Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

83 Cricket and Class up to 1914 the astute Disraeli was busily acquiring a working-class vote for the Conservative Party that it never wholly lost. His Times obituary in 1881 included the famous phrase that he ‘saw the Conservative in the working- class voter as the sculptor saw the angel in the marble.’ It was in his honour and named after his favourite flower that the Primrose League was launched in 1883 as a mass movement backing Toryism which peaked at 2m members in the Edwardian era. The Primrose League was suffused in medievalist imagery. It had ‘habitations’ such as the ‘King Athelstan’ Habitation at Malmesbury or the ‘Coningsby’ equivalent at Brighton and ‘tributes’, a humble threepence annually, where lesser mortals had to suffice with branches and subscriptions. This well-marshalled army of volunteers did much political canvassing and also enjoyed a range of social activity. It was open to everyone apart from ‘atheists and enemies of the British Empire’ and is a picturesque example of the merging of the classes, for not the least of its attractions was the chance for lower middle and upper working class men and women to decorously rub occasional shoulders with the titled and belted lords and ladies. Its faux -medievalism is a further reminder of the chivalric nature of Victorian national character. Having been enfranchised by the 1867 Reform Act, my great-grandfather, a chief ostler with the Bridgewater and then the Manchester Ship Canal Companies was numbered among this noble company but perhaps more relevant to immediate matters is that Lord Harris was a rather more well- known member. He was Chancellor of the Primrose League in 1887, 1888 and 1896 and its 1894 Manual defined his values precisely: ‘bringing high and low, rich and poor together, breaking down social barriers and uniting all classes in a common crusade against the forces of atheism and revolution’. For all its air of patronage and, perhaps worse, its avoidance of fundamental social reforms, Lord Harris overtly saw a parallel in his fair dealings with respectable cricket professionalism, regarding cricket as ‘a great Conservative institution’, without apology for the capital ‘C’. Lord Hawke, his colleague in their little campaign to have paid cricketers treated more kindly in so far as they made manifest a seemly reputability, wrote in his memoirs in exactly the same vein, even wordage: ‘high and low, rich and poor, greet one another practically on an equality, and sad will be the day for England if socialism ever puts class v class and thus ending sports which have made England.’ 5 If the Conservatives contributed the chivalry, the Liberals were heavier on the evangelical front, reliant as they were on a formidable nonconformist adherence. Several professional cricketers were of this persuasion. A well- turned anecdote of a slightly later vintage epitomises that condition. The stout Lancashire spin bowler and safe slip catcher, Richard Tyldesley, called back a batsman in a county game after he had been given out caught by him. Both umpire and batsman were content with the decision but Dick Tyldesley believed he had feathered the ground with the ball. At close of play Neville Cardus asked him why, given the general opinion