Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

62 The Working Class Cricketer an extraordinary picture of extremes. Poverty, illness, premature death, alcoholism and suicide were at one end of the gamut and highly successful business enterprise at the other. While some, like John Wisden or William Gunn, profitably developed major sport equipment businesses – who among the aficionados didn’t want a copy of ‘the Cricketer’s Bible’ or a Gunn and Moore cricket bat? - whereas Archie MacLaren, while majestically regal as a batsman, was more of a court jester when it came to the umpteen business enterprises of which he made a pig’s ear. On his death William Gunn left £54,392. Yet John Jackson, having risen from poor origins to become a feared quick bowler, declined into impoverishment and died a pauper in 1901 in Liverpool workhouse infirmary. (Not quite so miserable an ending as one might fear; by 1901 the poor law hospitals, like Manchester’s Crumpsall and Withington, were among the country’s leading such institutions, well-disciplined and pioneering, having rid themselves of much of the Dickensian gloom and horror.) Two great professional cricketers, Arthur Shrewsbury and Albert Trott shot themselves, or rather himself; but so did A.E.Stoddart, an outstanding amateur batsman, sustaining a grim cricketing parade of felo de se which David Frith has chronicled with diligent and perceptive acuity. 7 In short, between these diverse points were also many who, by the norms of the time for a working class man, lived moderately well. This was in part because of the noblesse oblige influence of one or two potentates of the game such as Lord Hawke of Yorkshire and Lord Harris of Kent, both of whom, if with more than a whiff of condescension, insisted on reasonable treatment for professionals. The former, faced as captain with a Yorkshire team he famously described as ten drunks and a parson, strove to smarten up and discipline his almost wholly inebriated and only slightly Christian troupe. With such accoutrements as the county cap, he enjoyed some success in his aims while Lord Harris said in 1886 that so progressive were his views that some claimed he was ‘a cricket socialist’. It is unlikely that Keir Hardie, let alone Karl Marx, would have spotted in Lord Harris a fellow searcher for the Red Dawn – and they would have been right. But both Lord Hawke and he demanded respect and they were prepared to tender the same in return. Like so much of the Victorian social equation the significant factor was respectability. If the working man toed the line in dignified fashion and kicked not against the pricks of the ongoing order, then he would be treated decently and fairly. Dutiful behaviour was at the heart of the relationship. Complaining, quibbling and defiance were not. Let us be quite fair to Lord Harris and Lord Hawke and others of their ilk, among them A.N.Hornby and on his more thoughtful days W.G.Grace, they were ready to respond positively. There were others perhaps who expected the deference as a right and took it off-handedly for granted. As county cricket waxed and Exhibition cricket waned, the professional became the subject of more intensive control than hitherto, his reaction