Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

74 the air for the rank odour of rebelliousness, had been horrified at the thought of thousands upon thousands of workaday folk heading for Hyde Park. His strong advice had been to place no less than 15,000 troops on hand to crush incipient revolt. He could not have made a wilder prophecy. Calm reigned. The Duke did, however, make one winning contribution on a topic which again touched on the unspoken subject of the lavatorial. Birds had managed to imprison themselves within the glass edifice and were making a dreadful mess. Efforts were made to expel them but all failed. The queen sent for her old servant and, much embarrassed, haltingly tried to convey to the Duke the problem caused by bird droppings. ‘Try sparrow hawks, ma’am’ was his curt but essentially practical and successful advice. History is not mathematics. It is all about more or less and rarely all or nothing. There were over the period outbreaks of civil stirrings occasionally political, for instance the Suffragette movement, but mainly to do with economic unrest and strike action. However, on the whole, by comparison with the previous century and a half, it was as if the tempest had been stilled and the waters were not rippled. Policing had certainly improved. The Metropolitan Police was inaugurated in 1829; the Municipal Incorporation Act of 1835 introduced the borough forces and statutes in 1839 and 1856 established the county police services. By 1900 there were 38 county and 145 borough forces in England and Wales. The random mesh of gaols was nationalised in 1865 and replaced by a stable network of 95 prisons. This fabric of policing and prisons remained undisturbed until after the Second World War. Perhaps more important than the actual installation of police forces was the gradual consensus, apart from among the ‘residuum’ of the much reduced criminal fraternity, the police service negotiated with the public at large, The feared ‘blue-butchers’ slowly became friendly ‘Bobbies’. Crime declined rapidly, down, according to some commentators, by 50% in the latter half of the 19 th century. Crime statistics are even more notoriously variable than cricket statistics but there is no doubt that by the last decades of the Victorian epoch crime had dropped to abnormally low not only by previous standards but by international yardsticks. In the last decades of the 19 th century indictable offences had lessened to about 100,000 per annum , that is about two or three crimes for every thousand of the population – and that rate was to stay unchanged until the early 1960s. This was a very law-abiding community. Sir William Harcourt, Home Secretary in William Gladstone’s 1880/85 ministry, announced that the decrease in crime was ‘a bright and encouraging sign on our social horizon’. In 1901 the Criminal Register noted that there was ‘an approximation in the manners of different classes; a decline in the spirit of lawlessness.’ Sir Richard Evans has recently drawn the significant conclusion that ‘the more urban and industrialised an area became, the more its overall crime rate tended to fall’. 5 The Victorian world was more settled and the old grey area between wrong- and right-doing had been clarified. Public space was more precisely The Cricket Crowd