Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

138 Chapter Fourteen First-Class Fragility People may or may not get the governments they deserve but they certainly get the cultural baggage and social paraphernalia they deserve. The economic and political construct of any society determines in major part its style of leisure, arts, pastimes and allied domestic values and habits. That is baldly true in that, for example, a national format of any game is impossible without an effective transport system and other means of communication. But it is also true in the more nuanced manner in which the social practice and conventional beliefs of a community intertwine with and influence the character of its cultural superstructure. It is equally true that in the fluidly organic movement of community or national life, there are overlaps and vestiges. It is at least arguable that cricket in its Victorian guise as a three or four day county-orientated diversion might be so identified. To recap briefly, the county system that evolved or was devised during the last third of the 19 th century was, by accident or design or more likely a compound of both, an adjunct to the cross-class alliance that was the prevailing Zeitgeist . Its leading features were a resolve to find, despite its cumbersome qualities, an accommodation by which paid working class and notionally unpaid middle class players could perform in tandem and by which both classes were offered a satisfactory chance of spectating. Uppermost in this determination were shared values, especially relating to a genuinely felt if actually false pastoral imagery, a proud and superior sense of imperial splendour and a firm belief in the Victorian gloss on Christian morality. Ineluctably, these three aspects were closely interlinked; for instance Rudyard Kipling’s ‘White Man’s Burden’ was accepted as a Christian obligation. Crucially, nationwide cricket, in both its professional and recreational formats, was encouraged by industrialism, especially by way of vastly improved transport and other means of communication. Victorian cricket was in part a creature of the Industrial Revolution, the provincial manufacturing cities becoming sites for the game’s national spread at its highest level. Indeed, a further perspective on the current increasing centralisation of government is the return of the nation to one dominated by the south-eastern conclave. In the pre-industrial era of the 18 th century and before, London was basically the only major power-house, with trade and population intensely based on the area south of a line from Bristol to Norwich. It was the great industrialised towns of, in particular, the north and the midlands, cities like Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester, that had exerted the keenest edge of local government hegemony, just as they had