Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

42 Renaissance; The Revitalisation Of Cricket historical worth, MCC celebrated its centenary in the dark days of World War II in 1941. Thomas Hughes captained the school in 1841 and then made a set-piece of the game when disguised as Tom Brown in his semi- autobiographical story. In the famous novel Tom and one of his alter egos Arthur (the ‘Christian’ one; ‘Scud’ East had the ‘Muscular’ role) discuss cricket with ‘the young master’. ‘What a noble game it is, too’, says the teacher, to which Tom responds, ‘but it’s more than a game, it’s an institution.’ Arthur adds, ‘it is the birthright of British boys, old and young, as habeas corpus and trial by jury are of English men’. ‘The discipline and reliance upon one another it teaches,’ claims the master. ‘is so valuable...(it is) an unselfish game. It merges the individual into the eleven; he doesn’t play that he may win, but that his side may’. Cricket, once a rumbustious, occasionally tumultuous Hanoverian pastime, frowned upon by some even in that century of vulgar and ruffianly carryings-on, was suddenly the acme of ethical probity. The pedant might point the finger of criticism at the history teaching at Rugby if Arthur believed cricket had so lengthy a heritage but, then, it was already an aspect of the cult that the legend of longevity had to be promulgated. The ‘young master’ was George Cotton who soon became headmaster of Marlborough and later Bishop of Calcutta, the senior prelate in India. It is not irrelevant to an analysis of an emergent morality that George Cotton was to have married Thomas Arnold’s daughter, Jane, but the nuptials were cancelled in the light of the prospective bridegroom’s mother’s affection for strong drink. The sympathetic reader will be comforted to learn that George Cotton found solace in the marital embrace of Sophia Ann Tomkinson, another churchman’s daughter. The public schools grew in strength and in numbers. There was a move to a starting age of thirteen, with younger boys tending to attend the new line of preparatory schools that were opened. A crucial element was the arrival of the sons of ‘new money’. The merchants and factory-owners made abruptly rich by the Industrial Revolution proceeded to gentrify their families, to the disgust of, it must be said, Richard Cobden, central figure of the free trade movement and exponent of what was sometimes called Manchesterism. He deplored this aping of what he called the ‘clod- pole aristocracy’, believing that the wealth of the new middle class should be deployed in creating high-minded, forward-looking cities. He visualised Manchester as ‘the Venice of the North’. It is prototypical of the times that the ‘shopocrats’ turned backwards instead to the land and the pastoral fallacy. The very men who had built the industries were eager to play out the false anti-industrial ‘medieval dream’ of a rustic idyll. Robert Peel and William Gladstone are two famed examples of the sons of Lancashire trade moving through public school and Oxford and themselves – at Drayton Manor, Staffordshire and Hawarden respectively - living in stately homes. Among cricketers, A.N. Hornby, child of a Blackburn cotton mill owner, went to Harrow and briefly to Oxford and set himself up with a country estate, Parkfield in Cheshire.