Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

110 activity and the way in which famous names would be seen playing on ordinary club pitches. The cricket was more recreational than competitive in style, for entertainment was the motif but there were myriad chances to see one’s heroes at close quarters rather than secreted away in just seventeen shire bases out of reach of many. For six summers there were regular appearances of well-known English and also West Indian and, especially in the later years of the conflict, Australian and other Dominions players widely across the country. For instance, in the flourishing Bradford League spectators might have watched up to five well-known first-class cricketers every Saturday. Not since the long ago era of the Exhibition elevens had there been so comprehensive a spread of high-class talent. The second point is even more salient. The crowds that turned out to watch these games were amazingly large. Even in the worrying summer of 1940 the British Empire XI attracted over 80,000 to its 37 matches, an average of more than 2000 a game. Another example was the work of A.D.Procter in the north-west. As head of the Welfare Section of the Ministry of Labour and National Service in Manchester it was his task to raise funds for welfare scheme. Cricket was his chosen mode. In 1942, for instance, he arranged a score or more matches which drew average crowds of 5000, reaching a total of 125,000. Similar matches were happening all over the country. Warwickshire, after an uneasy start to the war including war damage to Edgbaston, extended its wings until in 1945 it arranged a fixture list second only to Lord’s. The highlight was a Festival week, with an attractive one day fixture every day as part of the Birmingham ‘Holidays at Home’ programme. The 1945 event was the fourth annual festival in the series which welcomed 150,000 in total to Edgbaston. Nottinghamshire’s experiences make for lively comparison. Only twice in the 1939 season did paying customers (that is, excluding members) exceed 2000 and they were occasionally as small as a hundred or so. Under the energetic leadership of the club secretary H.A.Brown, Notts organised an ambitious list of weekend matches throughout the hostilities with the following results in respect of attendance: 1940, 7 games 6000; 1941, 8 games 6100; 1942, 7 games (two days lost to rain) 5000; 1943, 8 games 9000; 1944, 8 games (one day lost to rain) 19,000 and 1945, 11 games 27,000, including one crowd of 7000. The average gate in 1944 and 1945 was 2300. Not surprisingly, as the trajectory of the Trent Bridge figures show, the gates grew as the war situation at home eased, reaching a bustling culmination in the summer of 1945. Wisden reports some 270 games for that season, including eleven declared first-class, among them the five much celebrated Victory Tests and another 24 two-day matches. According to Sir Pelham Warner the exhilarating occasion of the England and Dominions fixture in which 1241 runs were scored was ‘one of the finest matches played at Lord’s’. There were over thirty days cricket at Lord’s in 1945. The total attendance over the summer was an astounding 414,000, an average of over 12,000 a day, with the gates locked four times. Cricket and Society in the 1940s