Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

72 Another example is that of Britain’s first venture into the light music industry with the extremely business-like Gilbert and Sullivan operas. In concert with the entrepreneur Richard D’Oyly Carte, Gilbert and Sullivan took the theatrical world by storm. By the time of the composer’s death in 1900 there had been 6000 G&S performances in London and 30,000 in the provinces, there were 3000 amateur licences sold a year and there was a vast outcrop of sheet music, band parts, souvenirs, gifts and the like. From ‘parlour’ ballads sung domestically and mock-madrigals for choirs to barrel-organs, military bands and whistling errand boys, the melodic strains were ubiquitous. Those holiday-makers, middle-class or working class, pausing by the band on the prom at Eastbourne or Skegness, would have bent their ears to a selection of tunes from Pirates of Penzance. Spectators, whether of high or low birth, at Scarborough or Hastings cricket grounds would have been entertained by the brass band playing a medley of HMS Pinafore music. As an exercise in the shrewd salesmanship of light music, it was not emulated until Beatlemania generations later but what is striking is the keen awareness of W.S.Gilbert of the cross-class potential. Over and again he used culinary metaphors to describe this. He searched for what he called ‘the gastronomic mean’, musical theatre that would ‘supply a meal of one dish at which all the community are to sit down.’ ‘Tripe and onions’ would be found tasty in the pit but not the stalls; vice versa ‘sweetbread and truffles’. So Gilbert argued that ‘a plain leg of mutton and boiled potatoes is the most stable fare of all.’ On another foray into the kitchen for inspiration, he claimed to provide ‘rump steak and oyster sauce for all.’ Another who had a clear-eyed understanding of the ‘integrated culture’ of these two staple classes was Gilbert’s own Guru, Charles Dickens. While accepting, even approving, the strict class divide per se , he preached the benevolent creed of entente cordiale between the classes as the foundation for social harmony, as we have already noted in respect of Gad’s Hill cricket club.. ‘We are all fellow-travellers to the same grave,’ he wrote in A Christmas Carol , ‘and not a race of different creatures bound on other journeys.’ His influence was enormous, first among equals in the prosperous book and publications industry. During Queen Victoria’s reign the numbers in the printing and stationery trades doubled to 200,000 and the number of books published annually rose from 2000 to 10,000. There were 42,000 Victorian novels written by 1500 novelists; a hundred of them each had one hundred titles published. They were chiefly family novels but they were also often and always in Dickens’ case, read by all social classes. They contrived to be both classic and popular, much more than today. A fine example of Dickensian social concord and his wish that the classes should be joined in ‘fusion...on a good, common, mutual ground’ is to be found in his master-servant studies. Some are, to be sure, acrimonious, exemplifying how unfruitful such relationships might be but others are, as in the splendid illustration of Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller, portrayals of wholesome and reciprocal affection, images of what has been called The Cricket Crowd