Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

58 The Working Class Cricketer printer, introduced the branding to grade batsmen. Later bowlers were added and eventually these joint performances led to matches and teams being so judged. 2 It is a cheering conceit to imagine that Fred Lillywhite, who must have undertaken many train journeys in his career, borrowed the term from the railways, to which national cricket already owed so much. It must be said that the cricket authorities were not so well-organised as the railway companies. The counties and the press argued over the throes of classification for years and it was not until 1894 that a leaden-footed MCC, despairing of the counties’ inability to resolve the issue, came to a momentous decision. There was ‘no need for further sub-division’. Like, famously, pregnancy, you either were or you weren’t. In future there would be first-class teams and matches and, consequently, players – and the rest were not. Like so much of cricket’s past – the county championship and Test matches are other instances – this led to sometimes rather frantic efforts by archivists and researchers to ascribe the title retrospectively. This arose partly from the faux -religious cult that cricket had become, with a heavy weight of history required as a kind of benediction. But this ex post facto approach was in part caused by hapless statisticians faced, a pertinent example, with the risk of W.G.Grace’s figures changing grades in 1894. Association football, for instance, was either more fortunate or more neatly managed in that the Football Association was a properly acknowledged national body when it inaugurated for its national club membership the FA Challenge Cup whilst the Football League constructed a well-regulated competition from day one. There was no attempt – there was no need – to latch on earlier activities to the annals as the cricket arbitrators felt obliged to do. A starting-point in a clearer understanding of the balance of classes must be the numbers involved and here, as on other matters, the historian is lucky in the richness of the data available, much of it contemporary. Dudley Baxter’s excellent attempt at social analysis, National Income , produced in 1868, estimated that the upper and middle classes constituted between a fifth and a quarter of the population. He calculated that the population of England and Wales was 21m – the census returns for 1861 and 1871 show 20m and 22.7m respectively, so he was clearly close in his arithmetic. Of these he reckoned there were some 4.8m in the top and about 16.1m in the bottom of the two broad bands. This rough split of 20/80 to 25/75 middle class/working class is still an approximate ratio that acts as a guide for general social study, changing slightly to 30/70 during the early decades of the 20 th century. 3 The spur to a rising and more influential middle class was patently the burgeoning place of commerce and industry in the economy, but such growth brought with it other demands. Urbanisation and the necessary and allied provision of public services boosted the strength of the professions, among them doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers and public servants of all kinds. The number in the ‘public service and professional sector’ in 1851 was 200,000. In 1891 it was 560,000 and there were similar rises in