Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

120 Kingdom by the outbreak of the Second World War. It was seen as the new emblem of the middle classes. By 1970 there were 12m private cars on the roads. In 1959 the first modest stretch of the M1 motorway was declared open, the start of a complex mesh of such highways. It was viewed as a great liberation. During the 1950s and beyond there was a break with the necessarily routine constriction of public transport, with the car releasing the public to seek a much broader gamut of recreation. Thus were the television set and the motor car the main factors in a return to a much more withdrawn and isolated privy life-style. The home once again, after a hundred years’ interlude, became the base for substantial pastimes. Central heating and modern devices helped. The washing machine replaced the public wash-house, the laundry and the laundrette; the TV replaced the cinema. It has been calculated that today’s kitchen generates as much power as the average mill in the 1840s. Moreover, as well as witnessing the breakthrough of television, 1953 saw 3m Britons book charter flights for holidays in sunny climes; by 1970 the figure would be 7m, a further fracture in the previous pattern of holiday-making and recreational provision. 1 Cricket felt the full brunt of this reversion to an 18 th century life-style clad in a modern technical garb. There was a double blow. Sir Home Gordon, the well-known cricket commentator of that time, had suggested that it would cost £10,000 a year to organise a county club in the post-war years. The true cost turned out to be nearer £60,000 and by the mid-1950s the counties were already relying on Test revenues for 15% of their income. Attendances shrank alarmingly. 2m, not counting subscribing members, watched the first-class programme in 1950. By the early 1960s this had declined by 75% to 500,000, a massive drop and a descent that showed no signs of abatement. Cricket, too, was unavoidably involved in the accompanying saga of the dissolution of the British Empire, Having reached its peak in the 1890s, it had all but vanished by the end of the 1960s, making it one of the most short-lived of imperial regimes in history. Benjamin Disraeli’s slogan of ‘ sanitas et imperium ’ had tidily summarised the populist concept of an Empire which filled the hearts of the working class with pride and their stomachs with low priced foodstuffs. Disraeli offered the Tory working- class voter the comfort of effective sanitation – his government’s 1875 public health act stands proudly as the foundation not just for British physical well-being but for that of many countries - and a focus for enthusiastic loyalty. Politicians such as Joseph Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes made much of this notion of the Empire as a supplier of both material succour and cultural balm, particularly for the lower classes. Cricket had played a role in this narrative, being accepted, quite accurately, as the non pareil imperial sport. The question of cricket and class in British possessions, in most cases shrouded in a more corrosive cloak of ethnic and racial divisiveness, falls outside the parameters of this study but the ambivalence of English cricket’s position imperially does not. Again one senses a strength and Towards Classless Cricket?