Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

85 Cricket and Class up to 1914 parachute jump in Europe and that may have tickled their sportive nerve. Possibly the professionals discussed cricketing matters. The manner in which the Australians were treated as amateurs but somehow ended up earning money was always a sore point. Wilfred Rhodes for one ever felt the ambiguity of being famous and yet somehow servile, because of being on low pay but it never altered his earnest commitment to his trade. Then they all emerged either individually to bat or as two groups to field. England won the toss and the eleven batted, shared partnerships and then fielded and bowled as a team without rancour or demur. This more peaceable ambiance reigned at the Oval and across the land. Whilst the lines of social separation remained clear and imperishable, and although, not least in those immediate pre-war years, there were occasional sparks of political and economic fury, in daily practice both these main social groupings tended to adopt the same set of values in regard of family and community life, religious and moral observance, political affiliation and belief, leisure pursuits and general disposition. There was class peace rather than class war, In 1915 Harold Brighouses’s deliciously crafted play Hobson’s Choice , set in 1880, was first performed. The Lear-like figure of Henry Hobson the complacent Salford shoe shop owner, soon to be outwitted by Maggie, his eldest of three daughters, grandly declaimed his beliefs near the opening of the play: ‘I’m Hobson, I’m middle-class and proud of it. I stand for common sense and sincerity...You forget the majesty of trade and the unparalleled virtues of the British constitution which are all based on the sanity of the middle-class, combined with the diligence of the working classes.’ The cross-classed audiences in the stalls and galleries of several repertory theatres that over the years laughed at the opinionated bumptiousness of Mr Hobson nonetheless agreed with the sentiment he expressed. 1. Asa Briggs A Social History of England (1983). 2. Jacques Carré People’s Parks; the Design and Development of Victorian Parks in Britain ‘Journal of Garden History’ (April 2012). 3. Donald Read England 1868-1914; the Age of Urban Democracy (1979) for much of this previous discussion. This is an erudite and wide-ranging book – with a perceptive sub-title. 4. E.P.Thompson The Making of the English Working Class (1963) for an absorbingly epic account of this process. 5. Sissons op.cit. pp. 89-90 in particular.