Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

29 dug something of a foothold in the south-east, had seen countless years of warfare along with much internal upheaval which, admittedly, continued into the first decades of the subsequent century. Other sports seem not to have been unduly affected. The British prize- fighting championship, with James Figg its first winner in 1719, went on unabated, with, for example, the popular Tom Cribb adding the world title to his British one in the early 1800s. In 1879 James Rice, a racecourse journalist, wrote ‘for some 200 years the pursuit of horse racing has been more attractive to our countrymen than any other outdoor pastime’. It stood up to the rigours of war with some pomp. Two of the five classics – the Two Thousand Guineas in 1809 and the One Thousand Guineas in 1814 – were actually launched during the wars. They followed swiftly the inaugural St Leger, 1776, the Oaks, 1779 and the Derby,1780, proof that, as Whyte’s History of the Turf proudly claimed in 1840, ‘for nearly a century and a half, the ‘turf’ has formed a favourite amusement for Kings, Lords and Commons’. Horse-racing was well established as the major national sport. So how is one to explain this disastrous, near-fatal misadventure of cricket? First, it must be emphasised that one is drawing a distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘generic’ cricket. The former was the slightly more official game, with rules accepted by sufficient to enable gambling to occur and for crowds to gather able to find intelligible what they were betting on and watching. The ‘generic’ title refers to whatever mass of bat, ball and target pastime around the nation used that name. Like football at the time, it had as many versions as the bands of boys and young men who occasionally played it. Rowland Bowen correctly writes of ‘unofficial laws’ that ‘enshrined local variations of long standing’ into the 19 th century and that in the preceding century ‘differing versions of the game were played in different parts’. 4 Second, on closer look at the evidence, it might be surmised that ‘formal’ cricket never quite became as fully grounded as, for example, horse racing in this its first manifestation. It was more a craze, a freakish gambling mania that suited the hour and then was almost gone. It is interesting that the newspaper coverage of those great games had more print directed at the betting than at the scores; while the word ‘form’ was borrowed from horse-racing as an indicator to readers how best to lay their cricketing bets. For a number of reasons, some of which will become more apparent later in the text, the gambling madness petered out, certainly in terms of wagering on practically everything. Establishment backs were being turned on the violence and venality associated with crowds at sporting events. Of course, betting remained a foremost component of horse racing. The sport of kings retained the loyal support of the ranks of blood and wealth and its regime of control was firmly entrenched. Those enclosed cricket grounds that were developed prospered for a while and then fell empty, not unlike bingo halls in the late 20 th century, although - if Lord’s and Trent Bridge can bear the cultural comparison with the bingo- callers’ jolly cry of ‘legs eleven’– one or two in both cases carried on to keep Diaspora; Cricketing Migration