Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

27 Chapter Three Diaspora; Cricketing Migration The advent of the modern, nationally uniform sport of cricket arrived flying, as it were, on two wings. One was professional and the other amateur and, by those tokens, they could also be characterised as lower class and middle or upper class. Initially more distinct, they gradually fused both in regard of spectators as well as players, although, intriguingly, class identity was never lost within that fusion. The coming of this new model of cricket followed a phase in which cricket as a public entertainment had collapsed. At best, this might be viewed as a breathing space wherein cricket shrugged itself free of parlous attributes and advanced. At worst, it was a near-death experience. This modern version of cricket, prominent from about the beginnings of the Victorian era, had sufficient links with the past as to make the chain a recognisable one, yet the alteration was fundamental enough to hint at brand-newness. The changes were, inter alia , in technique, incidence, organisation, regulation and, above all, tone. The decline of cricket was substantive. From 1720 there had been an annual average of some twenty matches retrospectively defined as ‘important’. On reflection, that figure of no more than one or two a week during the season should remind that ‘important’ cricket was restricted in quantity as well as place. Nonetheless, the famine that ensued made these decades seem like years of plenty. Between 1802 and 1840 important matches never reached double figures in a summer. There were only two such fixtures in each of 1803, 1814 and 1818; there was only one in each of the years 1802, 1811, 1812 and 1813. 1841, with eleven fixtures, broke the dearth and pointed to a happier future. The restricted ambit of these games both demonstrated the continuing dominion of the wider London region as well as its failure to export the game very much elsewhere in the kingdom. Of the ‘important’ 115 games – just five or six a season - played between 1801 and 1822 inclusively, 82, that is 71%, were played at Lord’s. Most of the remainder were staged elsewhere in the south-east. After 1817 Cambridge hosted five games, a nod towards the provenance of the newer establishment emerging. 1 Rowland Bowen quotes an 1813 newspaper in the Midlands attesting that ‘the game had died there because it had not been played for some time’, this being the first mention for three years. Hambledon, most notable of the few clubs outside London that had developed and staged major matches, had closed for business. The club minute book for 25 September