Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

6 for ‘educated’ and ‘artisan’ participants to play or watch together. Fortunately, there had been precedents in the Georgian epoch when forms of cricket were induced in London and the south-east into something of an identifiable format under the pressure of heavy gambling. The patrons of those matches were not averse from recruiting, initially through their own employees, paid help from the lower classes. For a brief spell cross-class teams were fielded – and the notion of the paid player had stamped itself sufficiently on the game for it to survive. It did so, much strengthened, when cricket re-emerged in improved moral guise after the collapse of the gambling craze. The class-related phenomenon of ‘Gentlemen and Players’ was soon accepted as the normal descriptor. It is often viewed, according to political taste, as a wholesome jolly of cavalier toffs and cheery rustics or a grim exploitation of abject proles by arrogant gaffers. The association of social class and English cricket is, of course, much more nuanced than that. In particular, the period 1846 to 1962, book-ended in cricketing terms by the first outings of William Clarke’s ‘Exhibition’ XI and the end of the purported amateur/professional distinction, also approximates to the era in which the concept of social class impinges most forcefully on the English psyche. Cricket, most compellingly at county and international but also at club and school levels, has much to tell about the incidence of social class consciousness and practice during this period – just as an understanding of this same class dichotomy in society in general throws light on cricket’s class issues. In overall terms, the period under major review was a hundred years or so marked by a counter-intuitive harmony as between earnest middle class and aspiring working classes. This was forged against a background of state-sponsored improved conditions, for which the most apt technical term is Collectivism. This embraced local as well as central government not least in those activities ascribed as ‘rational recreation’ by Victorian authorities. Hundreds of cricket matches played in municipal parks is a model example of this tendency. With shared values and interests, the two classes, making up over 80% of the population, prompted a kind of voluntary alliance, best described as ‘cultural integration’. There was much shared in common, although the spheres of that sharing were clearly marked – for instance, the train with its ‘class’ compartments. Thus the sight of three Victorian or early 20th century amateurs emerging from one dressing room and through one gate and eight professionals from another room and through another gate to find common ground in a joint enterprise is the perfect microcosm, arithmetically correct, of social conditions from mid-19 th to mid-20 th century. Moreover, if less regulated, something of the same was to be found in certain elements of recreational cricket while, more significantly, spectatorship of the first-class game was similarly patterned. One is able Prologue