Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

118 Towards Classless Cricket? Along with Raman Subba Row, Ted Dexter and Bob Barber, English amateur batting ended its long saga on a characteristically flourishing and uplifting note. For all their efforts, either professional or amateur, the cricketing fabric shrunk in the 1950s and eventually alarm bells faintly began to tinkle if not ring out resoundingly. Where most institutions and activities, economic, social and cultural, had seized or had felt obliged to take the chance offered by the declaration of peace to undertake radical reform, cricket had relaxed complacently, beguiled by what Rowland Bowen called ‘the delusion’ of the late 1940s. What was happening nationally was, as ever, the determinant of cricket’s destiny. The consensus of a Collectivised society that had reached its zenith in the war and post-war years began to fracture. It was gradual at first, just as the onset of a more co-operative and public-spirited community had taken time to take hold in Victorian Britain. Little more was done to reform society, rather was there a resigned acceptance, with successive governments conserving what was now the new disposition of national assets, grudgingly and unenthusiastically. There was, too, a distinct shift in fiscal and economic methodology. Price and other controls were lifted, subsidies withdrawn and the notion of what had been deliberately something of a siege economy was frowned upon. Much was made of freedom of choice and an end of high taxation, while the pressures of material consumerism, more especially the motor car and television, placed a strain on the old cultural bonds of community life. For better or for worse, a more pronounced individualism superseded the old-fashioned communitarian values of the previous generations. The ‘integrated culture’, composed of common denominators in values and activities shared by a strong working class and an earnest middle class, frayed very much at the edges. Much hinged on the two general elections of 1950 and 1951. It is arguable that, in terms of the future domestic life of British people, they together represent the most meaningful such contests in modern domestic history. One may scarcely overestimate the fundamental nature of the question posed. It was in its best sense an ideological political contest. What the electorate was challenged to decide upon was whether it wished or did not wish for the adoption of a more complete social democracy. The Labour Party campaigned for the former vision of society; the Conservative Party, then true to its implicit principles, sought not to backtrack and destroy but to argue thus far but no further., The twin elections were very closely fought. The first gave the Labour Party a thin five seat majority; the second provided the Conservative Party a slightly fatter majority of seventeen. The nation was split into two halves; it could hardly have been closer, with some vague almost unconscious acknowledgement of the primary nature of the decision. The turnout was 84% in 1950 and 83% in 1951, a tribute to the civic values of the post-war population, the citizenry who had contested the war