Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

46 Chapter Five Clubs And County Clubs Cricket had become the visible and picturesque emblem of English life and character at that time – the phrase underlined mindful that, were the conditions to change, the emblem would be redundant. For then, and perhaps reaching a zenith in the 1890s, the nation and its chief sporting symbol enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. The staple of the ubiquitous cricketing network was the club. There had been a few cricket clubs, with the necessary internal systems, in Georgian cricket circles but most cricket had been more random, relying on organisers and sponsors to promote games and select teams. The club, with its minute book, its annual general meeting and its elected officials, really came into its own in the Victorian era. It was a device which, from trades unions and friendly societies to choral groups and horticultural associations, penetrated every activity in every community. Especially after 1883, when the Boy’s Brigade, first of the formal youth organisations, was started by William Smith in Glasgow, it would have been difficult to find a household where some if not all of its members, young and old, were not members of ‘clubs’ of one type or another. In the sporting, as in other vogues, the club was the means of securing the 19 th century ideal of ‘rational recreation’. Responsible Victorians, beset by terrible public health problems and, following the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, looking over their shoulders at the ‘survival of the fittest’ slogan, became fitness fanatics. Athleticism was the keyword at school and afterwards. They were also drawn to the notion of the bureaucratic and systematic response – and this was manifestly true of both middle and working classes. The rash of cricket clubs was not a lone epidemic. The associationist contagion was rife. This point must be stressed that, given the flurry of cricket club formation, the higher ranks of society could not have provided the numbers to promote or support them in such profusion. That is not to detract from the major role played by the middle and upper classes. Their money and talent were invaluable. But the workers, particularly in the industrial trades, were also honing skills in the arranging of craft unions, co-operative societies and the like. By the last quarter of the 19 th century cities like Birmingham and Liverpool had well over 200 cricket clubs within their bounds. 1 Assuming that to be a standard distribution, it suggests that Britain at this time rejoiced in a cricket club for every 2/3000 of the population, with an estimated 15,000 in all, an intriguing figure given that England and Wales was divided into 15,000 parishes, but not forgetting Scotland and Ireland. From the heart of London to the remotest village outpost, cricket clubs were formed, and,