Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

54 Clubs And County Clubs have been used to taking advice from artisan experts like gamekeepers or blacksmiths but not to being ruled by them. It is a tribute to the more mellow mood of the age that it worked tolerably effectively. By this time many amateurs would as schoolboys have become habituated to reacting temperately to coaches and both kinds of cricketer would have been reared in the lesson of the finality of an umpiring decision. The umpires desire to both please their bosses and placate their old comrades possibly neutralised any in-built prejudices and, on the whole, all cricketers appeared to have been reasonably well-conducted. Throwing was the chief cause of discontent. The Australian-born umpire James Phillips created mayhem in the 1890s with his fearless and perhaps over-enthusiastic calling, the culprits including the patrician and irate C.B.Fry. In a complex game such as cricket there has always been a grudging agreement that umpiring errors even themselves out, if not over a match, then over a season. Generally speaking, it would be fair to rank this espousal of the lower class umpire as a tiny piece of evidence of the benign behaviour of the classes then when active in concert. The story is told of W.G.Grace, not one to suffer fools purporting to be umpires let alone batsmen, bowlers and fielders, gladly, showing disapproval of a contested run out in a match at Birmingham in 1874. Noting this, the Yorkshire umpire Charles (presumably) Webster cried, ‘If you had been Jesus Christ I should have given you out.’ The Victorian theologian may have wished to add the rider that Jesus Christ would have been unlikely to have shown signs of dissent at his dismissal. That apart, the tale, whether, like many Gracian anecdotes, apocryphal or not, acts as a gentle resume of this discussion of the umpire/player class relationship in Victorian cricket. 9 Professional umpires, players, net bowlers, groundsmen, coaches, some of them part-time, some of them taking two of these tasks – it is difficult to place a correct figure on those making a living, in part or whole, from cricket. It was certainly several thousand with, at the top of a flourishing tree probably 500 in relatively well-paid posts as players and/or coaches in the county, league and prestigious club ranks or attached to schools and colleges. It is logical to surmise that these men learned their trade as members of club teams and it would have been on the basis of club form that they sought professional recognition. While the social profile of some of the elite clubs seems to have remained purely middle class, it must be assumed that the generality of local clubs were giving plenty of chances to young hopefuls from the working classes. Otherwise there would not have been this thriving flow of potential county and league professionals of such good quality. A further assumption might be that in the main they must have come from the upper tiers of that echelon. They would have needed a little bit of brass and a little bit of polish to negotiate the rugged path to success. Few of them would have been coached at school whereas the blossoming amateur legion benefited from the high-levels of coaching, grounds and fixture-lists of their public schools. Just as many, though by no means