Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

104 of the Bristol Rovers squad.’ 10 He developed a mode of life more in keeping with a ‘gentleman’. His two marriages – to Dorothy Lister from a wealthy Bradford textile family and to Sybil Ness-Harvey from a moneyed South African background – were definitively upwardly mobile. During the Second World War he became a squadron-leader in the RAF, commissioned like others of his England colleagues such as Leslie Ames, Bill Edrich and Hedley Verity. Herbert Sutcliffewas sure tohave notedwithquiet approval Bill Bowes’s commission as a gunnery officer. However, before this Walter Hammond made the major breakthrough of becoming an amateur and captaining England. In 1937, to be more specifically accurate, he became a ‘gentleman’, courtesy of a £2000 per annum directorship with the Marsham Tyres Company with permission, indeed encouragement, to play cricket whenever required. Doubtless he earned some of this corn through the use of his name and presence in terms of sales, but it was in reality a spectacular species of Shamateurism. It was almost four times his earnings as a paid cricketer and it was nearly eight times as much as the captain of the English football team, Eddie Hapgood, the stylish Arsenal full-back, was paid. The whole strategy had obviously been vetted, approved and perhaps even instigated by some of the cricketing authorities. They preferred to switch the class of the man rather than offend the code of the class. Nonetheless, the integrated class culture that permitted such a degree of social mobility was not to everybody’s satisfaction. Hobnobbing and fraternisation was one thing but transference was another. The unease it caused was voiced on behalf of the more conservative faction by Neville Cardus. He was disconcerted by Wally Hammond and Herbert Sutcliffe wearing Savile Row suits and generally parading like top executives, with the latter speaking ‘not with the accents of Yorkshire but of Teddington.’ Neville Cardus, watching with alarmed disgust the possible change in the models of wry crustiness he had utilised for his eloquent descriptions, may himself have had a professional axe to grind. The estimable, envy- free, knowledgeable northern ‘player’ had served his copy well. It was as if L.S.Lowry’s matchstick men had suddenly straightened up, bought city-style bowlers and umbrellas and started reading the Daily Telegraph . ‘The county cricketer in certain instances’, Neville Cardus gloomily wrote, ‘has become a man of bourgeois profession’. 11 The use of the adjective ‘bourgeois’ is instructive, for, in effect, cricketers like Wally Hammond and Herbert Sutcliffe were undergoing what in the 1960s would be called embourgeoisement. In those pre-war days they might have been described as absorbing suburban values. Over against the dark clouds of the slump in the heavy manufacturing areas, the bright sunshine of a growing suburbia was to be observed. Ribbon development of semi-detached residences, Metroland, ‘Baby’ Austins, trim lawns and hedges, ‘table ready’ foodstuffs, ‘the religion of home improvement’, vacuum cleaners (sales of which went up from 18,000 in 1930 to 410,000 in 1935): these components and others contributed to the suburban dream. One would like to believe that Emmie Sutcliffe and Sybil Hammond The Shadow Of Embourgeoisement