Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

67 Chapter Seven The Cricket Crowd The crowd came as a bit of a surprise to the cricketing authorities. Grounds had been enclosed more to repel than embrace the common horde. Lord’s had imposed charges to deter the bothersome element and, as William Clarke and other ground entrepreneurs discovered, over a hundred years period prior to the 1860s, much as the lower orders enjoyed cricket, they preferred it gratis. These were clubs and remained so. By that token they were the province of subscribing members, initially playing members, soon joined by non-playing members who enjoyed watching. One or two counties were more watcher than player orientated in their origins but, in the outcome, they all, along with MCC, adopted some form of two-tier membership, three-tier if one counts the usual provision made at lower cost for the ladies and children of members. A taste for spectating had been renewed by the Exhibition XIs although it would appear that some of their matches had been, in part or whole, of the typical Georgian mould, whereby an entrepreneur, ordinarily a publican, gathered together as many as wished to attend, hopeful that their consumption of his wares would leave him with a profit. Gradually, a combine of increased leisure and improved pay coupled with the burgeoning interest in cricket produced large and regular attendances. To this should be added the spiralling interest of the press, both the specialist sporting magazines and the daily or weekly newspapers. Much cheaper newspapers and a widened literacy boosted the daily reading about cricket in all classes of society. 1 Almost the only signs of misconduct at cricket grounds in this more quiescent epoch were when the new wine of milling crowds clashed with the old bottle of inadequate grounds. Unruliness at the Eton and Harrow fixtures at Lord’s in 1863 and 1873 was caused by overcrowding. In 1864 MCC invited the Metropolitan Police to extend the long arm of the law but lack of space and amenities were the real problems. 40,000 attended the two days of the 1873 game, 27,000 of them paying, 13,000 members and guests. MCC next played the old card of raising the admission from 1s to 2s 6d. Paying customers dropped to 15,000, still making an overfull arena. Some idea of the antiquated nature of the Lord’s ground is explicit in the 1864 announcement of increased prices at the schools’ match. These were 1s for those ‘on foot’; on horseback 2s6d; two wheeled carriages 5s and the four wheeled type 10s. In 1861 700 carriages had paraded at Lord’s for the first day of the Eton and Harrow encounter; in 1876 there were 1200 carriages. Strangely, the Eton and Harrow match stretched the Lord’s resources more than most games and was one of the motivators of