All too brief

Cecil Abercrombie - Died at Jutland, May 31st, 1916 

In 1977, a battered, dust covered photo album was hooked out of a builder’s skip on a street in central London. The pictures captured the pre WW1 marriage of a young naval officer called Cecil Abercrombie.  A rugby international and a Hampshire cricketer, Abercrombie was destined to be one of the 8,500 men killed at the Battle of Jutland at the end of May, 1916.

He spent some of his youth with relatives in the New Forest, the Shaw family of Milford House, and on joining the navy he played rugby for the Combined Services side in Portsmouth. A powerful loose forward, he went on to win six Scottish caps. By the summer of 1912 he had taken up cricket, and he impressed the crowd at Lords with some destructive hitting in the Army v Navy match. His quick fire century in the second innings featured a mammoth six that landed on the players’ dressing room balcony. Hampshire lost no time in securing his signature.

In just 13 matches in the summer of 1913, Abercrombie scored nearly a thousand runs.  Most famously, Abercrombie combined with George Brown to produce a huge stand of 325 for the seventh wicket against Essex, a record that is still etched proudly on Hampshire’s records board more than a hundred years later. Abercrombie smashed 165 runs, including 11 fours and 4 sixes.

Hampshire’s supporters would have been licking their lips at the prospect of their new hero dismantling County attacks in the 1914 season, but naval duty called for Abercrombie.

When his ship, HMS Defence, was finally called into action at Jutland at the end of May 1916, Abercrombie was one of 903 men lost. Defence had lasted a matter of minutes in combat. A stunned officer on board a nearby ship, the Obedient, wrote that after a huge explosion “we could see no sign of a ship at all – Defence had gone.”

Abercrombie and his wife had only married in 1913, and the battered photo album saved from the builders’ skip was the record of their time together. Like Abercrombie’s cricket career, her married life had been all too brief.