Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

75 regulated and life was led according to a more well-defined clock. The settled worker and his wife adopted more of the life-style of the middle- class gentleman and his family. Records from the 1880s show that 80% of marriages were of men and women who lived in the same district, a remarkable testimony to the stability of the labour market and the concomitant steadiness of housing tenure. The contrast with the restless, casual, inconstant character of work and accommodation of many people in the 18 th century could not be more marked. The respectability of the working-classes was thereby consolidated. The professional and managerial classes admired and encouraged this. They were more farsighted than their forefathers, sensing that a stolid plebeian phalanx was preferable to a belligerent one. Victor Gatrell in a 1996 article entitled Crime, Authority and the Policeman State wrote ‘Victorians had no doubt that the best guarantee for the survival of their social order resided in the socialising of the poor rather than in their too candid disciplining.’ 6 In this way the one class encouraged the other as the other sought to emulate the one. Both agreed on a temperate vision of a civil community based on mutual respect and recognition. Among later professionals, church-going Jack Hobbs was one of a number who found little to complain of in the system, one in which, it is true, he had been immensely successful. It was a system that was a microcosm of the national pattern. He seems to have been one, for example, who very willingly accepted the role of the amateur, not least as captain. There are parallels in those other Victorian bastions of deeply etched tradition, the army and the stately home. In a county team and in some other cricketing situations where the gentry turned for technical succour from a paid expert, the relationship was akin to military rank or domestic service status. But, especially for the more senior pros, the grading was at non-commissioned officer level. The seasoned professional, like Wilfred Rhodes or George Hirst in the Yorkshire eleven, had much in common with the sergeant-major in the crack regiment or the butler in the big house, the Hudson of Upstairs, Downstairs or the Carson of Downton Abbey . The stairs might set apart servants from master and mistress, like the separate dressing rooms of the cricketers but both occupied the same edifice. Often the butlers and housekeepers or the sergeant majors and warrant officers held the honour of the house or regiment in higher esteem than their superiors, defending its conventions and peculiarities with a surprising fierceness. Thus was it with many cricket professionals, grimly protective of the ancient truths and habits of the game. Even at a day-by-day practical level there was some humdrum rationale. Given the class division, the artisan in his soiled overall would not, even if suddenly gifted with a fortune, have felt comfortable entering a first- class railway carriage, sitting in the stands at a Football League ground or lounging in a stall seat at the Savoy Theatre. The lady of the house, had she been graciously trained in the courtesies, would have hesitated about bursting in on the servants’ supper or at least would have apologised for so doing. The sergeants’ mess was sacrosanct. No officer would have The Cricket Crowd