Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

71 working class and a serious-minded and hard-working middle class was, a conservative estimate, well over 80% of the population, that is all but the poorer, unskilled sub-class and the upper class. Alike in mind-set, religious outlook, moral code and domestic habit, they constituted a formidable coalition. The cricketing alliance, whether at participation or spectating level, was not some exotic novelty. A deeper understanding of what at first sight appears to be a divisive process, with amateurs and professionals using separate dressing rooms, entrances to the pitch, overnight accommodation, travel facilities and so forth, comes with a grasp of the widespread manifestation of the phenomenon. The strategy of sharing the same experience from class standpoints was not new. What was novel was the concentrated incidence of this joint happening. The theatre had long practised this and continued to do so. Indeed, even the music hall, long believed to be the haunt of the working class, has been shown to have enjoyed, especially when big business adopted it and sought respectability for the product, a considerable middle-class custom. The church practice of the free pew and the pew paid for is another example, as is, at the other end of the ethical gamut, the pub with, increasingly, a saloon and a public bar. A cheery example is the seaside holiday resort. The advent of the week’s holiday for many workers, with, eventually, pay included, brought thousands usually by rail to the beaches and promenades. By 1911 there were 145 registered seaside resorts around the British coast. The brash leader was Blackpool which welcomed 1.5m boarders and 3m day visitors every year. It is a particularly apt example, for, of course, many seaside towns hosted first-class cricket among the attractions on offer. The Sussex county ground at Hove and the deployment of Scarborough and Hastings for late season festival weeks are the obvious instances but Blackpool, no less, as well as Southport and Lytham St Annes, along with Clacton, Bournemouth, Southend and others might be listed. Consciously or otherwise, many seaside resorts developed a select and a less select end or, as in the case of Blackpool, two select wings and a working class centre. One could opt for different styles of accommodation according to income and taste – and then stroll down the same promenades, walk down the same piers, watch the same minstrel or pierrot shows, listen to the same brass bands – Britain had 50,000 brass bands in 1900 – and cluster in the same pier pavilions and promenade shelters when the same inevitable rain fell. The trains that carried the holdiay-makers to and from the resorts were overt in their retailing, using the first, second and third class nomenclature unashamedly. Interestingly, it was in 1875, as the new social order was beginning to peak, that the railway companies upgraded the third and abolished the second class carriages, so that they basically ran trains with working and middle-class compartments, conveying professional and amateur cricketers in each respectively. The Cricket Crowd