Russell Stewart Marriott, Sr.
April 4 1979

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BB: Now, tell me what you did while you were in England? What was the work for the church that you did?

RSM: Well, our main purpose of going on a mission for the church was to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, the gospel that had been revealed to the prophet Joseph Smith in these latter days. And we were to take this message to the English people. And so, with this in mind, we had to have all types of ways (to reach the people). Many of the people didn't want to listen to us.

BB: And how did you get to them?

RSM: It was a difficult job to a young person. I was about twenty-one years old, maybe twenty-two. It was difficult for us to get this message to the people, to get them to listen to us, to tell them our message. Some of the missionaries a year before we came to England were playing baseball and they used baseball as a method of getting to the English people so they could talk to them. When I arrived in London the mission president asked me if I had participated in any sports and I said yes, I had played baseball and I had played basketball. Well, they needed baseball players up in the north of England near Manchester in a little town called Rochdale. The town was about I forty to sixty thousand people. They were playing baseball there, so the mission president asked me to go up there and play baseball. Now we didn't spend all of our time playing baseball. We only played baseball a very short period of the time. We would maybe go out for an hour in the after-noon and practice. The rest of the time was spent in reading the scriptures, and in studying, and going around knocking on doors, talking to people, and maybe speaking in church. We had several churches over there at that time, and we would be asked to speak in church. And this was the way we took the message to the people. But one of the very interesting things about my mission (is that) this was the only place in the whole world where the Mormon missionaries went that they played baseball. This was the only place. It was a unique mission because we got to the people so much better than all the other missionaries. We turned out to be idols of the English people in this city. We could do almost anything we wanted. We had a wonderful attendance to our baseball games, and we played in a professional league. Baseball was really just starting over there, but the English people had developed quite a number of teams around the country. They used the Canadian hockey players who had played baseball, and then they imported professional baseball players from the United States. They had some very good baseball players playing on the English team. One of the pitchers that we had to bat against was named Lefty Wilson, who was a pitcher for the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals. They paid him a good size sum of money to come over to England and pitch for them. We used to have pretty good crowds. The English people picked up baseball very rapidly. It was a faster moving game than cricket, and they seemed to like it very well. We used to charge two and six to come in and see us play.

BB: Two and six.

RSM: Which was about sixty cents in those days.

BB: Did you learn any of the English sports? Rugby or cricket?

RSM: We learned only one game and that was rugby. We did play in a commercial league. We played in the fall after the summer was over; we played rug-by for one season. Because I had played football and most of the companions had played football in college or in high school, we had a very good rugby team. In fact, we were so good that we got second place in the division, which was very, very good considering we were just a group of elders who weren't taking it up professionally.

BB: Did you make any friends during that period of time that have been friends of yours for a number of years since then?

RSM: Well, I had a lot of friends over there in England. A few of them I wrote to. After I got back from England, I got married and things were moving along so fast that I almost forgot about England. One lady and gentleman that I met while I was in London whose names were Madge and Bernard Woodford. They became our good friends there in London and when I returned to America they came over to see us and everytime we went back to England or to Europe to travel we would go to see them. And to this day they still write us and come to see us once in a while. They are very, very good friends of ours.

BB: What year did you leave England? Was it in the fall or what was the particular time when you finished your mission and got to come back to the United States?

RSM: Well, I might tell you one experience that might be interesting before you go into that. While I was there, we had a centennial--a hundred years of Mormonism in England. Mormonism had been taken to England a hundred years before that time, and this was a centennial, so they had a huge celebration. So where should they hold this celebration, where should they hold this? Well, the most popular place in the whole of England was right in Rochdale where we were playing baseball, and every-one thought the world of the Mormon missionaries there. So, they held this big centennial there, and people from all over Europe and the United States came over for this celebration. It was a huge thing. President Grant was the president of the church at that time. He came to England and spoke to the people there in England at this time. I was the leader of the Mormon elders there at that time, so I was in charge of all of this big undertaking. I had to get a lot of the events ready and all the things done. President Grant had been a baseball player when he was a boy, and so he loved baseball. So we scheduled one of our games which was the game at the end of the season--the championship game--at this time when all these people would be there. And we held this huge game, and President Grant came out and threw over the baseball, the first ball at the beginning of the game. We were playing, as I told you, a professional team, and they were a very strong team. We had some players on our team that had been sent there to Rochdale from different parts of the United States that were Mormons. They sent over the best players they could find to play there in this team. We had triple A players that had played triple A baseball in the United States playing for us. We had a good team, but we were also playing professionals. We were quite young to be playing professional baseball. But we had won most of our other games and there were two teams that were eligible to play in this championship, and that was our team and, as I remember, it was the team from Leeds. We started this game and did pretty well until the latter part, and we got behind. We wanted to win this game very much, mainly because we had become the idols of the city. It was a small city, and baseball meant quite a bit to them. We had quite a large following, and we wanted to win this game very much. We got to the end of the game and in the ninth inning, and we were behind. We were six and they were eleven. We were in the ninth inning and we had two outs and the batter was going to get up to bat. He was the last out, and we had to get six runs to win that game. So being elders, we had a little prayer. And after the prayer the first elder that got up to bat got a hit. Well, the congregation had started to leave. They were filing down the road out of the stadium because there was no way we were going to win this game as far as they were concerned, and they were leaving the stadium. Well, we started getting hits, every elder that got up got a hit. Every one of us got a hit until we got six runs. Well, when these people went out of the stadium, they heard the shouting, and they started to come back and came back into the stadium and watched another forty-five minutes of baseball. And we won the game.

BB: That must have been the high point of your participation in sports.

RSM: That was one of the high points of our participation in sports. With one exception--we went on to play basketball and this is right before the World War. In fact, it (the war) was before I left my mission. Hitler had marched into Austria, and we were playing basketball. They gave us the armories to play in. They liked this sport. The British liked it so much and the army generals liked it so much because it was a sport they could play indoors and they could rehabilitate their army. And so they asked me to go around to the different armories and set up basketball courts for them, which I did. We won the British champion-ship in basketball, and to thank us for this, they sent us all over Europe to play in the European championship. We went to the major cities in Europe, and all our expenses and everything was paid by the British government. And we were all American players. One of the main teams that we had a hard time with, we only beat them by three points, was the German army team. We played the German army team and beat them.

BB: And this was just before the war broke out? RSM: That was just before the war broke out.

BB: Do you remember what city it was that you were playing in?

RSM: It was in Berlin. And when we went to stay in the hotel, in front of the hotel, the British flag was out there and the German flag was in front of this hotel.

BB: Do you remember how long this was before the war broke out? Was it a month or two months or three?

RSM: The war had already broke out with Austria and it was about six months before England and Germany went to war.

BB: Six months. That's interesting. You were there at a very unusual time.

RSM: I was there at a very unusual time. And I traveled all around Europe and saw so many things. At another time I'll have to tell you some of these experiences because it was at a unique time when Hitler was at the top, his peak of this regime and (Mussolini) was, too, at both those times. I traveled in all those countries and I got to see both Hitler and Mussolini. It was quite a unique time and I had so many wonderful experiences.

BB: Well, I can hardly wait until we start again. (Break)

RSM: They would set aside time for about an hour or two hours after every baseball game and they (the people) would come through to talk to us after our baseball games. And this is the way we did our teaching the gospel. And we did that after our baseball games and our basketball games, and we would be invited out to their homes. We had so many appointments we couldn't fulfill them. We'd go out to their homes, and they'd invite all their friends in, and we'd talk to them about Mormonism and about the gospel of Christ.

BB: And so you really had quite a good opportunity on your mission for your church.

RSM: We had much more opportunities than any of the other missionaries that went on a mission. We had those opportunities there and then the centennial being held there. It was such a fantastic thing. All of this was just an amazing thing. (On) my mission, I was out every night to a meeting with people. Talking to them every night, where missionaries in other parts of the world would be lucky to hold a meeting once a month or once every two months and things like that.