A Game Sustained

178 players, adminstrators and spectators in a prompt resumption of cricket. Returning troops initially had little difficulty finding jobs, average wages were up and the standard working week was reduced. 127 The cricket authorities were keen to catch people quickly before they were seduced away by alternative entertainments such as the cinema or by football, which was encroaching ever more on the cricket season. And there were even suggestions among some admirers of the game that its presence in national life had a calming influence. In May 1920, the Yorkshire Post commented that it was probably not a coincidence ‘that in those parts of the country in which cricket languishes industrial disturbances are more frequent, more prolonged, and more intemperate than in those other regions in which cricket is the game of every schoolboy.’ A resumption of the game seemed to hold out many positives. Nevertheless, the talk throughout the war and, more intensively afterwards, was of ‘brightening’ the game to address the shortcomings that had seen interest in county cricket appear to decline before 1914, and to pay greater attention to the expectations of spectators. Some seemed to understand this, with former Yorkshire captain Sir Archibald White recognising in an interview in 1919 that ‘when the expense of running a county cricket side is so serious, it behoves captains to study the interests of the spectator more than ever.’ As it turned out, however, the forces of tradition remained strong, and little was done to change most aspects of the first-class game as it entered the 1920s. In part, this was nostalgia for a (mis-)remembered past of dashing batsmen entertaining full grounds during a ‘Golden Age’, but perhaps also an understandable desire to maintain some stability in what, to many, appeared to be ‘an alarming world.’ 128 Despite this, there were also early indications of the divisions that would characterise cricket in the 1920s – the professional-amateur tensions and the emergence of the less deferential professional cricketer; the noisier and more demanding crowds, particularly at Sheffield; the renewed northern-southern county antagonisms; and the stand-off between the first-class game and the major leagues. Concluding thoughts: Cricket, Yorkshire and the Great War