Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

81 Cricket and Class up to 1914 1.5m, in the clerical and retail trades. A particular growth area was among the professional as opposed to the commercial ranks. There remained immense social pressure on the middle-class family, whatever its income, to sustain the pretension of that status. The American comic strip in the New York Globe, later a cartoon film, ‘Keep up with the Jones’ made its opportune entry in 1913. Turning again to fiction for pictorial support, Leonard Bast, the hapless young clerk with confused dreams of artistic enhancement in E.M Forster’s 1910 novel Howard’s End , ‘lived at the extreme verge of gentility’ and he was by no means alone. A more cheerful illustration comes from H.G.Wells. From his own painful experience and using his own feckless father, Joseph (four wickets in four balls for Kent v Sussex in 1862 in one of his eight first-class matches) as the model, he published, also in 1910, The History of Mr Polly . Please note it is the history of Mr not Alfred Polly, acknowledging that convivial individual’s desperate aspiration to a genteel ranking. In this same Edwardian period the working class numbers had also grown, if not quite so swiftly, to 28.5m inclusive of families. Overall, and in spite of the usual ups and downs of the economy, wages had been augmented and there had even been a slight decline in prices and rents. By 1910 the wage range was from 18s a week for unskilled workers to a much more healthy £2.5s for skilled tradesmen. Expert opinion suggested that 30s for a 48 hours working week was a reasonable minimum income for an average family. The major groupings of workers were, predictably, 5m in manufacturing, over half of these in textiles; a rising figure of 2m in domestic service; a receding figure of not much more than 1m in agriculture; 0.5m miners and about the same in transport and the building trades, and roughly 1m in miscellaneous trades. 3 Those few figures give some idea of how the new working class fell into certain mainstream sectors and, as the heat of early industrialisation cooled and there was a general settlement of social and economic existence, these workers grew ever more willing to subscribe to the craft unions that represented them and the friendly societies that brought them succour in hard times. There was a devout wish to present a peaceable countenance. It is a terrible gloss on the Peterloo Massacre that many, including young women, had decked themselves in their best finery, regarding the occasion as a day out, not a violent insurrection. Furthermore, following the tumult of Peterloo, the radical leader Samuel Bamford caught up with the fleeing contingents in the Harpurhey outskirts of Manchester, reformed a thousand of them into file and marched them home ‘to the sound of fife and drum, with our only banner waving.’ Discipline and good order held steady on the one side, and, on the other, as E.P Thompson points out, future governments would think twice about a martial response and ‘never since Peterloo has authority dared to use equal force against a peaceful English crowd.’ Ironically, in the past such gatherings had been scorned for their wildness; when they marched in smart procession, insensitive magistrates had been even more frightened. There was still much mutual comprehension to be negotiated. Activism