Chapter Four St Lubbock’s Day The big crowds attending the Lord’s showpiece fixtures masked a social problem. Missionary touring elevens had taken cricket beyond the railheads and introduced it to the people; the AEE-UAEE encounters lifted the game to new heights of quality before the allure of the travelling elevens began to pall. The outcome was an interregnum of sorts – a period when there was little big cricket to see and relatively few people with the time and money to watch it. And ironically, as Great Britain entered an era of unparalleled prosperity, the leisure hours of its working class had suffered. Many people uprooted themselves from the countryside, forced to seek work in the towns after the enclosures of common land left them with no means of supporting themselves by farming or agriculture. Long and demanding six-day weeks with Sunday allowed for rest and religion, plus Good Friday and Christmas Day, left a man with few opportunities to see Pilch or Mynn should they be playing in the vicinity. His lot was to improve but it was to be a long, hard road. Factory Acts eased the burden of labour. Those of 1819 and 1833 reduced the amount of hours children between the ages of nine and 18 were required to work; the Ten Hours Act of 1847 introduced a 10-hour working day or a 60-hour week, although employers found it easy to side-step the legislation. It was not until 1874 that the clear ten hours was secured; indeed, it was to be 1910 before miners had their underground shifts restricted to eight hours. The first major step which affected the playing and watching of cricket was the Saturday half-day, which developed from the shorter Saturday working day originally granted to textile workers and which, given an early-morning start, had allowed them an afternoon off. The half-day emerged during the 1850s, when business closed at 2pm. During the next 20 years the idea of a paid holiday also started to take root. At first this was restricted to just a few days but the gradual development of Wakes Weeks and similar mill and factory shutdowns in northern industrial towns placed the focus on local fairs and other events. As the railway system developed, so workers descended on seaside resorts such as Blackpool during Wakes Week. In the south, Brighton, Folkestone, Hastings, Margate, Ramsgate and Southend beckoned. By the 1920s, 1.5 million workers were entitled to a paid holiday, a figure which had doubled by 1938 and octupled in 1939 with the Pay Act. In 1868, the general election had left the Liberals with 387 seats to the Conservatives’ 271. The first great ministry of William Ewart Gladstone had begun and one of his early reforms was to have a major influence on cricket. The catalyst was Sir John Lubbock who became Liberal MP for Maidstone in 1870. Lubbock, who was born in 1834, was a member of a family of bankers which had strong associations with Bromley in Kent. They bought an estate there in 1808, which originally was used for sheep rearing although the later emphasis was on dairy cattle and cereal crops. In the mid-19th century High Elms House, at 18