THE MANY ESCAPES AND ESCAPADES OF ALFRED JOHN EVANS

"When the sons of old England are all driven from their native land by foreign foes, then – and not till then – will the bat, the ball, and the wicket be laid aside and forgotten." Felix wasn't quite right. First-class cricket stopped early in September of 1914, a month after war had been declared. By then WG Grace had already had already called for the county season to be closed, "for it is not fitting at a time like this that able-bodied men should be playing cricket by day and pleasure-seekers looking on. I should like to see all first-class cricketers of suitable age set a good example and come to the help of their country without delay." Bats, balls, and wickets were laid aside, but not forgotten.

At Gallipoli two teams of Diggers played a game on Shell Green to give the enemy the impression that all was normal while the rest of the army beat a retreat. Robert Graves recalled a match at Versailles: "The bat was a bit of a rafter, the ball a piece of rag tied with string; and the wicket a parrot-cage with the clean, dry corpse of a parrot inside." Play was stopped by machine gun fire.

Over 200 first-class cricketers died in military service in the first world war. Famous names among them. Tibby Cotter, the tiny, tearaway bowler who was so quick he used to shatter stumps, Colin Blythe, the spinner who once took 17 wickets in a day on a sticky pitch against Northamptonshire, and Gordon White, one of the four great googly bowlers from South Africa.

This, though, is the tale of a man whose feats on the cricket field make for little more than a footnote. John Evans played a single match for England, when he was tossed into the lineup for the second Ashes Test in 1921. He wasn't a bad bat, but he was a long way from being a great one. He had played for Winchester School when he was a boy, and was picked to play for Hampshire before he had even gone up to Oxford, where he won a blue in his first season. But he never committed to cricket. He was one of those who reckoned there was more to life than putting willow to leather.

Evans played a single full county season, for Kent in 1928. Otherwise he kept his hand in with odd games for Harlequins, the Free Foresters, the Band of Brothers, and other social sides. In 1921, England had lost six Ashes Tests in succession, and the selectors were trying to scrabble together a half-decent team. Evans was picked to play at Lord's on the strength of the 69 he had scored for the MCC against the Australians earlier that summer, and the century he had made in his only other first-class match that season. He made four in the first innings, 14 in the other, out to Ted McDonald both times. "The occasion being," said Wisden, "perhaps rather too big for him."

In the first innings Evans was, one report said, "so nervous that his knees were knocking together … his nerve had gone and the first straight ball did for him." That, safe to say, was a calumny. Whatever qualities Evans lacked, courage wasn't one of them. "Perhaps," Evans once said, "the majority of men are more afraid of being afraid than of anything else." He was something of an expert on the subject.

Evans's memoirs begin on 16 June, 1916, 4,000 feet up, and 10 miles behind the German lines. He was serving as a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, spotting artillery guns on the Somme. "Wonderfully satisfying work." Until his engine cut out. As his plane started to drift down to the ground, Evans came under fire from the infantry below, and realised that he was about to crash on top of a German battery. In such circumstances, it was a pilot's duty to destroy his plane to stop it being captured in one piece. So he told his gunner, Long, to get ready with the box of matches so they could burn the plane, and then "when I was about 50 feet from the ground I determined to crash the machine on landing," Evans wrote. "This I managed pretty successfully by ramming bar nose into the ground instead of holding her off. We had a bad crash. I found myself hanging upside down by the belt, shaken but unhurt."

Evans got the matches from Long, who was "staggering about in a very dazed condition" and crawled under his place. But he "found firstly that I could not reach the petrol cap and in spite of the machine being upside down there was no petrol dripping anywhere, and secondly that Long had handed me a box without any matches in it." Evans was arrested by a "filthy crowd of soldiers", led by an officer "whose face I didn't like". He was though, more irritated still by his fellow flyer. "Long," he wrote, "was thoroughly shaken, walking and talking like a drunk man. He kept asking questions in the most maddening way. Poor chap, but to be asked every two minutes if you have been captured when you are surrounded by a crowd of beastly Huns …!"

The two of them were sent to Cambrai, a 30-hour train journey – "we travelled second class and smoked cigars" – and then on to Gutersloh Prisoner Of War camp, which had been built in an old lunatic asylum. "The first month or two," Evans admitted, "was a real rest after the strain and excitement of the Somme." The prisoners published a daily paper, and two magazines each month. They worked in a co-operative canteen which sold "wine, whisky, tennis racquets, knives, books, pencils, and tobacco of all sorts." Life was so cushy, Evans complained, that "all officers there had abandoned all hope of escaping."

This state of affairs didn't sit right with Evans, who was soon transferred. He was "getting such an overpowering aversion to being ordered around by Germans" that he "began to think very seriously of escaping." So, one night, he fitted himself up in a civilian suit which he bought for 20 marks off a local tailor, pocketed a pair of nail pincers, which he had pinched off a German electrician, and a compass which had been hand made by a Belgian officer, and cut his way out through the fence surrounding the pea patch in the camp garden. Oh, and he also made himself a hat. This was important, he said, "because the fashion of going bare-headed had not yet come in."

Evans had to time his run into the garden to evade the guards patrolling up and down. "Once in the middle, one has not time to be nervous in either case. It is the necessity of walking and talking and acting as if nothing was going to happen, right up to the moment of going, which is such a strain."

Once out, Evans walked to the local station and bought a ticket on an early morning train to Dusseldorf. "By this time I had completely got over all the feelings of nervousness and was thoroughly enjoying the whole situation." He pretended to sleep the entire way. Arriving in Dusseldorf, he bought a map and some sandwiches, bluffing his way through conversations by using the few German phrases he had committed to memory, like "Ja, wunderschön" and "Die haben sie recht". From there he walked towards Crefeld on the Dutch border. "I thought it would be much safer to walk boldly through the middle of the town. My brother was interned there and I thought how amusing it would be if I were to meet him and wondered if he could keep a straight face when I winked at him."

For three days, Evans walked by night, and hid in haystacks when it was light. He made it to within 20 yards of the border, when he was finally found, trying to hide in a bush that was so small his legs were sticking out the back of it. He was sent back to camp. But he had learned two valuable lessons. The first was that "a forest is the most obvious place to cross a frontier, and for that reason the best guarded". And the second was that when escaping alone "it is almost impossible to refrain from taking undue risks, impossible not to do foolish things. It is partly over-confidence, and partly boredom".

After two weeks in solitary confinement, Evans was sent off to Fort 9 at Ingolstadt in Bavaria, which was where the Germans kept "150 officers with the blackest characters" who had all tried to escape and been recaptured. "All of them firmly believed that it was only the blackest misfortune which had prevented them from crossing the frontier," Evans remembered, "and were convinced that, if once more they could get clear of the camp, they would reach neutral territory and freedom. Each man was ready to help any one who wished to escape and had a plan, regardless of the risks. For courts-martial no one cared twopence."

"The camp was," Evans said, "nothing short of an escaping club." It was filled with the "most ingenious men" who could "make keys which would unlock any door," or "temper and jag the edge of a table knife so that it could be used to cut iron bars". Some were "expert photographers," others "expert engineers", some "spoke German perfectly", others "shammed insanity perfectly". The rest, like Evans, "were ready to risk quite a bit to get out but had no parlour tricks."

They lived off a diet of cabbage soup, "undrinkable acorn coffee", and loaves which were made out of sawdust and potatoes. "We never ate them, but if left for a few days they became hard as a brick and most useful as a firelighter."

Most of their time was spent plotting and preparing escapes from the camp, and much of the rest of it trying to "drive the commandant off his head". Evans had a particular dislike for the commandant. "An incompetent bourgeois shopkeeper, his outstanding features were his conspicuous lack of dignity and his total inability to keep his temper." So he was particularly pleased when the prisoners' ceaseless schoolboy pranks succeeded in seeing him off. "When he was eventually removed from the fort he was nothing less than a raving maniac with occasional sane intervals."

The trouble with Fort 9 was that there were only two ways out. One was through the gatehouse, and the other was across the moat. "So it all boiled down to a nasty cold swim or a colossal piece of bluff."

Cannily, Evans had worked out a secret code with his family before he went off to war, just in case he was captured and needed to communicate with them. "An obvious precaution". So he sent letters home, asking his parents to furnish him with the essentials for his escape. Maps came backed into the crusts of his mother's fruitcakes. Compasses were concealed inside jars of prunes and anchovy paste. "Watching a German open a parcel in which I knew there was a concealed compass was quite the most amusing thing I have ever done."

For his first escape, Evans fashioned a saw out of a table knife, then slowly hacked through the bars of the latrine, concealing the cuts with a mix of flour paste and ash. One night, he squeezed through the gap and scurried over the moat, which had frozen over in winter. He was terrified the ice would collapse beneath him, but then "anyone who lets his mind dwell on what may happen will never escape from prison in Germany" a lesson which we would all do well to remember, on the off-chance. Evans was caught by two farmhands on the far side, and served five days in solitary confinement.

Undeterred, he then teamed up with some French and Russian engineers and spent three weeks digging a tunnel down from their cell towards the inner bank of the moat. The shaft was propped up with bits of broken furniture, and the soil sent back on a wooden cart which was emptied in the latrine. Air was pumped down through a hose and a set of homemade bellows. The French decided they would strip and wade through the moat, carrying their clothes above their heads, but Evans "disliked the idea of being chased naked in winter". So he made himself "a diving suit out of a mackintosh and some grease". When it was done, the prisoners rigged dummies in their beds which "breathed when you pulled a string" to fool the guards, then played "a quick round of baccarat" to decide who would be first to go through the tunnel.

This time they made it a little further, to the neighbouring village, before they were caught and sent back. Sick of his shenanigans, the Germans decided it would be best to transfer Evans by rail to another camp, at Zorndorf. So, of course, he and another British officer, Buckley, jumped out of the train window and ran away. They set off towards the Swiss border, 200 miles away, with a stash of Oxo cubes and chocolate, supplemented by the raw potatoes which they dug out of the fields. They hid in the day, and hiked at night, hunkering down under their overcoats to study maps by matchlight.

"By the 12th night food became a barred subject between us, but I remember thinking of several distinct occasions on which I had refused second helpings in pre-war days and wondering how I could have been such a fool." They brazened their way through their occasional encounters with German soldiers and civilians, and arrived, 18 days later, at the border by Lake Constance, "slightly insane with hunger and fatigue". They crawled across it on their hands and knees. "We stepped into Switzerland, feeling a happiness and a triumph such, I firmly believe, as few men have ever felt, though they may have deserved the feeling many times more."

Incredibly, Evans was soon back in the service, with a bomber squadron in Palestine. "I hated long bombing raids, for the fear of recapture was always with me while I was over enemy territory. My nerves had suffered from the events of the past three years, and it was only with a great effort of will that I forced myself to take part in expeditions far over enemy lines." He was, predictably enough, captured again after another crash landing, this time by the Turks. And, predictably enough, he got away again too. Though his efforts to repeat his feat of escaping on foot failed after a week spent blundering bare-footed around the desert surrounding the Dead Sea. Instead he bribed a doctor in Constantinople, who declared him sick and included him in a prisoner exchange between the British and the Turks.

But that is another story, and one which, it has to be said, is spoiled by Evans' bilious opinions and racist descriptions of both his captors and his company. Hardship had fostered hatred in him. And, as he said himself "technically, I think I may claim to have escaped from Turkey as well as from Germany. But I am not particularly proud of the Turkish escape."

Evans is, then, one of the few men in history to have made two successful escapes from a POW camp, which must be worth an extra run or two on his batting average. "I don't think there is anything I have ever done quite so exciting as escaping from a prison," Evans wrote. "It may not be the same for other men who have tried both fighting in the air and escaping, but I know for me the nervous tension before the latter is much greater than anything I have experienced at the front." After all that, what thrill is there to be had in ceaseless seasons of cricket? And what fear to be found in facing down Ted McDonald's fast bowling?

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