Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

61 The Working Class Cricketer and a yearning for sporting success. The authorities blinkered their eyes. The main recipients are now well-attested, with W.G.Grace, by today’s reckoning comfortably in receipt of over £1m from his cricketing activities. Other celebrity Shamateurs included Surrey’s W.W.Read, with £150 a year for a sinecure secretaryship, expenses of £4 a game, an annual bonus of £100 and a season ticket to and from the Oval. Archie MacLaren is another whose trail of payments for a number of spurious reasons is colourful and lengthy while stars like A.E.Stoddart and Gilbert Jessop have also come under this clouded spotlight. The anonymous journalist-cricketer – Pelham Warner referred to himself as ‘Mr Warner’ when reporting his own cricketing exploits in the press – was another bending of the ethics. MCC did hold an enquiry in 1879 into ‘the definition and qualification of amateur cricketers’. £50 was decreed as the maximum expenses for a season; at the turn of the century the amateur expenses for a Test match were 30s a day plus first-class train fare and hospitality. There were professionals at £4 a game who counted themselves lucky to earn £50 each summer. One might interpose here a word on the income of the league professional. In the pre-World War I days it was not princely. The top Lancashire league pros might have received £4 a match, a total of about £80 for the summer but in more lowly clubs it was as poor as £2, usually with the proviso that ground-keeping and coaching were part of the deal. Collections occasionally added a pound or two, rarely more, to the earnings. Patently, it was not a full-time job. 5 The stirring tale of Sydney Barnes, world class bowler as he was, is an exceptional one. Independent-minded, stubborn and mentally extremely astute, he negotiated his way through Test, county and league cricket with unerring skill and judgement. A high point of his steadfast career was when the Church club paid him £8 a week plus performance bonuses and collections. With something like £250 for a summer’s work, he was probably earning more than the amateur and, as he was a diligent clerk and talented calligrapher, he found both winter and post-career jobs with reasonable pay. He might be said to have eventually crossed that magical line between the player and the gentleman. If the professional cricketers were a little ahead economically of their class, the real downside was the shortness of the career. The news was not all bad. The complexities of and interest in cricket were such that, as has already been mentioned, there was a host of post-playing jobs for cricketers, ranging from scorers to bat and ball makers. From a mixture of sources, one might hazard the guess that upwards of two- third of pros found some cricket associated work when retired from playing. Publicans were probably the next highest occupational choice. 6 Professional footballers were less fortunate in that as in other respects. The benefit system helped, as long as the weather held, and the Cricketers’ Fund Friendly Society, established in 1857 by the old-style Exhibition pros, also assisted admirably. It existed until well after World War II but its genuine identity was in that former age when about the time the CFFS was founded the Friendly Society movement was at its strongest. However, in that pension-less era, the later lives of professional cricketers thus paint