Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

20 Pre-Victorian Society And Sport cricket-lovers, like all devotees of a religious cult, have yearned to seek out cricket’s Bethlehem or Mecca, for religions, of course, are a case-study themselves in spontaneous uprising. Bethlehem and Mecca are as shrouded in myth as Harry Altham’s shepherds on the Weald (those shepherds have a habit of turning up at the nativity of religions) or Rowland Bowen’s controversial Irish or Flemish first-ever cricketers. 6 By far the most accomplished gold miners, seeking for originating nuggets, are Peter Wynne-Thomas, with his carefully reasoned critique of previous false claims and his geographically pursued course to the iron workers of the Sussex Weald, and John Eddowes, whose brilliant linguistic studies demonstrate how Flemish weavers brought cricket to Kent. Both know that the author admires them with equal deference and that he judges them both to be right. Cricket, like all games that have not been artificially invented like basketball (1891, James Naismith) or the snooker variation (1875, Neville Chamberlain – no, not that one...) have multiple origins. 7 Just to take a couple of instances of the mixture of 18 th century play, Prince Frederick Louis, eldest son of George II and heir to the throne, a cricket enthusiast and inveterate gambler, is said to have died in 1751 from being hit with a cricket ball, Horace Walpole, youngest son of the Sir Robert Walpole, has been pooh-poohed and dismissed as games-slacker and aesthete for confusing it with a tennis ball, although, at that time, it is possible the same ball could have used for both purposes. It may have caused an abscess which later burst but the prince also caught a chill, which turned to pleurisy, while supervising his gardeners at Kew on a cold March day, hardly cricket weather. He died on 20 March with general medical opinion now opining the actual cause of death was pneumonia. 8 Equally confusing is Samuel Johnson’s definition of cricket in his famous dictionary, published in 1755, as a game ‘in which the contenders drive the ball with sticks in opposition to each other’, suggestive of a brisk exercise in hockey. Harry Altham, writing almost 200 years later in 1926 and unable to contemplate his beloved cricket being played in so sprightly a fashion, judged this to be a ‘less happy’ error. It would be intriguing to arrange an ethereal confrontation of the two and eavesdrop on the grand lexicographer’s riposte. It is not beyond the bounds of speculation that Samuel Johnson had witnessed, say, a band of London apprentices diverting themselves as he described and calling it ‘cricket’. Once one accepts the Darwinian rather than the Creationist explanation, the evidence in which cricket is entwined with so many other games is the more explicable. Peter Wynne-Thomas properly points out that cricket must be a late developer because it has so many elements overtly borrowed from other groups of games, including bowling (as in bowls, skittles et al. ), hitting (as in baseball, rounders, hockey et al. ) and running (as in athletics, the football codes et al. ) One might add the rather strange defence of two targets rather than in one, as in football, rugby and hockey, not forgetting the charging allowed in early forms of the game. There are plenty of examples of how cricket has been thus influenced by some of the other genres but the chief point is the lateness of its coming to maturity.