Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

7 to trace something of a two-tier, loosely class-based attendance at such matches during the same period. This exemplifies a feature of this era; the relatively peaceful crowd, the crowd that was not feared. This was at variance with the 150 years before the 1850s when the crowd was rightly held in some dread. One might further argue that beyond the 1960s, at the other end of the period under review the crowd came again, with association football the prime example, to be regarded with apprehension. From 1846 to 1962 it was, on the whole, ‘class peace’ rather than class war – but with no relaxation of the class distinction per se . This study seeks to analyse and illustrate this vital piece of cricket history by fitting the cricket piece as neatly as is feasible into the complex jig-saw of society during this hundred year era. It reached from primary post- industrial times to the middle of the 20 th century. Since then the mood and the conditions have shifted once more from a more collectivist and co-operative to a more neo-liberal and individualistic age, in many ways more 18 th than 19 th century in character. The social and cultural coalition that had endured for a hundred years disintegrated. Once more cricket illustrated the switch. When first-class performers were all deemed to be ‘Cricketers’, they became, formally, by all the yardsticks used in such analysis, ‘Gentlemen’, that is, middle class. Some of this same proclivity was to be seen in the recreational game. Importantly, cricket’s audience also followed suit, with spectators largely middle class and, in part by that token, in penny numbers except on rare occasions such as Test matches. Ironically, the collapse of first-class cricket as a regular crowd- drawer may have saved it from some of the problems faced by the football authorities. Whether the novel attraction of the Twenty20 format will affect this comparative quietude or, like the previous one-day schedules, enjoy but temporary popularity is another question for another day. It is that pre-1962 age, dominated by some fluid alignment of the working and middle classes, which provides the canvas for this picture of English cricket in its most mature and penetrative epoch. The two classes were so near...and yet so far. Charles Dickens and ‘his favourite child David’ Copperfield contrived to switch relatively simply from one class to the other and back again. W.G.Grace, born a few months before David Copperfield, could not afford economically to be a ‘gentleman’ nor socially to be a ‘player’, so, as Cassius said of Julius Caesar, he ‘doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus’, with a Shamateur foot in either camp. 1 A.Calder-Marshal in his ‘Introduction’ to David Copperfield Pan Classic 1967. Prologue