Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

119 Towards Classless Cricket? against totalitarian regimes which would have quailed at the notion of such open, democratic voting. It was tantamount to a ‘yes’ and ‘no’ vote, for the total votes for the two main parties in these elections left only 5% and 3% respectively to be shared among the hapless other contenders. Curiously, the Labour Party polled more votes than their opponents in both elections; it was 13.3m against 12.5m in 1950 and 13.9m against 13.7m in 1951, further evidence of the marginal nature of the contests. There was, then, a genuine shift of mood in the 1950s. There was a loss of confidence in the lofty rationalities that had justified the planning of war and post-war policy. There was a feeling that citizens were too much in the thrall of regiments of unsympathetic clerks of one brand or another. Some of this is intangible. Aneurin Bevan once said that that peoples switch to and fro without reason being dog-like, that is, happily co-operative and companionable, to being cat-like, that is, more haughtily independent and selfish. From hereon in the pendulum swung toward the feline axis. However, the division at this juncture was severe and wide. Analysts of the election results confirmed what observation had intimated – that, at least politically, the non-formal class compact that had endured for close on a hundred years was dissolving. The crowd became less prominent in the field of leisure. Theatres then cinemas closed by the score. By the end of the century there would only be 500 professional theatres in Britain whereas at the beginning of the century, counting in all the possible theatrical outlets, there were as many as that in the London area alone. Within twenty years of the end of World War II the number of British cinemas had been reduced from 3600 to 1200 with only about one in ten of the population watching a film at least once a month. The great multitudes that had flocked to football matches diminished. Although the mainstream city clubs continued to prosper, smaller clubs which had attracted 30,000 or 40,000 gates in the 1930s and 1940s found themselves playing to sparse gatherings of a few thousands. Football League attendances fell from 44m in the 1949/50 to 28m in the 1964/65 and then 18m in the 1984/85 seasons. Individualism became the social and cultural as well as the economic and political driver. In terms of the retreat from Collective Leisure, the leading engines of change were television and the motor car. Television, with video players, recording devices and myriad electronic aids in support, magnetised people back towards the home, while, were they to abandon that haven, they became much more likely to do so privately, using the car, and, in consequence of car usage, able to select from a wider range of leisure options. In 1953 20.5m people, something like half the population, watched the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 5m television sets; within six years there were 15.6m TV sets – and by 1970 well over 90% of household had access to television. The car, initially the non-horse drawn substitute for the rare number of private carriages, became commonplace. Henry Ford’s vision of the car as a necessity rather than a luxury came to fruition. The tidal wave of car ownership had reached 4m vehicles in the United