Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

43 Renaissance; The Revitalisation Of Cricket Neville Cardus baptised him ‘the Squire of Lancashire’. One with more modest cricket credentials – twelve first-class games for Hampshire – was Reginald Hargreaves, son of an Accrington calico printer. Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, he was established in a county seat, Cuffnells in the New Forest, although his celebrity status perhaps rests more on his marriage to Alice Liddell of ‘Wonderland’ notability. However, the new middle classes whose wealth fuelled the expanding public school movement may have been snobbish but they were far from being stupid. Brass was brass. Their expectation of value for money was paramount. The stringent cleansing of the academic Augean stables owed much to their consumer consciousness. A sidelight on the introduction of cricket into the curriculum is that it could be domesticated. Much of what had passed for school games had been field-sports that took place outside the school and all games, including cricket, had been organised by the boys themselves. Gradually, the regimen of compulsory games supervised by the masters developed. It was never ideal; much pupil-led tyranny and bullying persisted but, compared to earlier times, it was as if Eden had replaced Hades. It was largely pupils who had undergone this educational process who furnished recruits for the country house weeks and were, to some extent, when on their home patches ready to play against or sponsor the itinerant Exhibition XIs. Inculcated with cricket and taught to believe in its virtuous elements, they were anxious to continue playing after school. Wherever they went, they played and drew others, sometimes from among the lower orders, into the game. There were four principal outlets for this enthusiasm. First, many of them went to Oxbridge and soon many of the colleges as well as the varsities themselves were fielding cricket teams. The crux of this pattern of cricket became the Varsity match. After a couple of such fixtures in 1827 and 1829, the series began in regular earnest in 1836. MCC and Oxbridge fixtures began in 1830. Second, they returned to their own or other schools as masters and sustained the goodly tradition of schools cricket. By the end of the century there were about a hundred schools, inclusive of ancient public schools and the newer ‘proprietary’ schools, as they were known, together with a number of prestigious day schools. All of them made cricket a central part of their ethos. In mid-century there had only been about forty such schools. Some, like Eton and Harrow, were annually coupled for a gala match at Lord’s; all eventually had a fixture with MCC every summer. From the 1860s onwards Old Boys teams were started, often with, as their titles - Eton Ramblers, Harrow Wanderers – suggest, something of the flavour of the amateur travelling elevens. Third, many public school and Oxbridge former students were in holy orders and made cricket part and parcel of their ministry. As curates and parsons, they often encouraged and played for village and township teams in their parish, perhaps having a more direct linkage and over a