Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

133 Change of Culture; Change of Cricket were on average earning £665,000 a year or £884,000 if sponsorships were included. In 2015 Wayne Rooney’s wealth was said to be £72m, placing him among the world’s richest sportsmen. The England football captain in the 1930s, Arsenal’s Eddie Hapgood, never made more than £250 a year – and when in later life he fell on hard times, Arsenal sent him £30. Even the players in the lowly League Two, the old Fourth Division, were in yearly receipt of £49,000 in 2006 while among other team games senior British Rugby Union club players had salaries averaging £60,000. Even if the top footballers are now earning five times as much as the top cricketers, the latter are still well rewarded at something like twice the average national income, with the star international players earning tidy sums. There is then a curious twist in the basic context of this study. By the usual yardsticks of income, education, housing and allied adjuncts, there is no doubt that all professional cricketers are now middle class. First-class cricket is now a single class occupation where once it was a cross- class activity. What happened when the division of Players and Gentlemen was abandoned and all those involved became simply ‘Cricketers’ was that they all soon correspondingly became ‘Gentlemen’, at least in social class terms. The aspirations of Herbert Sutcliffe, Wally Hammond and their ilk finally came to perfect fruition. Given the previous argument that the vast majority of county members and paying spectators are middle-class, as assessed by income, the first- class game in England is by and large a middle-class entertainment for a middle-class clientele. The fact that many England players have been educated at fee-paying schools serves to underpin that claim, even allowing for James Anderson’s schooling at St Theodore’s Roman Catholic High School, Burnley. 73% of the England team that won the Ashes in 2015 were educated at fee-paying schools. 9 The story of state schools and cricket has been a patchy one with some regions more active than others in this respect over the years. There was quite a lot of cricket played during the relatively brief recrudescence of grammar schools, from about the 1920s to the 1960s, for they were often eager to mimic the habits of the fee-paying schools. However, the many secondary schools in heavily urbanised areas always suffered from inadequacy of grounds, a plight deepened in the later years of the 20 th century by many sales of sports fields for building development. As an example of the differences, it was reported in 2009 that Dulwich College, a fee-paying establishment of 1450 boys in the London Borough of Southwark where the annual fees then were £27,330 well above the then average national earnings, had eight cricket pitches. The borough’s fourteen secondary schools, serving a population of nearly 300,000, had only six such amenities among them. A full boarder’s fee at Dulwich is now £39,480. The continuing cricketing dominance of the fee-paying sector reflected their old-fashioned belief that cricket was some kind of alfresco scripture lesson. A major factor has been the furtherment of an alternative educative