Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

24 Pre-Victorian Society And Sport backed by the nobility, the Duke of Richmond’s support of the Slindon side being an example. The gentry did not hesitate to turn to the simple folk when wagers were involved. It was a natural progression. As well as grooms multitasking as jockeys, there were footmen featured in ‘pedestrian’ or running events. Footmen, properly so-called, had to be fleet of foot, as one of their jobs was to lope ahead of the coach to announce his master’s forthcoming arrival. Thus the first paid cricketers earned their money indirectly, that is, as part of their ongoing wage and board. Thomas Waymark, ‘the Father of Cricket Professionals’, was apparently a groom on the Goodwood estate, although there must have been many an aristocratic eyebrow raised when Lord John Sackville chose his head gardener at Knole, Valentine Romney, to captain his lordship’s Kentish XI. Lord John presumably took the view, one long suppressed in English cricket circles, that one should turn for advice to the best-qualified candidate, whether runs or roses were the subject in question. John Minshull, while an employee of the Duke of Dorset, scored the first ever recorded century, playing for the Duke’s team in 1769. Charles Bennett, 5 th Earl of Tankerville, assembled around him a fine array of cricketers: among them were the feared bowler, ‘Lumpy’ Stevens who was one of his gardeners, Joseph Miller who was his gamekeeper and William Bedster who was his butler. 14 One internal piece of class distinction became evident and it is worthy of mention for it remained a constant into modern times. The nobs were not too keen on bowling. On the whole, they preferred ‘Lumpy’ Stevens and his plebeian mates to toil away with the hard graft while the gentlemen whacked away stylishly. The image of the foil-wielding lordling and the ploughman trundler was forever imprinted. That said, and as the ever empathetic David Underdown reminds us, the nobility and gentry did gallantly expose themselves by failure to the derision of crowds befuddled by drink and disappointed by lost bets, Of course, it was not long before sinecurism set in. Rather like the later mode of counties giving impecunious amateurs posts as assistant secretaries, the gambling peers and gentry found estate appointments for promising cricketers. The talented James Aylward was bailiff for Sir Horatio Mann. We are informed that he was ‘a poor one’. It was but a short step before a group of cricketing artisans started to operate more independently. While reasonably well-paid on a match basis of a guinea for a major fixture, rising as the century wore on to, exceptionally, a pay out of five guineas for a win and three for a loss, it is unlikely that any of them provided for themselves solely from cricket. They were chiefly men with itinerant trades adaptable to what were the fairly rare call of cricket which, in any event, was then cramped into a brief spell of early summer before the coming of the busy harvest weeks. Still, the average agricultural wage was only ten shillings (50p) a week, so the lure of earning just over twice as much from a day’s cricket was enticing. It should be stressed that not all the games were team-based. Matches with one, two or three a side were extremely popular and, as with the