Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

64 The Working Class Cricketer birthright. Football and cricket crowds still revel in the local boy making good although, truth to tell, they delight the more in supporting a winning team. Yorkshire, with its broad acres and multitude of cricket clubs, and in spite of Lord Hawke having been born in Lincolnshire, took the blood- cult very seriously until recent times. It is with sorrow that one discovers the pastoral idyll of the home-spun team was, not least at a time when the county championship was still some years away from being a properly regulated and orthodox competition, no more than a blatant piece of class legislation. It was an act in restraint of trade that was not seriously challenged until the Packer era while only latterly have counties been forced to agree more binding and player-friendly annual contracts to stop their staffs being recruited for winter cricket without their permission. At the time, of course, it was viewed rather differently. The abiding concept was the master and servant relationship. Equity had no part in that. Britons might never, never be slaves but even freemen had to work and eat, and their employers – mill owner, farmer, stately home, county cricket club – held the aces. Trades unionism, while on the rise, was still in its infancy as a negotiating mechanism. Cricketers, like farm labourers, were spread widely in penny numbers, not solidly together in sizable mining or textile communities. The only two attempts at what it is probably ostentatious to label strike action – seven Notts professionals in 1881 and five England players in 1896 – were both met with ruthless firmness. In other words, professional cricketers were no better and no worse off than their compadres in the upper levels of the working class. Another contextual lens is the manner in which other sports dealt with the class riddle. Plainly, the poser only arose where participants required paid help or spectatorship necessitated it. There is little data for anyone interested in writing a thesis on croquet, lacrosse or hockey professionalism at this time. Golf approaches cricket in that it developed the club professional who often doubled as ground keeper and teacher or maybe trebled as a club and ball maker. The British Open Championship, open, that is, to professionals and amateurs, dates from 1861 and that has safely sailed through the years without undue tumult. The professionals Willie Park and the Toms Morris, father and son were the early winners. They would not, of course, have been allowed in the clubhouse. Popular although golf was in parts of Scotland, the English boom came late in the 19 th century. In 1880 there was a sorry total of twelve courses in England; by 1914 it was over a thousand, providing wholesome employment for a large work-force. This was the era of a huge expansion in British sport and a time when the formation of national ruling bodies and league, championship and allied competitive structures was intensified. 8 The mature staples of horse racing and boxing, both dominated by professional performers, continued. Horse racing remained perhaps the most popular of games despite the growth of cricket and its rewards for high-class jockeys were mouth-watering. The legendary Fred Archer, champion jockey in thirteen years up to 1886, shot