Dimming of the Day

18 The Making of the Myth of a Golden Age for 1902 when the wet summer merely made Victor Trumper’s batting seem even more extraordinary). The myth still has power: if we look at Half of the Human Race 2 , published in 2011, the romance between the cricketer and the suffragette does little to suggest that others besides women might be suffering. As so often, the working class are invisible except as domestic servants. After 1918, there were those who had survived; Pelham Warner for instance and, of course, Neville Cardus with his reminiscences of MacLaren and Spooner and of early visits to Old Trafford did much to stoke the furnace. It is hardly a surprise for those surviving the Great War that the years before it took on a particular glow. Especially was this true for the upper and upper middle classes who felt a loss of status with the rise of organised labour, but mainly felt the terrible loss of life of a generation who died in Flanders and elsewhere. After the war, the landowning class – very important for a certain type of cricket, and that the most gilded of all – suffered from the loss of rents with the agricultural depression, and some of them for the loss of their investments. Of course, they blamed it all on increased taxes. The years before 1914 seemed all the more carefree. Altham in fact referred to the golden age of batting (and headed his chapter so), though his contention was that the bowling was strong as well, serving to enhance the glow of the batsmanship. Cardus in his English Cricket 3 said the same thing – it was the golden age of batsmanship – and that was based on the gilded batting of the great amateur batsmen. Cardus went on to identify it as a golden age per se because there were good bowlers about and because Australians looked on it as such (largely, but not entirely, because of Victor Trumper). Cardus’s book was written before the Second World War was over and when he was in Australia and not expecting to write on cricket again and so a certain sentimental nostalgia may have crept in. Any golden age of amateur batting was over well before 1914. In 1902 England’s batting at Birmingham had included Fry, Ranjitsinjhi, MacLaren, Jackson and Jessop. In 1914 the leading amateur batsmen (by average) were Sydney Smith of Northants and Donald Knight of Surrey. Lawrence Booth said, talking about Tom Maynard, Sportsmen are not supposed to die young. They may lapse into premature decline once their careers are over; they may be taken from us too soon by injury. But to die young is the preserve of the rock star. It is not part of the sporting deal, with its athleticism and gilded youth. 4 There is a different flavour to this than to Victorian cricket in general. The backlash against the starchy Victorian rectitude which was now seen 2 Anthony Quinn, Half of the Human Race , 2011 3 Neville Cardus, English Cricket Collins, 1945 4 Lawrence Booth, TopSpin , email 19 June 2012