Dimming of the Day

15 The Structure of Cricket in 1914 Journal reported on teams such as Kesteven Asylum and the Belvoir Hunt Servants playing in the local leagues. The Express carried fixtures and scores for the South London League, the Harrow and Wealdstone League and the Battersea Churches Association games on Wandsworth Common. There were small local leagues running in Kent, Sussex, Suffolk and Norfolk. In Cornwall, Wales and Scotland league cricket dominated as it did in the North and Midlands. In the south of England the leagues were later to wither away in the face of the scorn of the Club Cricket Conference, founded during the war to help arrange friendly matches, but later to crusade against league cricket. There is an interesting quote from the website of the Club Cricket Conference no less (based on research by Duncan Stone), The CCC was founded in 1915 to help clubs cope with fixtures during the Great War, but the organisation lost its way in the 1950s and 1960s. This was a dark period when the CCC could justifiably be regarded as reactionary and even destructive while aspirations of so many club cricketers were beginning to change. In the post-War era a rule in the CCC’s original constitution was used to block all attempts to introduce competition and coaching in the south. That sort of behaviour is completely disowned by the CCC nowadays. The CCC’s original rule read, ‘It shall be an indispensible condition that this London Club Cricket Conference shall neither recognise, approve of, nor promote any cup or league system.’ ‘London’ might be significant. In fact the summary for Duncan Stone’s paper reads, As the late Victorian and Edwardian upper classes’ power declined, some of the sporting elites were determined tomaintain their social and cultural hegemony. Within amateur cricket, this was to be maintained by the Club Cricket Conference (CCC), the aims of which were to ‘control and safeguard amateur cricket along strictly non-competitive lines’. Although largely reactionary, the CCC, due in no small part to its social origins, exerted a disproportionate influence over amateur club cricket in the South of England – especially with regard to the aggressive suppression of leagues. Although the historiography suggests that the CCC were very successful in this endeavour, leagues and cups existed throughout the South from the early 1880s. The historical oversight of what became a predominantly working-class mode of cricket, and the game’s cultural meaning, reflects the social origins and influence of the CCC’s elite founders (and many historians) over the game and its image. Far more attention was paid by the press to cricket at the public schools, especially the “great “ schools who played their traditional rivals at Lord’s. Cricket was a major activity at these schools and they would run second and junior elevens as well as “the Eleven”. They would play other schools, but would also play local and wandering clubs as well as MCC. In 1914 Hurstpierpoint College, then a school of 186 boys, ran three teams and