Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

116 including the 1947/48 winter tour of the West Indies, captaining England once owing to the indisposition of Gubby Allen. A dental surgeon in the family practice, his father had agreed to subsidise this bright two-year extravaganza. Don Bradman famously sought him out in the England dressing room at Headingley for professional advice Then Ken Cranston had perforce to return to fillings, extractions and very likely stumps for the remainder of his working life. For the post-war amateur it was more likely to be the equivalent of what would now be called a ‘gap’ year than a settled life-style option. Ken Cranston, a charming companion, could be gently amusing about post-war county cricket. Once sitting with him at Lord’s he spoke of the pastoral nature of some of the out-grounds of less well-resourced counties then. Of one such he remarked that the ground was so green and well- grassed that until the umpires put up the wickets there was no way of telling where the pitch was. All in all, cricket, as the complimentary phrase then ran, had a good war. The peace seemed momentarily to be fruitful as well. It was not to endure. As the perceptive John Arlott concluded, we were living in ‘a kind of cloud cuckoo land’. Thereafter followed something close to implosion during the 1950s, as the following chapter will attempt to describe. 1. Taylor op.cit for background reading on this issue. 2. Ian Kershaw To Hell and Back; Europe 1914-1949 (2015). 3. F.A.Hayek The Road to Serfdom (1944). 4. Jose Harris William Beveridge; a Biography (1977). 5. Angus Calder The People’s War; Britain 1939-1945 (1969). 6. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska Austerity in Britain; Rationing, Controls and Consumption (2000) an award-winning study plentiful in detail and rich in insight in regard of this issue. 7. Midwinter Collectivist Age op.cit chapter 18 for a much fuller study of this 1940s theme. 8. Eric Midwinter The Lost Seasons; Cricket in Wartime 1939-45 (1987) for a more thorough analysis of the often neglected condition of cricket in World War II. 9. John Arlott Vintage Summer; 1947 (1967) is a predictably first-rate narrative. Eric Midwinter’s Brylcreem Summer; the 1947 Cricket Season (1991) is a later account of this pivotal time. 10. Sissons op. cit. especially pp.261/272. Cricket and Society in the 1940s