The Summer Field

47 By then the only amateurs were passing youths like Freeman Barnardo, who before the 1939-45 war played once for Cambridge University against Yorkshire (out leg before Hutton for 75, his only first-class runs) and once for Middlesex, at Cambridge, in May 1939. Barnardo and his like were merely cheap labour, though well-connected and well-spoken. A s average standards rose, amateurs found it harder to keep up. It was as Lord Desborough summed up in a 1932 essay: The skill now necessary in games like cricket and football requires such constant practice that amateurs in these hard days find it increasingly difficult to devote the necessary time, and cricket and football are falling more and more in the hands of those who have to be paid for their services. Even with as much talent as a pro’, sooner or later amateurs had to make a living outside sport, in what some called ‘the game of life’. Tennis was the same; in August 1937 the English Davis Cup player C.E.Hare said he would have liked to play for longer, ‘but it is imperative that I look ahead to my future business career’. Amateur captains lingered, despite the hypocrisy, because enough people paying at the gate, and especially writing the cheques in the committee room, wanted them. Eventually, amateurism became as impossible to defend as an unelected House of Lords. Even an amateur captain, Charles Palmer of Leicestershire, wrote in his county’s 1951 annual ‘that providing a man has the appropriate abilities it matters not a jot or tittle what his status may be’. Palmer straddled two viewpoints, when England was passing from one rule to another: from the old based on land-owning, the church and the monarchy; to the new, of managers chosen on merit to run private enterprise and the new nationalised industries alike. Likewise, you were no longer picked for your county (or even your country) ahead of another man because of who your father was, where you went to school, or because you only asked for travel expenses. Just as spectator sport employed professionals, so the professionals took command of soldiering, medicine, the law, politics – confusing, admittedly, because ‘professional’ did not mean quite the same outside sport. You could only take a job as a scientist, teacher, sports coach even, if you had the right qualification - which was not the same as being fit for the job. Elite sport showed up the flaw in professional society. You could pass an exam in sports science, ‘sportology’, but could you bowl six leg breaks on the same length? Or hit them for six? Even if you could on the day of the test, could you a year later? Only if you kept proving yourself on the field, were you paid to play. Hence Palmer’s choice of the word ‘status’ was so important. Men always ranked themselves, according to whatever customs inside cricket or wider society. Your body of work and most recent successes; money and title (inherited or earned), fame, beauty: all counted. A cricketer’s status was forever changing, compared to his fellows and to wider society. The young might decide against or aim for an occupation, depending on its status. A man’s or occupation’s status depended on the solid — the age and make of a Why Cricket?