Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

35 Diaspora; Cricketing Migration style sponsorship of paid cricketers and supported the AEE but there was a general turning of the landed gentry towards its own kind. Country house cricket came into its own, often with a county seat organising a week’s cricket, with visits from the glittering wandering sides among the highlights. It quickly became as indispensable for a stately home to have a cricket ground in the 19 th century as to have a swimming pool in the 20 th . Eric Snow, dauntless researcher, identified sixty country house pitches just in Leicestershire and Rutland, along with eleven minor occasionally used sites. 8 This was no superficial aristocratic jolly. It was often extremely serious cricket for the leading amateur players of the nation. Hundreds of games were played, summer after summer, in a format that endured until the First World War. Writing in 1918 C.K.Francis, an Oxford blue and occasional Middlesex fast bowler recalled ‘we used to stay in various country houses for about a week, playing two or three matches sometimes against very good teams. The cricket weeks at Preston Hall, Croxteth, Lees Court, Scarborough, Hothfield, Compton Verney, Wilton, Rood Ashton, Patshill, Northernwood, Escrick, Southgate, Vice Regal Lodge are only a few I remember out of the many.’ 9 It is a possible there were a thousand such locations in the United Kingdom generating a gaudy moving carnival of amateur cricket over some half a century and more. It is apparent, too, from the researches of Eric Snow and others that many of these grounds were frequently made available to the local village or township team rather than them lying idle for all but the special week. It was not unusual for the young gentlemen of the house to join, even if condescendingly, in some of those lesser fixtures. One or two peers, passionate about cricket, kept up the Hanoverian tradition of employing professional cricketers. The Earl of Stamford, for example, employed seasoned professionals at Enville Hall from 1845 to 1864, beginning with Reuben Roby and ending with Hiram Slack. Even where the country house owners did not take their duties quite so seriously, they still required groundsmen to ensure the pitches were of high enough standard. The quality of groundsmanship matured over the century. One’s week as cricketing visitor to a country house would be judged by the lavishness of the hospitality, the gaiety of the evenings’ entertainment and the prettiness of the lady guests – and also by the excellence of the wicket. The nearest equivalent of the gentlemen who brought social graces to the working class Exhibition elevens were the hard-working groundsmen-cum-gardeners who made sure the wandering amateur sides played on carefully nurtured surfaces. It was in these two ways, one cannily professional and artisan, the other fashionably amateur and gentlemanly, that modern cricket was introduced to and reinforced the length and breadth of Britain. It might be observed as a pincer movement encircling and suffusing the nation with the cult of cricket for all grades of society. This establishment of a sport, both national and cross-class in appeal, was made possible by a relatively abrupt change in both the socio-economic fabric and the cultural ethos of