Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

48 Clubs And County Clubs haphazard fashion, for in Georgian times noble landowners who owned great tracts of a shire felt entitled to call any team representing them accordingly while often a town club when reinforced by neighbours for a special fixture had done the same. Hambledon qua Hampshire is an example. This tactic had been encouraged by artful taverners, bookmakers and newspaper editors, keen extravagantly to embellish the styling of a game for the purposes of their marketeering, just as similarly they had tended to exaggerate the size of wagers. The scrapings of so-called county cricket that had been sustained until early in the 19 th century were likewise puffed by the sporting press doing its ingenious best to spot a county champion amid the bits and pieces. It followed, therefore, that when the gentlemen in a given sector of the nation wished to raise local standards they chose to do so by a commitment to their shire for this purpose. It upheld a rather ramshackle tradition. It drew some often misleading cosmetic aid from the pastoral traits of the shire; a county name sounded more countrified than that of a city. Of most practical bearing, it leaned on what was the recognised ambit of the ancient divisions of British local government. Other sports, the football codes, athletics, hockey among them, also utilised or would utilise the county for the control and betterment of their activity, although most did so by forming an ‘association’, with occasional representative games or tournaments, rather than a participating ‘club’ per se . Rather boringly from a literary stance, the county clubs were mostly formed in monotonously similar manner over a relatively short time. Not for county cricket the colourful assortment of football team origins with churches, schools, workplaces and whatnot engaged, including - Derby County – county cricket clubs. In county after county, delegates from the most prestigious clubs gathered, with yet another curtsey to tradition, in a tavern and agreed to set up a county club. It was a messy process. Some counties had had primitive autonomy hitherto; some counties failed and started up again later or had distinctive changes of institutional format at some point; some counties established clubs which collapsed. Like the parable of the sower, some seeds fell on stony ground. Nonetheless, for all that there were counties with what in the parallel worlds of criminals and police officers would be termed ‘previous’ and others that tried and failed, the main bulk of the originating activity was in the last third of the 19 th century. Moreover, at some time every county in England and Wales has boasted a bona fide county club, as have most of the counties of Scotland and Ireland, then, of course, not partitioned. Only three counties in the British Isles have not tried their luck with a county cricket club. 3 A common denominator in the progress of county establishment, one affecting its class relations markedly, was the role played by the premier bourgeois clubs where the membership was restricted by price and/or social control. Some may have employed a professional or two, if only for practice or groundwork purposes. It was not like the league clubs that evolved in the industrial areas where the professional was, in some case,