Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

89 Cricket and Class in the Inter-War Years summer term; whilst the cynically inclined might suggest that vicars and curates only worked on Sundays when first-class cricket was forbidden. Needless to say, there was some grumbling among the professionals when such amateurs turned up and the pros found they were dropped at the cost of their match fee. There were also some complaints that amateurs always managed to be available for the seaside resort fixtures and were somehow otherwise engaged when it was time for the tough northern tour. Despite such doubtings, the evidence does appear to confirm fairly conclusively that many amateurs who made a contribution to the process and styling of English cricket had a military, clerical and educational background. In practical terms this suggests the obvious comment that those with such vocational duties found it simpler to fit in some first-class cricket but it does resonate with the earlier claim made in chapter four that those responsible for the spread of cricket in mid-Victorian times were of a similar background. But there lay a riddle at the heart of English cricket that remains unsolved unto this very day. For all its success in and contribution to English society in the Victorian era, a question mark already hung over the sport. As if in some Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, the hallmark of its strength was also the harbinger of its weakness. Perhaps Hamlet’s hesitant uncertainty comes closest to a theatrical analogy of cricket’s ambivalent position. Without the potent force of middle-class and upper-class involvement it is doubtful whether cricket would have survived as a nationally ubiquitous activity with a spectator base, widespread engagement in every part of the country and a supportive press and literary backing. A colourful rider to the situation was the fashion in which foreign visitors were surprised, even shocked, in pre-1914 days by the sight of working men paying their sixpences to be entertained by an Indian prince who was prepared to place himself on exotic show. But the construct was always from one important standpoint decidedly rickety. Cricket, as it had evolved, was not commercially viable and therein lay the seeds of its own likely decline, even collapse. There were practical as well as ethical issues. Lost in the wonder of it all, the cricketing powers-that-be had somehow neglected to observe the extension of the passage of time it took to complete a cricket match. In the formative Hanoverian years a day, granted fine weather, was usually adequate for four innings to be negotiated with totals of 30 or 40 commonplace. The improvement of grounds and the predominance of batting slowly led to much higher scores. An oddity of first-class cricket is that the gamut of innings totals is extreme, running from 12 to 1107. No other game at its premier levels offers such variance. Because commercial income did not have the prior call, little was done – and five day, even timeless, Tests were one consequence. Most sports either have a given target – the first to reach 501 in darts or the best over eighteen holes of golf - or a specified time limit – as in football or hockey. Cricket was much more open than that and no one had