Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

79 was an occasional nod to the other two park typologies. The Italianate statement of a baroque focus for civil pride, like Florence’s Boboli Gardens, was echoed in the bandstand that featured in most parks, while the Oriental attempt, as with the Taj Mahal, to create ‘an oasis of beauty blooming in an earthly desert’ was referenced in the colourful botanical gardens and flower beds that adorned many parks. The park as a place to walk, listen to the band on a Sunday afternoon and look at the flowers was all very well. It suited the Victorian’s pastoral dream that he was really a countryman at heart. It met the Victorian’s wish to lure the working man away from the demon drink and the sin of idleness. An item in the Times in 1841 on the opening of the Regent’s Park conveys this flavour admirably: ‘the redemption of the working class through recreation’ would now be possible as such people would benefit from ‘the liberty of taking a walk in the more plebeian portions of the park, provided they had a decent coat on.’ 2 However, the evangelical concern with temperance and the chivalric yearning for pastoralism also underscored the school of thought that argued for rational recreation and public health. A sedate stroll was fine as far as it went – but it did not go very far in terms of active exercise; soon there were urgent pleas to deploy these often quite extensive green swards for games. There were obstacles. The most famed anti-cricket crusade was led by Lewis Carroll. In 1867 and 1879 he mounted attacks on Oxford University’s desire to make the Parks the home of its cricket club. He parodied Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village in his poem The Deserted Parks , claiming that the poor people of the town would lose out on their opportunities to enjoy a quiet promenade. Interestingly, cricket was initially the main beneficiary, although football did catch up later with something of a vengeance. Cricket was the game with an Arcadian aura; football was still seen as rather a vulgar pastime. Cricket clubs in mid-19 th century were more middle-class and better managed than what were often still somewhat unregulated football activities. One of the critical elements in the decisions to use parks for games was the rueful acknowledgment that it was preferable to license organised games rather than have mobs of youths causing havoc with disorganised ones. There can be no doubt that there was a demand. In 1860 the newly opened Macclesfield Park played host to 40 or more cricket matches on Saturdays after the mills closed. In the year 1908 London County Council had 448 park pitches for 10,000 players and 30,000 fixtures. In some parks games were played serially, with some pre-breakfast starts to ensure all were accommodated. Some parks, of course – Stanley Park, Blackpool and Valentine’s Park, Ilford are two of several - graduated to staging county cricket. Jacques Carré, the French cultural historian and leading expert on the subject, wrote that as well as being ‘a spectacular manifestation of Victorian civic art’, parks were also ‘a testing ground of the new urban ethos.’ Parks Cricket and Class up to 1914