Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

39 Renaissance; The Revitalisation Of Cricket In any study of Victorian culture it is impossible to avoid this faux - medievalism. Historical novels such as Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe , published in 1819; the ‘vibrant medievalism’ of Augustin Pugin’s mock-Gothic edifices like St Pancras Station or the Houses of Parliament; sanitised folklore, the very word coined by the antiquarian William Thoms in 1846; political forays like the Young England movement, the Primrose League or Robert Blatchford’s more left-wing best-selling Merrie England story; John Ruskin’s Guild of St George, founded in 1878...the list is endless, as the nation luxuriated in ‘the medieval dream’. The English taste for gardening – Walt Whitman called a trim lawn ‘God’s handkerchief’ – was, and is, imbued with this nostalgic yearning. The hard-headed cricket groundsman of the age would probably have recalled what the grass was like when God had it on his own before the invention of the lawn mower by Edwin Budding in 1830 which led to the gradual disappearance of the scythe. Fuller Pilch would have been enviously pleased; he carried a small scythe in his luggage against the rough-cut pitches his Exhibition eleven had sometimes to play on. The scythe was quite a long time a-vanishing. Until the Edwardian years the cricket ground at Loseley Park, near Guildford, home of the cricketing Christopherson family, was scythed by nineteen gardeners who rose at 4.00 a.m to be sure the pitch was prepared for country house cricket. This combine of religiosity and pseudo-medievalism helped create the courteous and obedient conduct that became the fulcrum of English character during these times. A little later the headmaster of Harrow, Dr Cyril Norwood wrote ‘for what has happened in the last hundred years is that the old ideals have been recaptured. The idea of chivalry which inspired the knighthood of medieval days, the ideal of service to the community which inspired the greatest of the men who founded schools for their day and for posterity have been combined in the tradition of English education today.’ 4 Even as late as 1947 the medieval scholar, Ernest Barker, felt able to define the English national character as ‘a mixture of stoicism with medieval lay chivalry’. This, then, was the watchword not only of the ruling elite and the rural gentry but of the up-and-coming industrial and capitalist middle classes, for whom hard graft and conspicuous gain were the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. It also boosted the motivation of that energetic and self-confident stream of young men, army officers, civil servants, clergymen, engineers and agriculturalists, who, not content with invading all parts of the nation, also took sail or steam and built an empire, an empire of which their cricketing credentials are perhaps its most enduring vestige. ‘Who dies for England, sleeps with God’, unctuously intoned Alfred Austin, who became Poet Laureate in 1896. For three generations or more the yardsticks of personal and frequently professional conduct were of this fashion. Irrespective of one’s inner disposition, it became customary for individuals from all social ranks to exhibit these mores. Some may have done so superficially, as ‘mask’ or ‘caricature’. In many situations, including playing in a cricket match, it was