Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

113 Cricket and Society in the 1940s officers included Bill Edrich and Leslie Ames. Wally Hammond, of course, had turned amateur shortly before and Bill Edrich followed suit shortly after the war. Hedley Verity died, sadly, of his wounds and Bill Bowes had a long spell in a prisoner of war camp. Bill Edrich lived, as he has vividly described, a strangely split life of heroic aerial feats one day and cricketing jaunts the next. But for some of the ex-officers and indeed senior non-commissioned officers, such as RAF sergeants Washbrook and Hutton, the latter invalided out with an arm injury in 1942, must have felt that the return to the status and income of a professional cricketer was something of a backward step, even given the relief from the anxiety of war. Both cricket and football authorities sought to retain the wage levels of yesteryear but the professionals in both sports knew full well that gate receipts had been fruitful in the later war years and that manufacturing wages had doubled. The Professional Footballer Association posed the threat of a strike and a deal was briskly cut in 1946 of a weekly £10 maximum throughout the season and a £7.10 summer retainer, an overall rise approaching 25%. The cricket authorities had hoped that the £440 maximum of 1939 would suffice but, as the usual round of county by county negotiations began before the 1946 season, there was considerable leverage to improve on this, Surrey and Lancashire, the two leading counties in terms of the remuneration on offer, consulted closely with representatives of the playing staff. As before, the gradings remained quite complex but, in summary, an established Surrey first eleven professional earned £500 to £550 (with a guarantee of £450) annually in those immediate post-war years and their Lancashire coevals a little more, perhaps as much as £600 (£416 guaranteed). This very roughly represented something like a 25% increase on pre-war levels of pay. The poorer counties could not match that degree of generosity but all felt obliged to improve on their pre-war wage packets in some proportionate fashion. For the international elite there were slightly richer pickings. Players chosen for the 1946-47 Australian tour received £550, a 60% increase on 1930s trips, plus expenses and a possible bonus of up to £275, but they netted only £450, and no expenses, for the South African tour of 1948-49. 10 English professionals received £75 for a home Test match and that was the standard rate for some time. In private conversation with Brian Statham he explained to me how Fred Trueman and he lost money as internationals. In the 1950s both Lancashire and Yorkshire paid their top-grade capped players a generous match fee of £50. Test duties often meant that these two world-class figures missed two matches per Test, so that in a five fixture rubber they were down a probable £125 on the overall deal. Brian Statham was extraordinary in his ordinariness; it is inconceivable that a man could have risen to such heights of international sporting fame and remained completely untouched or untarnished by the experience. Sitting together on the Lancashire committee balcony one afternoon, Brian