Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

66 to choose between being a pure ‘gentleman’ and an openly remunerated ‘player’. Nonetheless, cricket by accident or design managed the cohesion of the classes with more fluidity than any other sport where professionalism had become an essential factor. The County Cricket team was a microcosm of what was evolving in many domains of cultural and social experience in late 19 th and early 20th century. Its arithmetic was surprisingly close to the norm in its proportions. As the 20 th century dawned and for a further generation, the average county side would have two or three amateurs and eight or nine professionals. This very tidily represented the 25%/75% of that large central mass of the then British population which comprised the aspiring working and the earnest middle classes. All in all, and for all the snobbery and hypocrisy involved, cricket’s essay in class alliance offered during this period perhaps the least objectionable sporting model in a class-obsessed society. 1. Richard J. Evans The Pursuit of Power; Europe 1815-1914 (2016) pp 225/228 2. Wynne-Thomas p.81 3. Eric Midwinter The Collective Age 1850-1950;the Rise and Fall of a Fairer Society (2017) The following discussion of social class statistics leans heavily on chapter 3 ‘Collectivism and Social Structure’ 4. Sissons op.cit p.85ff and passim. 5. Sandiford op.cit. Pp 86/87 6. Sissons op.cit. Especially pp 140/143 7. David Frith By Their Own Hand; a Study of Cricket’s Suicides (1990) and Silence of the Heart; Cricket’s Suicides (2001) 8. Judith Flanders Consuming Passions; Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (2006) fascinating in general but in particular for this topic chapter 11 ‘Sporting Life’ pp.419/465. For a simple list of the dates of this ‘bureaucratisation’ of all games, see Eric Midwinter Fair Game; Myth and Reality in Modern Sport (1986) p.54/56 The Working Class Cricketer