Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

101 is again self-evident. J.T.Hearne, when Middlesex’s senior ‘pro’, ordered the time of meals and the time for going to bed. After first the seniors had sat down to eat and their juniors had shyly followed them to the chairs, he would enter, take over his place at the head of the table and preside over the repast. It could have been downstairs at Downton Abbey. It is unsurprising that the long-serving and immaculately mannered J.T.Hearne was, as early as 1902, invited to serve on the Middlesex Committee, the first professional anywhere so to be asked. 6 Ernest Tyldesley, the Lancashire and England batsman, who was considered at one time for the county captaincy, was another who served his club committee after his retirement in 1936. A sedate and thoughtful man, he would not have made waves and would have offered his opinions quietly and sparingly. This all eased a little as the years drew by but the amateur/professional barriers were mainly retained. Some counties did not have separate dressing rooms by this time, although amateur captains who essayed to lead out their troops through one gate at Lord’s received short shrift. During this era, in part owing to the decline in the number of amateurs available, a number of professionals, some two dozen, captained their counties on occasion. Jack Hobbs, who was to shatter the mould with his knighthood long after he had retired in 1953, was always reluctant to step into the captaincy shoes either with England or Surrey; even when a knighted elder he was wont to embarrass callow young amateurs by addressing them as ‘sir or ‘mister’. Alf Gover, the Surrey fast bowler, has recorded both the church-going Jack Hobbs’s severe intolerance of bad language in the dressing room and of his own embarrassment when, on becoming a senior, he found it acutely painful to mumble ‘Jack’ instead of Mr Hobbs. Ewart Astill was the first professional actually to be appointed a county captain. He skippered Leicestershire in 1935 in what was one of their most satisfying campaigns but his appointment was not renewed and Leicestershire slumped again. Ewart Astill, a highly consistent all-rounder, was a capable man who, unusually for a paid cricketer, had gained a commission with the Machine Gun Corps in World War1, but somehow the Leicester committee was not tempted to reappoint him. On the other side, there were amateurs who verged on a genuine if slightly glossed over professionalism of a kind which even the most cynical ‘player’ did not feel breached the code of ‘gentleman’. This was where the captain acted also as what now would be called the chief executive of the club, the head cook and bottle-washer who made it his career to keep the county in workable condition. These were not the sinecures of the purported ‘assistant secretaries’, masks to fund young amateurs; these were full- time gruelling jobs. The chief example in these pre-1939 days was Maurice Turnbull at Glamorgan; he ruefully complained how he wore his feet out dancing at fund-raising balls and altogether did a most efficacious job for that hitherto ailing county. Two other instances were Cyril Walters and Vallance Jupp at Worcestershire and and Northants respectively. That captain-cum-secretary was the sort of role undertaken by Trevor Bailey at The Shadow Of Embourgeoisement