Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

47 viewed by churchmen, civic leaders, employers and other local big-wigs as a necessity rather than a luxury item, there were charitable grants and contributions available to guarantee viability. As Keith Sandiford affirms, ‘cricket clubs were as vital to society as schools and churches.’ 2 In the more populous areas cups were placed on offer while associations - a noun favoured by the Victorians as the story of football bears witness – were formed. Just as 40 or 50 teams might compete for a trophy, a group of clubs might cluster together to arrange a regular fixture list. This device was the forerunner of the league, another appreciative nod to the footballing fraternity. The Birmingham and District League (1889) and the North-east Lancashire League (1890, later the Lancashire League), the North Staffordshire and District League (1890) and the South-east Lancashire League (1892, soon to be the more famous Central Lancashire League) were among the first, with Yorkshire and the other northern counties seeing similar groupings of what were usually a dozen to a score of clubs existing in a circle of roughly a 20 or 30 mile radius. It is worth noting that a man ticking almost all the amateur boxes the Rev J.R.Napier of Marlborough School, Cambridge University and Lancashire was the founding President of what became the Central Lancashire League. A taste of the commercial ingredient entered into the league venture but not overly so, at least as far as obscene profit went. Few if any grew absurdly rich through bankrolling a league club. It was more the serious necessity of the enterprise that mattered. The early introduction of professionals, sometimes as many as four but over the years tending to be just one per team, was testimony to this more earnest approach and league cricket did provide a parochial loyalty and adherence that, for example, failed to characterise the outings of the Exhibition elevens. Some clubs remained quite elitist; Hampstead, one of the leading London region clubs, charged members two guineas annually, sufficient to deter those not middle class in pocket and style. However, league clubs in industrial areas and village green sides in rural districts had in common a cross-class base and, unlike the bourgeois organisms such as Hampstead, had been consciously established on those lines. Necessity may, in the smaller hamlets, have been sometimes more the mother of inventive team selection if the local clergy and gentry could not muster eleven good men and true, but there is no doubting the sense of cricket as an improving tool for the lower classes. Cricket, with its kit and impedimenta, has always been a moderately expensive pastime; not so costly as horse racing or real tennis but more pricy than football. It has been calculated that the expense of equipping someone to play cricket in late Victorian England would have been over £2, which would have been the weekly wage of many skilled workers at that time. It is certain that many clubs outside the inner elite would have provided equipment other than boots and clothing such as bats, pads and gloves. That practice continued for several generations. It was out of this amazing network of town, district and village clubs, in particular the more high-flying, exclusive middle-class variety, that the system of county cricket clubs arose. The precedents were there, albeit in Clubs And County Clubs