Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

49 Clubs And County Clubs earning as much as some of his fellow working class team-mates who would have been barred from those more prestigious sides or found them unaffordable. Thus the emergent county teams inherited this social structure. Carmarthenshire, for example, specifically ruled that tradesmen were ineligible for membership. The styling of some of the initial county sides did not beat about the bush of social correctness; ‘the Gentlemen of Warwickshire’, for instance, left the onlooker or newspaper reader in little doubt as to the sociological provenance of the eleven. Some counties evolved first as subscription clubs whereby the gentlemen paid a fee to fund a team with a more potent professional component for their personal diversion. This general tendency was amplified by another common element in the county mix. In almost every case the formation of a county club was based not on some spontaneous amalgamation of that shire’s leading clubs but on the controlling majesty of one such club, sometimes after a tussle with an equally powerful rival, Canterbury and Maidstone in Kent being an instance. Those whose attentive minds reach back to history lessons in chalky classrooms will appreciate the analogy of the Unifications of Germany and Italy which were negotiated about the same time as most of the counties were being properly founded. It was not so much a combustion of either German or Italian nationalistic fire that did the trick as the expansion of the powerful Prussia and Piedmont-Sardinia respectively dominating the prescribed area overall. Lancashire provides a compact case-study of this phenomenon. The Manchester club was founded in 1818, possibly 1816, and, like other city- locked clubs had a move or two because of urban development before arriving at what was the second of two Old Trafford grounds in 1857. Some years earlier in 1842 Manchester visited Lord’s and suffered a humiliating rout. Dismissed for 59, their attack ‘was very deficient’, according to one press report, ‘it being of the old-fashioned underhand school, which afforded the MCC gentlemen much amusement in hitting it away’ to the tune of over 200 runs. The crushed Mancunians forfeited the match and skulked back to their northern fastness. It show once again the varying standards of cricket in those days, for, although round arm bowling had been legalised in 1835, it was still not uniformly practised. There follows a deliberate digression, albeit one that touches on the same point. In 1944, writing coincidentally in a Manchester newspaper, the usually perceptive George Orwell claimed that Charles Dickens knew nothing about cricket because in his one and only ‘reference’ to cricket he has Dingley Dell forfeit the game against All-Muggelton in Pickwick Papers (1837 but set in the 1820s) thus demonstrating he was ‘ignorant of its rules’. Homer nods twice. First, there are at least sixteen ‘references’ to cricket in the main Dickensian canon of novels, as well as umpteen other mentions in his journalistic and allied writing. Second, if MCC acknowledged a forfeited match in 1842 it is likely Charles Dickens was aware of what, evidently, in some circles, was an acceptable mode. 4