Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

51 Clubs And County Clubs tantamount to Lancashire’s 2nd XI. 5 In no major case did a county, as in other sports, organise itself as an alliance of clubs. Rather did the counties appeal for individual members, hoping, as they genuinely strove to lift standards by raising a county banner, that the better players from surrounding clubs would join, as often they did. Apart from sometimes creating a barrier between the county club and the clubs that existed within the shire boundaries, it automatically fell to the dominant club to act as the Prussia or Piedmont-Sardinia in a county ‘unification’, with, to extend the analogy to its doggedly bitter end, usually a stalwart and competent individual cast in the role of Chancellor Bismarck or prime minister Cavour. A complementary factor was a sizable population base both for members and, gradually and importantly, spectators, with, of even more moment, the railway connections that were the prerequisite of Victorian county cricket. Realpolitik ruled with a heavy urban iron hand within a thinnish rural velvet glove. Of the original ‘Octarchy’ of leading counties only Nottinghamshire, where the town team had been a stronghold, found its home just across the river boundary at Trent Bridge. As for the others, county towns like Lancaster, York, Gloucester, Lewes and Maidstone yielded to Manchester, Sheffield/ Leeds, Bristol, Brighton and Canterbury, while both Middlesex and Surrey opted for grounds that soon fell within the London local government boundaries. Contemporary voices of a conservative tenor had ridiculed the Exhibition XIs and pleaded for more county cricket. In the wake of the glories of county cricket over the next couple of generations, some modern cricket historians have suggested that the continuance of both amateur and professional itinerant teams delayed the development of county cricket. The boon of hindsight may be at play in this conclusion, even allowing for the natural overlap of the travelling Exhibition and more static county formats. An alternative judgement might reverse the equation. It was not until the Exhibition and Country House teams had thoroughly accomplished the groundwork that there was sufficient quality and interest to launch a more studied county programme. And it had a downside. It has often been said, doubtless with some truth, that county cricket offered the opportunity to devote one’s affections devotedly to one’s local team. Unluckily, even when it reached some enlarged regularity towards the end of the 19 th century, this was quite a limited proposition. The north-east and, beyond Gloucestershire, the west went unserved; only in the 20 th century did Durham and Glamorgan bring balm to the afflicted. Although the northern and later the midland counties attracted reasonable support from the industrial working classes, it was the lower orders who suffered most from top-class cricket starvation. They had neither the money nor the time to journey long distances to watch good cricket when, earlier, they had, even if only once or twice a summer, had it supplied on their own door step. Scotland is frequently scorned as lacking in a cricketing soul but perhaps that valuable possession was wrenched from the Scots by an absence of high-class cricketers on view.