Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

108 Cricket and Society in the 1940s brilliantly and valorously negotiated the tribulations of a terrible war, he consigned much of the running of the home front to his Deputy Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, the Labour leader with whom the premier had a sound and trusty working relationship. Clement Attlee’s two chief adjutants were both Labour comrades-in-arms, namely, Herbert Morrison, Home Secretary and Minister for Home Security and Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour. This trio then formed the core of the 1945-51 Labour Government. In effect, Clement Attlee was in charge of the internal running of the United Kingdom from 1940, when the wartime coalition was formed, until 1951, when the Labour administration fell narrowly at the polls. Public order remained at its high level. Crime continued at an abnormally low rate by international criteria. In a recent study of the black market in all combatant nations in World War II the United Kingdom emerged as the least troubled. Such good conduct played itself out in the arena of leisure. A curio of the times is that expenditure on leisure between 1938 and 1944 increased by 120% and continued upwards in the post-war years. This was in consequence of full employment and improved wages which in real terms rose by 50%. This was the heyday of the cinema – 30m cinema tickets sold each week; 1.5bn a year; 75% of the adult population were film-goers – while the variety theatre was still active and lively. The dance halls attracted 4m customers a week, that is 200m a year; it has been estimated that 70% of married couples at this time met on the dance floor. Football League attendances amounted to 90m annually in the post- war years, although the truncated and regional wartime competitions also attracted great hosts. The queue was the social symbol of the age. There were vast crowds but they behaved, on the whole, patiently. The counterpart in the home was the radio. In spite of, probably because of, its narrowness of content, its appeal was, paradoxically broad. In 1923 200,000 licences were bought; by the early 1930s sales had risen to 5m; in 1939 nine out of ten households had licenses. It peaked in 1948 with 8.8m. Writing about the history of the BBC in 2014 Charlotte Higgins pointed out that it was ‘the first time...a physically dispersed general public had been able to experience events simultaneously’. Over 20m people tuning in to Tommy Handley’s ITMA or Wilfred Pickles’ Have a Go were genuinely defining moments of collective enjoyment. Cricket was an early beneficiary. In 1927 the BBC had begun its lengthy series of ball-by-ball commentaries, with, after a rocky start, sizable audiences tuning in from all parts and social sectors of the country, The soothing tones of Howard Marshall soon became almost as recognisable as those, say, of Uncle Mac, Donald McCulloch, the long-time host and Toytown’s Larry the Lamb of Children’s Hour . In these later years post-war, of course, John Arlott’s superlative gifts placed him in the pantheon not just of great sports commentators but of all eminent British broadcasters. The ‘wireless’ seemed to lend itself to the slower rhythm of cricket, a game where meditative appreciation was the keynote. All in all, the 1940s witnessed the point where the cultural integration of