Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

44 wider geographical range with players from the lower classes than other groups of cricketing disciples. Of the 795 Oxford and Cambridge blues of the Victorian epoch, a quarter 209 in all, were ordained. At one time the sizable parish of St Mary’s, Southsea fielded a full eleven just of curates. 6 Anthony Trollope in his 1884 novel An Old Man’s Love described thus the ‘exquisitely fatuous’ Rev Montagu Blake as being ‘not so strict in matters religious as to make it necessary for him to abandon any of the innocent pleasures of the world. He could dine out, play cricket and read a novel.’ At a time when Christian devotion was at its height and the acceptance and practice of faith was widespread, the relation of church and cricket was exceptionally strong across the classes. It became ‘the Holy Game’. Reading the homilies and sermons of the age, one finds it sometimes difficult to decide which of cricket and religion is the metaphor for the other. The vision of ‘the One Great Scorer’ in the well-known Grantland Rice verse is but one illustration among hundreds of this absorbing relationship. Another instance is the Rev Thomas Waugh’s The Cricket Field of the Christian Life , published in 1894, close to the high water mark of this sporting religiosity. God is the Captain-King, delighted that your ‘innings’ has left your conscience trouble-free, so that on ‘resurrection morning’ as you emerge from the pavilion you would be greeted with angelic cries of ‘well played, sir’. Fourthly, a considerable number of former pupils took commissions in the army which was, for a time, as big a purveyor of cricket as any other institution. In 1841 the order was issued that every barracks should lay and maintain a cricket ground. Former servicemen will wryly recall the chasm that often exists between the weighty military order from on high and its artful evasion on the ground. Nonetheless, cricket was by no means unknown in army circles and this edict did lead to its considerable expansion in the military world. There were many inter-regimental games, with the Woolwich and Sandhurst annual fixture the martial equivalent of Oxford v Cambridge. From the standpoint of this text, a caveat must be entered about the dominant role of officers, at least in the major matches. In 1870, as one illustration, the initial-less Private McIntyre appeared as the sole other ranker alongside ten commissioned soldiers for the Household Brigade versus the Royal Artillery. One convention held good. Private McIntyre did most of the bowling and took ten wickets in the match. The ordinary soldier probably had to excel visibly to crash upwards through what might now be called the glass ceiling. Of course, inter-platoon games on these grounds for the rank and file would have been likely - but here again one must recollect the working of the military mind. The 1841 order commanded that the troops would be required ‘to pay the estimated cost of repairs, as in the case of barrack damages.’ The army’s inhibiting response to that type of edict has been usually to insure against so dread an eventuality by keeping the article in question under wraps and never using it. That weary hint of scepticism aside, the soldiers joined with the clergy, the school masters and the students to detonate what has been termed Renaissance; The Revitalisation Of Cricket