Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

65 himself - shadows of Arthur Shrewsbury and Albert Trott – in that year aged 29. He left over £66,000. The credo of Athleticism was purest and some would add nastiest in, aptly enough, athletics and also in rowing. The Amateur Athletic Association formed in 1880 laid down stringent requirements. It defined the amateur in social as well as economic terms with its offer of membership to ‘any gentleman’ who eschewed payments and was not ‘a mechanic, artisan or labourer.’ Rowing purged the sport of any professionalism, even including coaching. Separate clubs emerged for gentlemen, tradesmen and ‘watermen’, who were those boatmen doing it for a living. The football codes, like cricket, were faced with professionalism. The Football Association, founded in 1863, accepted that legitimate expenses might be paid but otherwise stood firm. In 1885 it was reluctantly decided that, with certain restrictions, wages would be allowed. The authorities rightly thought this compromise was preferable to what Charles Alcock, Secretary of the FA and a power also in the cricket world, called ‘veiled professionalism’. Although the dodge of pushing a few shillings in the football boot was never eradicated, in the main this division into a professional spectator and an amateur recreational sport proved to be effective. There were oddities. In 1885 J.H.Forrest, of Blackburn Rovers, became England’s first professional international player; playing his first game against Scotland he had to wear a blue jersey to distinguish him from his white-shirted unpaid team-mates. With the establishment of the Football League in 1888 the professional game became increasingly serious. Registration was introduced which was in some ways harsher than the cricketer’s bond; once registered, a player was more or less tied willy-nilly to a club with the possibility of being sold by transfer to another team. The Rugby Union, formed by the breakaway of clubs from the FA in 1871, suffered its own fissure in 1895 over the question of ‘broken time’ payments, that is expenses paid to players who had lost earnings because of playing. The RU was adamantly opposed to this practice which led to the formation of the Northern Rugby Union, later the Rugby League. By 1910 there were about 400 Rugby League professionals while, after a latish start, a sudden surge had brought the number of full- or part- time paid footballers to 5000. A rough estimate would be that there were about 8000 or 9000 professional sportsmen in the UK by the end of the Edwardian period where there had been but a handful sixty years before. There were one or two gentlemen who opted for professional status; Surrey’s George Lohmann was the son of a Stock Exchange employee and the father of Lancashire’s Arthur Paul was a senior army offcier, later Chief Constable of the Isle of Man. One or two played as amateurs and then turned professional, among them W.G.Grace’s cousin Walter Gilbert of Middlesex and Edwin Diver of Surrey. It was a tiny band. The stigma was quite toxic. Being a gentleman in Victorian England, with all its subtle gradations and mannerisms, was to occupy a very particular status. W.G.Grace is but the most well-known of those who found it impossible The Working Class Cricketer