Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

82 Cricket and Class up to 1914 on the one side and over-robust reaction on the other never vanished completely but the temper of the age mellowed remarkably. Slowly the trades unions won reputable status and legal recognition. By 1914 the number of trades unionists affiliated to the Trades Union Congress was over 4m, a half the labour force and overwhelmingly skilled craftsmen. The friendly societies such as the Oddfellows, the Buffaloes and the Foresters had getting on for 6m members and total funds of £41m. Along with the network of co-operative societies, these activities provided hundreds of men and women with experience of handling accounts and running institutions. When it came to organising a cricket club, many working class men were more used to formal procedure than many of their middle-class colleagues. What is of moment in the growing sense of class strength among the labour force is the pride in which it was held, no more so than in the ranks of the cricketing professionals, proud of their hard-honed skills and quietly self-satisfied in the esteem with which they were held in their local communities. In the winter months the ex-miners and ex-spinners, that is of the textile genre, would stroll through the cobbled streets of their home environs, knowing that they were admired, if not fussily, by their neighbours. They had, as the saying went, ‘got on.’ No less than with the new middle-classes, the self-awareness of the industrial working class derived from men who believed they had deliberately attained class consciousness. Unlike the serf or the peasant of previous historical epochs, a class tag had not been thrust upon them by their superiors as a derogatory label. Here were working people determined to shake off the image of their being an uncouth rabble, as Samuel Bamford had endeavoured to do on St Peter’s Fields, Manchester in 1819. His instruction had read ‘It was deemed expedient that the meeting should be as morally effective as possible...We had frequently been taunted in the press with our ragged dirty appearance...with the confusion of our proceedings and the mob-like crowds in which our members were mustered.’ Sobriety and cleanliness would be the watchwords, with self-education the means and self-respect the characteristic to be admired. Coupled with that growing class discipline was a less clamorous and insurgent appeal. The more sensible constitutional and social reforms sought no longer had the ring of French Revolutionary fervour and audacity. ‘This collective self-consciousness’, concluded E.P.Thompson, ‘was indeed the great spiritual gain of the Industrial Revolution...forming their own traditions of mutuality in the friendly societies and trades clubs, these men did not pass, in one generation, from the peasantry to the new industrial town. They suffered the experience of the Industrial Revolution as free-born Englishmen.’ 4 As the franchise was widened, the political parties, no more chiefly loose groupings often of friends and families, felt under pressure to develop more formal mechanisms. Although the Liberal Party was strongly supported by working men loyal to Gladstone, ‘the People’s William’,