Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

127 Chapter Thirteen Change of Culture; Change of Cricket A respectable working-class family and a rather serious-looking middle- class family strolled through the municipal park where two or three cricket matches were ongoing. Both families paused for a few minutes to listen to the district brass band in the bandstand playing a programme of ‘Gems from The Gondoliers ’. Then they walked to the bus stop by the park gate. They caught the corporation bus and took the short trip to their local Odeon cinema to watch Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard starring in Brief Encounter . That little cameo of life in the late 1940s is salutary in that the half a dozen or so specific items listed there have either vanished or become outmoded. The civic and co-operative pattern of community existence and the communal sensibility associated with it were undermined by the onrush of neo-liberalism. The Tolkien-like term ‘middle England’ was coined much later but it might well have been utilised for that earlier period, given its middling characterisation. With the central phalanx of Britons acting and believing in cross-class unison, everything gravitated towards the mean. For instance, although newspapers varied from the Daily Telegraph to the News of the World , they were all recognisable as coming from the same stable, compared with the chasm today, say, between the Times and the Sun. A literary phenomenon of the age was emblematic; in 1935 Allen Lane founded Penguin books. At 6d a copy, he demonstrated the ready market for serious reading; Woolworths stores bought 63,000 books immediately and in the first ten months alone 1m books were printed. The middlebrow was dominant then. In late Victorian and Edwardian England few paused to ponder whether a Dickens novel was popular or classic or whether W.P.Firth’s paintings of The Derby Day or The Railway Station should be similarly categorised. The cultural gaps did tend to open a little before the 1950s, with atonal music, abstract art and free association literature being examples but they widened much further as the century wore on. Other factors contributed to the collapse of the old integrated culture. 1 First there was a generational element, especially as ‘youth’ came, by common observation and by its own self-awareness, to be a separatist bloc, with its own sounds, costume, argot and other accoutrements. Second, and more tellingly, there was the sheer diversity of communication, with, for example, a welter of television channels and other outlets. Such a wealth of choice had its welcome and beneficial aspect but it spelled the end of a collective enjoyment and appreciation. The cultural niches