Upon resumption of regular administrative activities in the MCC and ICC after WWII in 1946, there were discussions on the recognition and conferral of honorary life membership on Allied war heroes and war-time leaders such as Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower,
Field Marshall Viscount Wavell and Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten19.
Chaired by John Lyttelton, the 9th Viscount Cobham, the first post-war ICC meeting
was held on January 15, 1946 after a gap of seven years. A list of Commonwealth cricketers
who had lost their lives in the war was read out and the meeting paid tribute to them20. In
keeping with its assumed mandate to recognise and celebrate the wide reach of cricket in the British Empire and the Commonwealth, the MCC proposed the construction of an Imperial War Memorial Gallery at Lord’s to commemorate these Commonwealth cricketers.
is possible that ‘MCC Council’ was used in a more informal sense and gradually faded away, particularly after reconstitution of the Council a few years after its establishment. This move granted greater representation to the TCCB at the expense of Minor Counties and to a lesser extent, the NCA and the MCC. This reconstitution was poorly received by the old guard of the MCC [Details in Swanton, p. ix (Author’s Note) and p. 286].
18 Interestingly, while the MCC ceded executive authority to the ICC by 1993, it has retained its legislative
authority. Gerald Holden noted that, “The ICC does not, however, decide on changes to the laws of the game, which continue to be the responsibility of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) in London. The MCC describes itself as a “private club with a public function”, and is recognised as the “guardian of the Laws”” [Gerard Holden, ‘World Cricket as a Postcolonial International Society: IR Meets the History of Sport’, Global Society, Vol. 22.3 (2008), p. 359]. Dominic Malcolm wrote that “The insertion of a Preamble to the Laws of Cricket on the ‘Spirit of the Game’ in 2000 can be seen as a symbolic swansong of English influence over the international game” (Dominic Malcolm, ‘Malign or benign? English national identities and cricket’, in Malcolm, Gemmell, Mehta, eds., p. 189).
19 Minutes of Emergency Meeting of MCC on Nov 12, 1945; 159th AGM of MCC on Jan 15, 1946 (at the AGM, 11
war leaders made Hon Life members); MCC meeting held on Feb 11, 1946.
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Contributions were solicited from member boards of the ICC and from cricket-playing parts
of the Empire and Commonwealth21.
The Annual General Meeting of the MCC in 1947 discussed the process of re- cataloguing of pictures, books and other items for the Imperial Cricket Memorial Gallery and Reading Room at Lord’s. Offers and donations of material and money received by the MCC
from Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, India and the West Indies were acknowledged22.
An MCC meeting on June 12, 1947, reported problems in obtaining a licence to build the Imperial Memorial Gallery – a reflection, perhaps, of the post-war resource scarcity situation. It was reported that talks were being conducted with the Ministry of Works and Secretary of
State for Dominions about the licence23.
In subsequent ICC meetings, MCC representatives provided updates on the Memorial. Minutes of the ICC meeting on July 19, 1948, recorded the MCC’s gratitude to members for their gifts and donations even though the Memorial Gallery was still without a licence. In the
meeting of July 28, 1952, MCC representative H.S. Altham24 announced that a licence had
finally been obtained and that work had begun on the Gallery. Altham once again thanked the various Boards and visitors for their enthusiasm and “in particular he referred to the enthusiasm shown by Mr R.G. Menzies during a recent visit to Lord’s”. Stating that all help was welcome and that no individual or Board would be coerced or pressured to contribute, he added, “We hope you as partners and co-trustees of the game’s tradition may share our feeling that the service, the sacrifice and above all, the spirit of the great company of
cricketers who gave their lives in the two Wars should be thus commemorated”25.
21 The first full discussion on the Imperial Memorial Gallery in the ICC took place in the ICC meeting of July 19,
1948. However, the idea for such a memorial had been conceived in 1946 and ICC member boards and cricket associations in the Empire had been notified then, as indicated by discussions in MCC meetings between 1946 and 1948.
22 MCC AGM 1947.
23 MCC Minutes: June 12, 1947.
24 H.S. Altham was an Oxford cricket blue, public-school teacher, cricket writer and later county cricket
administrator. He was part of the inner circle of the MCC, serving as President of MCC (Chairman of ICC) in 1959, and in long-term roles as Secretary and Treasurer [Jack Williams, ‘‘The Really Good Professional Captain Has Never Been Seen!’: Perceptions of the Amateur/Professional Divide in County Cricket, 1900–1939’, in Dilwyn Porter & Stephen Wagg, eds., Amateurism in British Sport: It Matters Not who Won Or Lost?, Routledge (2008), p. 95].
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In the ICC meeting of July 21, 1953, H.S. Altham notified the gathering of the successful completion of the Imperial Cricket Memorial and its inauguration that year by the Duke of Edinburgh on April 27, 1953. The memorial had been dedicated by the Lord Bishop of London. The ceremony had been attended by all High Commissioners or their representatives, the touring Australian cricket team, well-known cricketers of all countries, many members of the MCC and representatives of county clubs. The Memorial displayed cricket photographs and memorabilia from around the Empire and Commonwealth in honour of the fallen soldiers. Altham urged the ICC representatives to visit it. Karl Nunes, the West
Indies representative26 at the 1953 meeting, declared himself very impressed by the Gallery.
The MCC had received pictures from Australia, South Africa, the West Indies, New Zealand, Canada, Malaya, Uganda while Ireland, Fiji, Hong Kong and Mauritius had expressed their desire to contribute. Enthusiasm had been shown not just by official members of the ICC, but also by non-official cricket playing parts of the Empire and Commonwealth. The Queen, who was patron of the MCC, had inspected the Gallery a day prior to the ICC meeting that year and had reportedly expressed her satisfaction. Altham believed that the Gallery would become popular with visitors and quickly evolve into a “pilgrimage” for cricket lovers that would serve to familiarise all visitors with the “history and great traditions of the game in all countries where it is played . . . it would also prove a convincing token of the unity which binds those countries together and of which, in the field of cricket, this Imperial Cricket
Conference was itself an expression.”27
On July 14, 1955, Altham informed the ICC that in the two years since its opening by the Duke of Edinburgh, the Memorial had garnered much praise and attention from visitors from Britain and abroad. It had attracted “thousands of visitors, a large number from overseas”. The Gallery had acquired pictures from as far and wide as Tasmania, Rhodesia, Philadelphia, Kenya and Madras. He further informed the gathering that “[m]any parties of schoolboys had visited the museum on conducted tours and they and others had derived great
26 R. Karl Nunes, a regular at the ICC, was the first captain of the West Indies in 1928. He was President of the
Jamaican Cricket Association and of the West Indies Cricket Board of Control [Swanton, pp. 232-233; Stephen Wagg, ‘Calypso Kings, Dark Destroyers: England–West Indies Test Cricket and the English Press, 1950–1984’, in Stephen Wagg, ed., op cit., p. 186].
27 ICC Minutes: July 21, 1953. See also the website of Lord’s Cricket Ground for a mention of the Gallery:
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value thereby in increasing their knowledge of the history and traditions of cricket as it is
played throughout the world.”28
According to minutes of the ICC meeting of July 20, 1956, H.S. Altham reported a welcome increase in visits by young people to the Memorial. It had continued to attract huge interest and had received gifts for public display from abroad which had hitherto not been made available for public viewing. Since the 1953 meeting, the MCC had received pictures of the Brabourne Stadium in Bombay, the Kingston Ground in Jamaica and the Albert Park Ground in Suva in the Fiji Islands.
It took several years in the post-WWII resource scarcity situation to procure a licence to build the Imperial Memorial Gallery and the MCC was forced to lobby the government. The process of obtaining a licence for the Gallery was extremely protracted and although proposed in 1946, it was not until 1952 that the licence was finally obtained. Talks were held with the Ministry of Works and the Secretary of State for the Dominions to expedite the process of obtaining a licence. In the ICC meeting of 1948, with the MCC still struggling to get the licence, the then President-Chairman, Colonel Wykeham Stanley Cornwallis, 2nd Baron Cornwallis, pointed out to the assembled representatives of the ICC member boards, the great importance of the Memorial to cricket’s bigger picture. He requested the overseas boards to play their part in lobbying the British government and to emphasise the importance of the Memorial from the Dominion point of view as that was most likely to carry weight
with the authorities29. When the licence was finally granted in 1952, the Memorial progressed
speedily and was opened in 1953.
The Imperial Cricket Memorial Gallery was intended to house photographs and memorabilia of cricket grounds and cricketers from around the world as an endeavour to display the reach of the game and to provide an understanding of its history and traditions. The Gallery was seen both as a celebration of the bond between the cricket-playing Commonwealth countries and a commemoration of martyred Commonwealth soldiers. The widespread reach of the game of choice of its foot-soldiers also served to provide a snapshot of the widespread reach of the once-mighty British Empire.
28 ICC Minutes: July 14, 1955. 29 ICC Minutes: July 19, 1948.
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These initiatives to memorialise martyred cricketers and recognise Allied war heroes through the award of life membership by a private men’s club that also ran an imperial– Commonwealth sport were perhaps remarkable in their uniqueness. Pace these grand gestures, the title ‘Imperial Cricket Memorial’—in 1953—served as a reminder of the imperial genesis of cricket and of the MCC’s, and hence England’s, position at the top of the cricket hierarchy.