Denis Compton and Bill Edrich became a symbol of national renewal with ‘happy, reckless and carefree’ batting that broke the grip of grim times
On 21 January 1947, Christopher Isherwood came back to London. He had been away in the US for eight years, and now found his old city “powerfully and continuously depressing”. It wasn’t the bomb damage, shocking as that was, but the shabbiness of the place, the peeling plaster and faded paint, the tattered wallpaper at his club, and the bare walls at the National Gallery.
London “remembered the past and was ashamed of its present appearance”, he wrote. Amid all the rictus grin-and-bear-it cheeriness, “several Londoners I talked to at that time believed it would never recover. ‘This is a dying city,’ one of them told me.”
Written by Andy Bull
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2020/apr/28/comptons-cricket-summer-47-succour-nation-needs-now under the title “
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