Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

73 ‘the democracy of laughter.’ One might imagine Mr Pickwick and Sam as fellow-members of the Gad’s Hill CC XI. Charles Dickens employed the vogue device of cross-class romance, as in the poignant tales of Pip and Estella in Great Expectations, itself a telling analysis of the difficulties of changing from working man to gentleman. or Eugene Wrayburn and Lizzie Hexam in Our Mutual Friend . Every mainline pantomime – Cinderella and Prince Charming; Aladdin and Princess Balroubadour; Dick Whittington and Alice Fitzwarren – represents this trope. Gilbert followed suit – the G&S comic operas have been termed, not altogether kindly, ‘intelligent pantomime’ – in almost every libretto, with, for instance, Frederic and Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance or Ralph Rackstraw and Josephine in HMS Pinafore . The Victorian public avidly read and eagerly watched cross-class stories. Everyone had characters with whom they could socially identify. The social and cultural concordance enjoyed by the classes and its celebration in their literature and theatre was of the utmost importance to the watching of cricket and indeed other sports. The older inhabitants of later Victorian Britain must have marvelled at the changed outlook on the teeming host compared with in their younger days. In a phrase, the crowd was no longer feared. Memories of the Luddite riots, the ‘Captain Swing’ agricultural unrest and the hard-line militancy of a minority in the Chartist agitation had not faded yet, but surprisingly and suddenly, it was deemed legitimate for vast assemblages to forgather regularly, in fact, during the cricket season almost every day, often with little or no policing. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a test-case and marked a step-change in the authorities’ view of the English crowd. 6m people, notionally almost a quarter of the population, visited the splendours of the Crystal Palace, on an average of 43,000 daily. Bear in mind, too, that this was more an educative exercise than any sort of funfair and yet train loads of working men and their families were motivated to make the trip, frequently with paternalistic bosses underwriting the costs and making the arrangements for travel and accommodation. It is a matter of prurient interest that it was at the Great Exhibition that the first penny-in-the-slot toilets were made available; 800,000 men, women and children of all classes, took advantage of the amenity. Before this just a few ‘chalets de convenience’ had been supplied for the gentry on ceremonious occasions, the use of French itself pointing to a cloying inhibition about such matters, although soon ‘public conveniences’ were being built by local authorities. Now cricket ground administrators, along with the owners and managers of other arenas, were having, in the face of much larger audiences, to take this issue into account and provide facilities, even if ‘spending a penny’ had to be embraced as yet another prudish euphemism. Behaviour at the Great Exhibition was exemplary. The old Duke of Wellington, but a few months of his life remaining, but, as ever, sniffing The Cricket Crowd