the pace with 60, and the immensely experienced Essex batsman Tom Pearce shepherded the innings past the 209-run target. After Brown’s departure, the Egyptian team picked up three quick wickets, but in the end the tourists reached home with three wickets to spare. World Cup 1992 — Mushtaq Ahmed waggles his thumbs at Dermot Reeve

The first flight

Martineau, the great lover of the game and a major patron, had made this tour of Egypt an annual affair.    Not quite a talented cricketer —he did not make it into his school team at Eton —he nevertheless was an addict of the game, and in his private ground of Holyport Lodge, near Maidenhead, he ensured high standards of club cricket. The Australians played there in 1926, the New Zealanders in 1927, the West Indians in 1929 and the Indians in 1932. Martineau developed his left-arm spin well enough to play three First-Class matches for HD Leveson-Gower’s XI in the early 1930s, against University sides. World Cup 1975: Glenn Turner’s 171, the first huge innings

He had first toured Egypt in 1927 with the Free Foresters, and had been smitten by the land. He took a private side, with several First-Class cricketers, to the country every year, between 1929 and 1939. What’s more, he played in each and every match on those eleven tours.

Of course, with the Second World War about to shift the stage of action to a greater game, the 1939 tour was the last of the Martineau ventures to Egypt. The second match against Egypt on that trip, played from April 23, was to be his last game of serious cricket. That was a curious match as well, with the Egyptian side gaining a first innings lead of 154 despite Martineau’s five-wicket haul and collapsing for 50 in their second innings to lose by 125 runs. ICC World Cup 1999: SA coast to win over India and there is tumult in ear-piece

This tour, apart from being the last carried out by Martineau, was also special in the annals of cricket history.  This was the first time a serious cricket team had travelled by air. They flew to Cairo and back during the days travel by sea was the more accustomed way.

The only previous known instance had been the private team Arabs who had flown to Jersey in 1935 on what The Cricketer called a ‘ridiculously flimsy’ machine. The same team later flew to the Channel Islands to play some recreational matches. World Cup 1992: Rollicking Ranatunga clinches it from South Africa

The magnificent men in their flying machines

Indeed, flying was by no means a regular way of travel in the 1930s and MCC cricketers were officially prohibited by contract from flying when under the patronage of MCC abroad.

In April 1937, Gubby Allen’s side was in Hollywood on the way back from Australia after a riveting series. There they were met by the former England captain and famed character actor on the silver screen, C Aubrey Smith. A proposal was made to them to play a match with the promise that the cricketers would be flown to New York to get to the Queen Mary in time. However, the contracts intervened and the players took the train across the great country, travelling to New York via Chicago and no match took place. Lindsay Kline’s moment of epiphany

Just a few days before the pioneering flight of Martineau’s side, Wally Hammond had become the first England captain to travel by air while still under MCC contract. After the South African and England teams mutually agreed to a draw in that infamous ten-day Test, the Englishmen travelled by train from Durban to Cape Town to get to their homebound ship. However, Hammond decided to take the plane. EW Swanton accompanied him on the flight, and the MCC officials back home must have been on the verge of apoplexy when news reached them that the craft had been forced to make an emergency landing at Mossel Bay. However, Hammond got to the Cape safely and no issue was made of the breach of conditions. Richie Benaud — the tour that established him as one of the greats

The science of aviation received a great boost during the War and air travel became more and more popular. In the summer of 1946, the Indian side flew in small groups from Delhi to London for their English summer. Even during the tour they flew twice to play matches in different parts of the country.

And later that year, during the disastrous Australian tour of 1946-47, a railway strike in Victoria forced the England team to fly from Adelaide to Melbourne. This historic flight was followed by their only victory on that nightmarish Australian odyssey. Len Hutton, suffering from tonsillitis towards the end of the tour, became the first English cricketer to fly home from Australia. He was followed by most of his teammates. World Cup 1975: The Andy Roberts-Deryck Murray heist

Travels on ocean liners remained in vogue all through the 1950s before the currency of time shot through the roof to make such leisurely journeys obsolete.  But, in 1939, it was a mix of novelty and bravado to board an aircraft for the purpose of playing cricket matches. Martinueau’s team will fly high forever as pioneers.  World Cup 1987: The Steve Waugh turnaround

(Arunabha Sengupta is a cricket historian and Chief Cricket Writer at CricketCountry. He writes about the history and the romance of the game, punctuated often by opinions about modern day cricket, while his post-graduate degree in statistics peeps through in occasional analytical pieces. The author of three novels, he can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/senantix)