Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

78 Cricket and Class up to 1914 libraries, was another instance, while William Gladstone’s removal of what was called ‘a tax on knowledge’ is another. As Chancellor of the Exchequer he rid the nation of the advertisement tax, the newspaper stamp duty and the paper tax that a free press might flourish. It should be recalled that the installation of such taxes had been to halt the publishing of insurrectionary materials – rather like cricket clubs putting up the prices to deter the rougher sort - and thus their cancellation is an excellent illustration of the new trust in which the lower orders were being regarded. There are illustrations galore but a very positive one was the introduction of the Penny Post in 1840. Before 1840 letters were charged according to distance and number of sheets. From here on in a penny would be the uniform cost for delivery anywhere in the country or, later, the Empire and the USA. The General Post Office delivered 132m letters in 1840, the first year of Rowland Hill’s inventive scheme. In 1839 there had only been 75m letters delivered. By 1913 there were 300m letters posted. Prior to 1840 when the ‘letter carrier’ had being paid on delivery, costs were high, with, for example, 9d Birmingham to London among the standard charges. The equivalent of a reduction of the 1s3d it previously cost to send a letter to Glasgow from London to 1d would be if today the price of a first-class stamp fell from 64p to 4p. Moreover, far from taking the current market stance, the British government underwrote the new process until 1870 when it first began to realise a profit. However, much as cricket teams and supporters benefited immeasurably from the railways, much as millions more were enabled to read avidly of their cricketing heroes’ acts of glory in the cheap press and much as hard- pressed fixture and harassed team secretaries must have been eternally grateful for the advantages of the Penny Post, the most direct contribution of the nascent Collectivist state to cricket was the municipal park. In 1834 a Select Committee of the House of Commons on drunkenness had strongly recommended the provision of ‘public walks, or gardens, or open spaces for healthy and athletic exercise in the open air’ and radical MPs like Joseph Hulme and Robert Slaney took up the cudgels. Soon forward- looking local authorities were taking as much pride in their parks as in their libraries, art galleries and museums. Park designers had what might appositely be called a field day. Among them were Joseph Paxton, creator of the Crystal Palace, John Gibson, Superintendent of London’s parks, many of which had been in the royal gift, Edward Miller, who designed parks in Buxton, Halifax and Preston and Edward Vamp, responsible for Hesketh Park, Southport, Stanley Park, Liverpool and Birkenhead Park. Some parks were donated by or subscribed for by local philanthropy; Sir Robert Peel gave £10,000 towards the development of Peel Park, Salford. The standard British park followed the landscaped enclave made popular earlier by Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton. Urban noises and bustle were effectively shut out of sight and mind by a surround of heavy foliage usually with ornate gates to feed the country estate fantasy. Inside this perimeter of bushes and trees was laid a Macadamised path known as a ‘Brownean ring’. Within this circular walkway was the grassland. There