Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

57 Chapter Six The Working Class Cricketer Context is important. The demographics of the middle and working classes and their comparative life-styles paint the canvas against which a cross-class affection for cricket was played out. It was only in the early part of the 19 th century that the terms ‘middle class’ and ‘working class’, sometimes in the plural, came commonly into use, with categories like ‘gentle’ and ‘simple’ now somewhat archaic. Certainly from the ascent to the throne of Queen Victoria in 1837 one may safely deploy the terms without fear of anachronism. It was far from being a caste system. Writing in mid-19 th century the perceptive French political scientist, Alexis de Tocqueville suggested that ‘the Englishman, unlike the Frenchman, is accustomed to the idea that he can rise in the social scale’ and that this was protection against the kind of revolutionary humours of his native land. At the same time, this comforting thought appears to have been pondered upon and accepted as an agreeable situation about which not much further action need be taken. On the whole, there was little urgency to seek to rise in station. There was substantial contentment, perhaps, self-satisfaction, in being in, staying in and knowing one’s place. Lord Palmerston, a leading light of the Whig governments from the late 1840s and prime minster with just a brief interval for ten years 1855 to 1865, understood full well the social model that was emerging and urged it on Britain’s more reactionary neighbours: ‘we have shown the example as a nation, in which every class of society accepts with cheerfulness the lot which providence has assigned to it; while at the same time every individual of each class is striving to raise himself in the social scale – not by injustice and wrong, not by violence and illegality, but by preserving good conduct, and by the steady and energetic execution of the moral and intellectual faculties with which his creator has endowed him.’ 1 The cricket clubs both of the recreational and the county varieties illustrated the ethic explicit in that statement – and, so as the next chapter will outline, did those who came to watch. It has some relevance to cricket that the first use of numbers apropos classes was in 1807 when Oxford and Cambridge Universities introduced the concept of first, second and third class degrees, although this was a very rarefied usage given the miniscule sum of persons involved. It was the railways who, in 1838, initiated the usage for popular reference with their first, second and third class carriage system. In 1846 they added the refinement of the hyphen, as in first-class. The second known practice of the ‘first class’ label was when in the 1840s Fred Lillywhite, that proficient bowler who became equally effective as a chronicler and