Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

111 This compared favourably with the 330,000 of 1939 when some 60 days cricket were each watched by an average of 5500. Huge crowds up and down the country told the same story. Did the authorities read any lessons into the fact that a programme knocked together by different enthusiasts up and down the nation had proved more popular than the staid ritual of the county championship? Reconstruction was the keyword on post-war lips. In many areas from broadcasting and housing to aeronautics and medicine, there were positive plans and immediate action by way of reform and improvement. Would cricket sign up for progress? It certainly went through the motions. All kinds of suggestions were proffered. In 1942/43 the Advisory County Cricket Committee and then a Select Committee of the same met to decide on the construct of post-war cricket. It was one of those junctures when the oligarchic as opposed to the democratic aspects of cricket made the judgements. The long-established settlement of the cross-class concord was not observed. Those wartime spectators, by token of their numbers primarily working and lower middle class in status, had voted with their shillings for an updated, more exciting sort of cricket. Their masters thought otherwise. The moderate plan for a two-day cricket based on weekend and half-day closing days, with counties playing one another home and away, plus a strong incentive to provide more entertaining cricket was almost contemptuously rejected. There were memories of the two-day matches of the 1919 season which had not been a wholly satisfactory experiment. There were other recommendations, including proposals to end the ‘surely humbug’ of the amateur/professional distinction and others to promote divisions, the amalgamation of counties, a knock-out competition and Sunday cricket. Virtually none was adopted. Dynamic captaincy, implicitly by amateurs, was the answer, otherwise there was no need for basic change. ‘I can see nothing wrong with modern cricket’ said Sir Pelham Warner, stalwart protagonist of wartime cricket but so much more at heart the steady keeper of the fort rather than the imaginative explorer of its hinterland. The one innings version, long practised at the recreational and league level, was barely discussed; it was ‘just a jolly wartime expedient’. R.C.Robertson-Glasgow was most scathing. He called one day cricket ‘the new clockwork monkey in the nursery’ while three day cricket was ‘a three-act play not a slapstick turn’ and for those who were ignorant enough to think otherwise, ‘such spectators are, frankly, not wanted at county cricket’. Not immediately but in a year or so, they took him at his word. 8 A gloss on the decision to oppose change was the persistence in a belief that cricket had a special, even sacred, aura, rendering alteration from the ritual of the three-day county game something close to blasphemy. In fairness to the cricketing elite who opted for this immaculate system, the popularity of first-class cricket for the first few post-war seasons gave rise to a reasonable complacency that all boded well. Cricket and Society in the 1940s