Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

115 Statham/Tyson vintage of around 1930 who provided the next genuine supply of English cricketing cream, even if Tom Graveney, Jim Laker and Godfrey Evans were among the outstanding exceptions that prove that generational rule. The counter attraction of better paid jobs in the manufacturing industries and elsewhere posed a threat to the flow of professional players, £7.50/£8 a week, £350 a year, was by now the norm for skilled tradesmen. Work in engineering or light industries was not suddenly curtailed nor, in an epoch of full employment and sturdy trades unionism, subject to the equivalent of the whim of an umpire’s faulty LBW decision or an inconvenient injury. As the post-war settlement matured, there was, in relative terms, a high level of social mobility. Social mobility is a much abused phrase. However, as an integral aspect of the radical wartime and post-war planning thrust there is no doubt that the public service was expanded dramatically with many more opportunities in local government, education, the health and social care services and elsewhere in the public sector. Quite suddenly being a cricket professional was not so alluring as when it had been something of an escape hatch for talented young men in rather dead-end, boring and often tiring jobs. For all that there was among the veteran campaigners some sense of enjoyment. Having negotiated the rear end of the 1930s slump and the fortunes of war, it must have been for many a carefree delight to play cricket for weeks on end, even if the train travel was tedious and the guest houses drab. Let two anecdotes suffice to illustrate this point. At an early Cricket Society meeting in London the evening’s guest speaker was the long-serving Sussex opening batsman, John Langridge. Asked if he thought playing 34 first-class matches a season was burdensome, he replied warmly that in his day they were sorry when it ended and would have liked to have played more. And at the end of one season Cyril Washbrook’s opening partner at Lancashire, the lugubrious Winston Place was asked where he was going for his holidays. ‘I’ve just had mine’, he responded laconically. On the amateur front the story was the reverse. The heavy redistributive taxation concomitant on war and peace ends, both reliant on extensive public finance, meant that upper middle class families could no longer afford the luxury of a cavalier son striding the greensward. Still the counties in the main clung to the convention of the amateur captain, one not always really worth his place cricket-wise and often reliant, were he sensible, on the experienced counsel of his senior professional. The comparative vision of the young, green subaltern and the battle-hardened tough sergeant took time to fade. An attractive profile from those years which illustrates the point is the lightning career of Ken Cranston, who assuredly did deserve a place in the team. A year or so after demobilisation from the Royal Navy, he played two summers of first-class cricket 1947 and 1948 with eminently virile success as captain of Lancashire and played eight Test matches Cricket and Society in the 1940s