Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

70 more middle class than their counterpart in the major industrial cities. While this may have been marginally true, there may have been some of the ‘snooty London – sooty Leeds’ sentiment about this contention. Despite the prominence of the textile, mining and other heavily industrialised trades in the remarkable growth of industry in Britain, the metropolis also had its own industrial revolution. The population of Greater London shot astronomically from 1.4m at the beginning to just over 7m at the end of the 19th century. It had a huge proletariat, the diversity of its occupations blurring the vision of the historian habituated to observing the industrial work-force in blocs of miners or cotton operatives. As befitted a capital city, London’s industries tended toward such work as the docks, the building and construction trades, the food and clothing manufacturies, armaments and the like. There is every reason to believe that a dedicated minority of these workers would have wended their way to London’s cricket venues, especially perhaps the Oval. Cricket crowds were generally representative of the class breakdown in society at large. The lay-out of the larger modernised grounds illustrates this. The convention was adopted of a pavilion, sometimes with winged extra stands, for members and guests, with the remainder of the circle taken up by ‘free seats’ or other terracing, rows of benches and grassed mounds. The inference to be drawn is that, on average, a quarter of the crowd were members in the pavilion and its surrounds, all of them, as of right, drawn from the middle classes and well able to afford the one or two guineas fee. The stands flanking the pavilion might also have included specially priced accommodation for non-member gentlemen and perhaps their families. Ladies’ pavilions were not unknown. The other three quarters of the circuit of seating and on many smaller grounds grassy knolls for standing or sitting were for the working class spectators, obviously in goodly numbers. However, the overlap of income of poorer middle class and better off working class earners must be recalled, so that there must have been some mixing of the respectable artisan and the underpaid clerk, for example, all of it illustrative of the enforced closeness of the two main classes at their income-based boundaries. The standard football ground, given its rectangular shape, is a neater example of the principle. Contrary to popular belief, professional football was not an entirely plebeian pursuit. While not as blessed with the encouragement of peers and knights of the realm as was cricket, there was a lot of interest and, of course, investment, by local businessmen and a keen awareness that a successful team was good for the community and its economy. The usual construct was a stand of, paradoxically, seats for this class, most frequently behind one touchline and with dressing rooms and offices often based thereunder, with the working class standing on the sets of terraces, one opposite the grandstand and one behind each goal. The demographic arithmetic was flawless; 25% middle and 75% working class. In this later Victorian period and up until the First World War, one must recollect that the combined total of an aspiring and respectable The Cricket Crowd