Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

87 Cricket and Class in the Inter-War Years whisper of reform. No one sought to seize the opportunity to take a long look and to re-build. Cricket was sports’ Peter Pan, a play and novel written by J.M.Barrie, himself a cricket enthusiast, in the decade before the war. The cricket authorities looked back to their own Neverland of a self- ascribed Golden Age and believed that the game had achieved perfection and need not mature any more. Thus cricket, like Peter Pan, never grew up. It was locked in a prism of the past. The ever percipient Gerald Howat called the inter-wars years the Second Golden Age. It was in format and style almost exactly the same as the first one, with the added good fortune that, happily, there were players of dazzling brilliance to adorn it. 2 After the many changes of the more bustling and self-confident Victorian age, cricket was deemed godlike in perfection; to meddle with it was heresy. For example, after some jockeying of counties over the years, the sixteen championship counties of 1914 were duly concretised as if in stone. Over the next hundred and more years there would be but the two additions of Glamorgan in 1921 and Durham in 1992 and, even more significantly, no subtractions. It followed inexorably that there would be no change in the Gentleman/ Player distinction nor yet in the steadfast alliance of the amateur and professional in the first-class game. Over the seasons there was a slight decline in the number of amateurs but the counties clung desperately to the convention of, at the very least, an amateur captain. Moreover, the unchanged cloisters of the public schools and Oxbridge continued untouched and the stream of handsome young Varsity batsmen was sustained for another half century. That said, the insistence on the officer- class captain meant that counties sometimes resorted to selecting an amateur not really worthy of a place in the team, itself a parody of the Great War trope of an experienced NCO in contempt of a fresh-faced, ingenuous officer. That fine example of Yorkshire and England doughtiness Maurice Leyland caustically said of his county’s championship triumphs in the 1920s and 1930s that they won them all with ten men. The vocational background of professional cricketers has been analysed a little and the predominance of entries from the upper or skilled ranks of the working classes observed. Thus far the amateur cohort has been treated amorphously as if the middle-class were one shapeless mass. At this juncture it might be timely to examine the vocational gradings of the amateur players. From a broad, sweeping scrutiny but by no means an ironclad piece of scientific research, of 1000 or so Wisden obituaries of amateur cricketers it has been possible to drawa sketch of their careers and how they earned their money. Not all were first-class cricketers but they had all done sufficiently well in the game to be selected for the Wisden accolade. Moreover, the total does not include the First World War deaths which would have very much distorted the picture in terms of military engagement. 3 A good many had no specific vocational reference, indicating that, as one would expect, quite a few amateurs did live off unearned income or vague