Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

63 The Working Class Cricketer to this a measure of his respectability. Voices sympathetic to the pros have tended to view the change as exploitative, the hearty entrepreneurial buccaneers replaced by galley-slave drudges. There is no doubt that the county system was more controlling than that of the Exhibition teams but to imagine that any group overseen by the likes of William Clarke or W.G.Grace, autocrats both, mirrored the ideals of the Rochdale Co- operative Pioneers would be wide of the mark. Although slow to reach tidy solutions in terms of how the championship was arranged, the county schedule was competitive and thus some refinement of player flexibility was demanded. A further point to note is the size of the cadre. Of its nature the Exhibition XIs in any one season could only offer opportunities to 40 or so players while the counties offered work to four or five times as many; it is a tricky ethical conundrum whether a few freer men in work beats many men doing the same job is more restrictive conditions. The defining year was in 1873. The decision was agreed that no player should play for more than one county in a season. Roger Iddison, for example, had contrived to play for both Lancashire and Yorkshire in the same summer during the 1860s. That was tantamount to being recruited by both sides in the contemporaneous conflict of the American Civil War. There was a reasonableness about the edict. Moreover, a deep sense of loyalty, fostered in school, regiment and elsewhere, led the authorities to expect such devotion among their inferiors; the professional flitting hither and yon lacked patriotic backbone. But the devil was in the detail, for a player had to opt by birth or residence of two years for a particular county and that was very limiting. It applied to amateurs but never seems to have been so strictly applied with the ‘occasional residence’, such as a parental home, clause benefiting the more geographically advantaged middle and upper classes. Moving freely each summer would have been workable, even legitimate but this birth and residential rider was stultifying. Pity the poor young professional born or living in a shire which could afford few if any professionals or his counterpart in a well-provided county who, falling short of the high standard required there, could not easily try his arm elsewhere. A player wishing or ordered to move was faced with a two year denial of top-class cricket as he established residence in another county, even if he could find one ready with a promise of fuller employment three seasons ahead. The convention of a benefit after ten years of cricketing application with good conduct was another tether. While gradually slackened in rigidity, the residential rule endured a hundred years. Tom Graveney played no county cricket in 1961 as he made what in terms of time was a lengthy journey from Gloucestershire to neighbouring Worcestershire. Many generations of cricket-lovers grew up enjoying the romantic fancy that the county was represented by county-born or bred players. There is no doubt that the county then had a profounder identity - ‘county commonwealths’ as Lewis Namier the great historian of Hanoverian Britain called them – with county as important to some as national