Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

100 The Shadow Of Embourgeoisement distillation of moral probity. As late as the 1990s I found myself having a ding-dong row with a public school/Varsity blue England Test player who believed Oxford and Cambridge should enroll promising (male) cricketers with below par academic grades. His constant, indeed only, refrain was that cricket was ‘the national game.’ In 1944 G.M.Trevelyan was to write his oft-cited quotation that ‘if the French nobility had been capable of playing cricket, their chateaux would never have been burned.’ This explication of the English class system being more benign and less caste-ridden than that of the French has been ceaselessly deployed by defenders of the cricketing faith. Trevelyan’s critics would argue that, writing toward the encouraging later years of World War II and naturally optimistic in his Whig interpretation of unfailing progress, he may have erred on the sentimental side in this judgement. There is no doubt that cricket provided a locus for the coming together of the classes both as players and spectators and that this, in the natural way of things, contributed to the social calm. But it was more an effect than a cause, the cause being a much deeper and more extensive shift in social conditions. Nonetheless, Trevelyan’s four volume story of English domestic life is brilliantly achieved. 4 The point is that during this mid-wars era cricket could no longer assume, whatever the past devotion of its adherents, the degree of cultural and moral potency implicit in such statements. The relative serenity of late Victorian times was sustained. The cultural historian Jeffery Richards has developed the Victorian notion of the working classes being divided into self-explanatory ‘respectable’ and ‘rough’ categories. He suggests that before about the 1850s the rough element had been dominant and that thereafter and until after the Second World War the respectable component attained ascendancy, It might be argued as well that the middle and upper echelons of society also went through this switch of character. This syllogism is a valuable tool for a simple analysis of changing conditions and cultures. It is significant that, for cricket’s two sequential ‘Golden Ages’, covering a hundred year cycle from the 1850s to the 1950s, the ‘respectable’ element was resolutely to the fore. 5 Nevertheless, for all of cricket’s petrified position between the two wars, there were straws in the wind. Even if the structure lay rigid, there were tiny movements in the superstructure that hinted at later more major changes. These clues lay in the borderland between the two classes. First of all, however, there was some levelling up to be done within the professional bracket itself. The nuances of a class-ridden society are numerous. There was a distinction between junior and senior staff, marked on some grounds, notably Lord’s and the Oval, by separate dressing rooms, while, until counselled otherwise, the senior professional had to be addressed as ‘sir’ or ‘mister’. Pettifogging although this may seem, one has to understand how in a tightly bonded group such conventions assumed telling significance. The comparison with the army regiment with its Regimental Sergeant- major or domestic service with its butler very much in authoritative control