Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

34 Diaspora; Cricketing Migration One may also conjecture that the artisan, more used to selling his skills or wares and dealing with middlemen or customers, may have had or learned habits of confidence and social awareness that informed both their cricketing attributes and their deportment as paid entertainers. Among William Clarke’s first wandering compatriots were Tom Box, a cabinet maker doubling as a wicket-keeper; the famed batsman Fuller Pilch who was a tailor; Joseph Guy, elegant bat and, one trusts, accomplished baker; William Hillyer, a quick bowler of note who was a gamekeeper; and William Martingell, medium paced bowler, also a gamekeeper but a shoemaker, too. Later recruits – the AEE, of course, continued its peregrinations after William’s Clarke’s death – were Edgar Willsher, fast bowler who came from farming stock and Julius Caesar, a fine bat who was a carpenter and painter by trade. George Parr, a major influence in these cricketing enterprises, was the son of a farmer; George Anderson, a powerful hitter, was one of the better educated of paid cricketers, while H.H.Stephenson, who excelled as batsman, bowler and wicket-keeper, became in later life a church warden and one of the Rutland market town of Uppingham’s Poor Law Guardians. 7 Sad to say, some of his comrades ended up in dire need of the never too kindly poor law. Julius Caesar, George Anderson and William Martingell were numbered among those, like, incidentally, many from the bottom rungs of the acting and circus professions, who died in reduced circumstances. Others did well, often as publicans, such as Tom Box and Joseph Guy. They were neither the first nor the last of sportsmen to be, as it were, called to the bar. However, the key issue was the relative good standing of these nascent professional cricketers among their own class. That precedent was to have, as will be later detailed, an influential bearing on the blending of gentlemen and players in the coming decades. At much the same time the gentlemen were themselves engaged in their own missionary tours throughout the country. The amateur equivalent of the AEE began a year earlier in 1845 when four Cambridge students inaugurated I Zingari, from the Italian ‘the Gypsies’, a typically arch undergraduate conceit. The residential life of public school and Oxbridge made for fast friendships that were constantly being sundered first by vacations and then by widespread home addresses. I Zingari would provide the opportunity for such distant friendships to be sustained. The foursome contacted a score of their close buddies with the notion of a homeless and subscription-less cricket club of a very exclusive kind, open by invitation only. They would gather from the four corners at their opponents’ ground. Within a year or two their fixture list was a healthy one and their exploits were published in the cricketing prints and annuals. As with the AEE, there were copyists. Quidnuncs (1851), the Harlequins (1852) Free Foresters (1856) and Incogniti (1862) were among the first and the most notable. Significantly, one of I Zingari’s first games was at a country house, the home of J.G.Sheppard in Suffolk. One or two noblemen – the Earl of Stamford and Warrington at Enville Hall, near Stourbridge and Lord Henry Paget in Staffordshire are examples – continued the old-