The pre-war years were a golden period for Radlett, first under Fred Watson’s inspired captaincy (1910-12) and then under G. E. Timins (1912-13).
This newspaper clipping from the 23rd August 1919 edition of the Slough, Eton and Windsor Observer shows the probable Herts team to play Bucks in a two day match the following week. It includes Radlett’s G G Dumbleton and also L J Reid who joined Radlett in the early 1920s.
Imagine the state of a cricket ground not tended or played on for five long years. So, read the minutes of the April 1919 AGM: “Every possible step is to be taken to revive the activity of Radlett Cricket Club.”
A circular was sent to every householder in the parish about raising funds to revive the Club which needed £100 to put the pavilion in shape and buy equipment. The Railway authorities were not so jealous about advertising space then and so a large model of a cricket bat was set up opposite the station entrance and linked to a scale showing daily the subscriptions raised.
The money was collected within weeks and the new first team skipper, Cecil Clayden and his vice-captain Sid Watson (Roy Watson’s father), got play underway. The same year that wily slow bowler ‘Daddy’ Breeds passed on but the Club itself was reborn.
Alas, war intervened and with it the Club’s hopes of repeating their 1913 successes, although poor St Stephen’s were thrashed once again in the penultimate game before war broke out.
The records read: “The grass grew on the out-field of the cricket ground and the wicket was no longer cut and tended and so for those dark years Newberries Ground continued to slumber. . . .”
1914-1918 – the First World War.
There is no information on the first three years of the 1910s other that the fact that in 1912 W. Montgomery took 105 wickets in 23 innings.
In 1913, Radlett scored 291 against St Stephen’s in the Club’s best pre-First World War season, according to incomplete records (played 17, W11, D2, L4). Breeds came good with 55 but man of the match was Radlett’s Herts County player W. Montgomery who hit 115.
Earlier in the season Montgomery and H, Dawes ‘up-ended’ St Stephens for 22 after Radlett had blasted 161.
Again in 1913, G. G. Dumbelton (85) and A. G. Saunders (86) put on 180 for the second wicket (still a club record in 1984). They faced a Napsbury total of 205 for eight dec. and, with 90 minutes to get them, won the match by six wickets with five minutes left.