Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

98 The Shadow Of Embourgeoisement many cricketers found some monetary solace. George Hirst’s record benefit of £3703 had been exceptional; it was a record that stood the test of time until 1925 when his fellow-Yorkshireman Roy Kilner collected £4016. Dovecotes fluttered in 1920 when the the £939 benefit of Kent’s James Seymour was challenged by the Inland Revenue, arguing that this testimonial derived straightforwardly from the work he had done and was therefore subject to tax. It was a protracted case that wound itself through various court-rooms until ultimately it found itself in the House of Lords which ruled in favour of the beneficiary. Thus benefit proceeds were protected against taxation as long as they were patently in the form of ‘a personal gift from the public.’ Technically, this meant that a benefit could not be assured by being a condition of the player’s contract; it had, notionally, to arise spontaneously through the gratitude of the fans. The conventional comparison in respect of earnings is with association football. Cricket professionals were, on the whole, still better off than their footballing counterparts, always recalling that some – Denis Compton is a notable example – played both games professionally. In 1922 the maximum football weekly wage was actually reduced from £9 to £8, with £6 about the highest for the summer retainer. All this, amounting to £354 annually, applied only to a small fortunate or talented band, so with very few international add-ons, footballers did not do as well as capped cricketers overall. The registration system was very strict; a judicial decision in the 1913 case of Kingsby v Aston Villa went in favour of the club. The player claimed his livelihood had been lost because the club had hung too high a transfer fee upon him and he was no longer needed as an Aston Villa player. But the law of contract was upheld on the employer’s side. At least the footballers were not cursed with a restrictive birth or residential condition; not many Hotspurs were born in Tottenham. Furthermore, the range of opportunities was much wider. In the immediate post-war years two teams were added to the existing two divisions and two more divisions were added. Thus the mainline Football League was comprised of 92 clubs, with the Scottish Football League offering jobs to another series of clubs north of the border. Some of the stronger non- Football league competitions also employed some professional and many semi-professional players. In the Football League alone there must have been approaching 3000 paid players. Although the semi-professional genre and the many tales of back-handed payments to gifted amateurs created something of a grey area, football attempted, unlike cricket, to separate rather than combine the paid and unpaid player. The distinction continued to fall between the business-orientated professional spectator sport and the largely amateur recreational game. At this stage the Football Association had 10,000 clubs in affiliation and 750,000 young men and youths played football every weekend. During the 1930s the County FAs also took charge of schools football competitions and several thousand secondary schools were involved in these. It was around the turn of the century that the annual numbers spectating at Football League fixtures passed those watching first-class cricket. By the