Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

40 Renaissance; The Revitalisation Of Cricket a basic matter of social even vocational survival to abide by these norms. The social changes from sinful rollicking to quasi-religious refinement were sudden in their happening. A crude Marxist analysis would interpret this novel intellectual and cultural ‘superstructure’ as being created by the underlying new economic ‘structure’. A more refined opinion would discern a complex interactive mesh of influences. Readers will be acquainted with the general lineaments of the Industrial Revolution that accompanied, influencing and influenced by, the perhaps less familiar cultural revolution described above. The pace and depth of change was breath-taking. A useful way of observing this phenomenon is to view it as three concentric and interconnecting rings of population, urbanisation and steam-powered factory-style production, a process tidily defined by the political scientist Herman Finer as ‘congregation’. Population had bobbed up and down unsteadily from medieval times. England’s population was 5.2m in 1700. A demographic explosion shot this sky-high to 12m in the 1830s and then more than doubled it again to 30m by the beginning of the 20th century. Town-life grew exponentially. In the first half of the 19 th century London’s population doubled to 2m, while Manchester increased in size from 90,000 to 400,000 and Leeds from 53,000 to 172,000. Bradford saw an eight-fold increment from 13,000 to 103,000 and Blackburn sprang 500% to 65,000. When Queen Victoria came to the throne the majority of her subjects were rural dwellers; well before her demise the vast majority were, using the normal criterion of a settlement of a minimum of 5000 inhabitants, urbanised. These hordes were both labour-force and market for the burgeoning industrial economy. Under the impetus of steam power the factory system quickly evolved so that by 1850 the average number of workers per economic unit was 200. In 1782 Manchester, the world’s first industrial city, had two mills; by 1800 it had 52 mills, plus 61 iron-foundries and machine shops. By the 1850s half the British work-force was engaged in the industrial trades. A paragraph scarcely does justice to the enormity of the change. It is an essential facet of any study of modern sport to recognise that its canvas is this amalgam of a multitude of people cramped into busy towns and confined in large-scale work-places. A specific aspect of this comprehensive nationwide change was transportation. The rapid development of the railways after 1830 is comfortably the most transformative event in the story of British social life. By the 1890s there were 20,000 miles of rail and 1,600m passenger journeys were annually negotiated. A near immobilised national community was liberated. The figure of four yearly public transport trips per individual in 1830 was mentioned in chapter one. By 1910 the ratio was 120 trips per individual. Tubes, buses and trams were also in the reckoning, totalling an amazing 5bn public transport journeys a year. The effect of railways on cricket has been well-rehearsed. 5 W.G.Grace would have been a country practitioner with a regional repute as a sportsman had it not been for Paddington. The Exhibition XIs would have