Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

103 left his blazer in the dressing room because his amateur skipper had done so but Herbert Sutcliffe severely instructed him, ‘we must do everything better than the amateurs. Your manners must be better, and if possible you must speak and dress better, too.’ 8 His aim, therefore, was not to make a proud trade with a craft guild character like an engineers’ or electricians’ union. His aim was to make cricket a profession in the style of teaching or medicine or law. He was certainly triumphant in terms of himself in this regard. Rising to be a major in World War II, he built a flourishing sports outfitting business in Leeds and Wakefield, which his son took over in the post-war years. Herbert Sutcliffe then became a representative and later a director of a paper manufacturing business where – most exquisite of ironies – his former England captain, Douglas Jardine, haughtiest of leaders, was employed as company secretary. He sent his son William Herbert Hobbs Sutcliffe to Rydal School; rejoicing in that glorious trio of initials, he played for Yorkshire as an amateur and captained the club in 1956 and 1957. Herbert Sutcliffe’s immediate famed predecessors with Yorkshire and England, Wilfred Rhodes and George Hirst had coached at such schools, the one at Harrow, the other at Eton. Now a fellow-professional ushered his son into a public school and, later, Len Hutton would emulate his guru by packing off his son Richard to Repton, prior to his cricketing days with Cambridge University, Yorkshire and England. 9 Thus began the gentrification of the English cricket professional. Thus started his transformation into a middle class typology of professional. Wally Hammond, whose claim to be one of cricket’s premier batsmen is non-negotiable, was also a leading light on the social as well as the sporting front. Rather like W.G.Grace, he found himself falling between two class stools and it is apparent that, as he matured, this confused him and left him discontented. His father was a regular soldier who, in the tumult of the 1914-18 conflict, shot up through the ranks to become a major. He was killed in 1918. His widowed mother managed on a relatively small income to educate her son at Portsmouth Grammar School as a day boy and Cirencester Grammar School as a boarder, hopeful that he would take up farming. Thereafter he became a Gloucestershire professional; there was certainly no family money to fund him as an amateur. Wally Hammond was also a gifted enough footballer with Plymouth Argyle and Bristol Rovers to evoke prophecies of him being a double international. His reluctance to continue as a professional footballer like several other cricketers such as Harry Makepeace (Everton and England) and Andy Ducat (Aston Villa and England) gives rise to two compelling points. One is that he believed, rightly, that, as a paid cricketer, with the promise of overseas tours, he would be able to afford a small car and maybe even purchase a modest home, neither of which was possible for the lower paid footballer. But his perceptive biographer, Gerald Howat, makes an even more telling point in describing Wally Hammond’s distaste for the plebeian ethos of professional football: ‘the football world was more proletarian than he cared for. He was a little different from the rest The Shadow Of Embourgeoisement