Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

86 Chapter Nine Cricket and Class in the Inter-War Years The 1914-18 War plays a significant role in the history of English cricket but it is a very negative one. This terrible conflict was the subject of two pieces of inaction on the part of the cricketing authorities. Both stemmed from the view of cricket as not so much a sport as the physical expression of moral worth. The first was the decision to halt first-class cricket for the duration and the second was the determination not to taint cricket by the slightest modification thereafter. One senses the impression that the decision to forego first-class cricket for the duration was not taken because cricket was trivial; far from it. It was so important that it was impossible to contemplate fighting a war and celebrating an ethical imperative at one and the same time. First-class cricketers were keen to volunteer and, indeed, were placed under intense social and economic pressure so to do. MCC ditched its extraordinary lengthy list of 163 fixtures and just played about 30 matches against public schools, fielding teams entirely composed of medically unfit members or those too ancient to be called to the colours. The northern leagues survived to some extent, justified in terms of providing relief for weary war workers, and some county players combined such war work with such weekend cricket. Most poignant at all, those hundreds of public schoolboys who had been instructed on the greensward on long afternoons by grumpy old cricket professionals had also been drilled on the quadrangles and in the gymnasia for similar periods by grizzled old army NCOs. Such cadetship meant almost instant commissioning as a second lieutenant and a lodgement as platoon commander in the trenches. Scores of Wisden obituaries over those grim years testify to the deaths of young amateurs, some with no more than their schools colours as their cricketing accreditation. There were 400 such notices taking up 60 pages in the 1917 annual while Peter Wynne-Thomas has calculated that one in eleven contemporary first-class cricketers was slain. 1 The holy writ of cricket, the outward and visible sign of the inward grace of Christianity mediated by Englishry, loomed large amid the register of values for which the war was fought. For all the empty, vain talk of change and ‘homes fit for heroes to live in’, the dominant tenor of the establishment was the restoration of the status quo ante bellum . Fazed and shocked by the butchery of the carnage, this desire to return to the past, to what, however mistakenly, was imagined to be the sylvan Edwardian summers of yesteryear, was palpable. There was scarcely a blasphemous