Former York journalist Dan Waddell's latest book tells the extraordinary story of an English cricket team which toured Nazi Germany in 1937. One of the English innocents abroad was a young Peter Terry, of the York chocolate family. STEPHEN LEWIS reports

IN the summer of 1937, Berlin was a city of contradictions. At night, the bars and restaurants were crammed to bursting; cinemas screened Hollywood movies; and the Nazis who were intent on letting their hair down turned a blind eye to the jazz music – officially decried as being of 'negro' origin – which played in the city's many clubs.

But overlying all this was the sinister panoply of fascism. The Unter den Linden, Berlin's grandest street, named after its lime trees, now featured three towering rows of white columns – each adorned with gilded swastikas and eagles – that stretched the boulevard's entire length. Many of the street's buildings were bedecked with red swastika flags.

"The effect," writes former York journalist Dan Waddell in his new book Field of Shadows, was "a stunning... display of Nazi pageantry and might."

Into this strange world came a small team of English gentlemen cricketers.

The Gentlemen of Worcester had been invited by the Nazi high command to take part in an official three-test cricket tour. Among them was a young man fresh from Marlborough by the name of Peter Terry.

The son of Noel Terry, head of the York chocolate family, he was a gifted cricketer, but had no real connection with Worcestershire. He had been invited because the tour was organised by Major Maurice Jewell, the father of Peter's Marlborough friend, also called Maurice.

"I think Major Jewell was scratching around for men," says Dan.

Whatever the reason, the young Peter Terry found himself taking part in this oddest of cricket tours. The tourists were put up in the Adlon Hotel, one of the most luxurious in the world. But they quickly realised what a strange place this Nazi capital city was.

In 1937, a year after the Berlin Olympics, relations between Germany and Britain were still much less tense than they were soon to become. Yet this was a city in which the journalist Kurt Hiller was tortured by the Gestapo for daring to write for a leftist magazine; in which soldiers were ever-present, and undesirables were cleared from the streets.

The English tourists were at one point required to 'Sieg Heil' the Berlin cricket club team who were their hosts. It didn't seem a particularly big thing at the time, writes Dan – not like the football international between England and Germany at Berlin's Olympic Stadium a year later, where the question of whether or not the English team would offer the salute led to a diplomatic crisis.

But the Gentlemen of Worcestershire, young Peter Terry among them, knew something was not right. Amid the barbarity of Nazi German this tour was a 'quiet oasis of cricket and culture and Englishness', Dan says. "But by the end of the tour they knew Germany was a strange place and couldn't wait to get the hell out of there."

The Worcestershire gentleman beat the Germans 3-0 in the series; all the games were played in Berlin. By the time they came to leave, Berlin was preparing to celebrate its 700th anniversary, a date pulled out of thin air for propaganda reasons, Dan writes. "Rather than parading in columns, troops were everywhere, stopping and searching passersby, and there was the intermittent crackle of gunfire in the distance."

An influx of visitors was expected for the anniversary celebrations. "And the authorities were rounding up and expelling 'undesirables.'" Perhaps not suprisingly, Dan says, the tourists were 'relieved to get away'.

The Gentlemen of Worcestershire never spoke much afterwards about that tour to Nazi Germany . Peter Terry went to Cambridge then, at the start of his third year and following the outbreak of war, enlisted in the Suffolk Regiment.

For most of the war he was a signalling instructor at Catterick, says his eldest son Anthony, who now lives in London.

It was only when the war was almost over that he was posted to the First Indian Airborne Division near Nagpur. They were training for a drop into Malaya to fight the Japanese, Anthony says - and then the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "I think one can safely say his life was saved by the dropping of the atom bomb."

Peter remained a keen sportsman all his life - his golf handicap was in single figures, he played county squash and hockey for York. But it was cricket that was his first love - at the time of his death in 2006, he was still vice president of the Yorkshire (not Worcestershire) Gentlemen.

After the war, he joined the family chocolate business, and spent most of his working life there. He died, aged 87, in February 2006, a few months after the chocolate factory which bore his name finally closed. By that time he had long since retired, and the firm was owned by Kraft. Mr Terry opposed the closure, and signed an Evening Press petition calling on the factory to be saved. The day it closed, says Anthony, was the 'saddest day of his life'.

And did he ever, during the course of his long life, talk about that cricket tour to Nazi Germany as a young man?

"He did. Not in any great detail, but he did mention that he had played cricket in Germany before the war, and that they all had to 'Heil Hitler'. He mentioned it from time to time... I think he rather enjoyed the unusual nature of it."

BLOB Field Of Shadows by Dan Waddell is published by Bantam, priced £16.99