Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

90 Cricket and Class in the Inter-War Years the temerity to intervene. Gradually during the 19 th century, as a result of so many ‘unfinished’ games, the practice grew, much affirmed by the league format, of playing just half a match, that is, one innings each. The splendid concept of the second chance was thereby removed and a system evolved whereby first-class cricket had a totally different formula from most of the recreational game, rather as if professional football might last 90 minutes and amateur football only 45 minutes. The practice of players getting themselves out deliberately in order to attempt to bowl out the other side in a three day match led to the declaration law of 1889. It was only permissible to invoke this regulation on the third day but it does demonstrate how the glut of runs was continuing to play havoc with the allotted time. This tension between the completion of a match and the time duration available made for a rather unattractive commercial proposition. Turning to the all-encompassing nature of every English first-class team in the senior echelon being based on a membership club linked with a county, this created a most inward-looking pattern. The subscribing gentlemen quite correctly and legitimately ran these clubs for their own benefit, often acquiring professional help of working class vintage in so doing. As the members, through subscriptions and frequently by bailing out contributions, kept these cricketing ships afloat, they were entirely within their rights to withstand attempts to alter the clubs’ profile, say, with profits in mind. It is palpably obvious that, as of 1919, seventeen clubs, not all of them sensibly located from a business viewpoint, all controlled at the behest of and on behalf of a relatively small cohort of upper and middle class gentlemen, and playing a lengthy series of eighteen-hour fixtures, was a cockeyed scheme from a purely commercial standpoint. This, equally obviously, had ramifications, for the work-force of professionals who helped to shore up this tottering edifice. It tottered but never collapsed, for the eagerness of its dedicated upper crust adherents was usually, with the aid of their resources and resourcefulness, adequate to avoid extinction. The chivalric-cum- evangelical fervour prevailed. Yet it was this very ethos that wavered when faced with the harsh countenance of hard coin. The pastoral fallacy won through again, hinting at the ugliness of the commercial world while enjoying its advantages, almost akin to the Victorian approach to the new- fangled water closet – happy to use it as long as no one mentioned it. Cricket was not the only manifestation of this sentiment. Perhaps buoyed by the return of the United Kingdom to the free market neo-liberalism that had marked the Hanoverian period, there was a serious academic debate in the last quarter of the 20 th century on this very topic. It was vigorously argued, if not without challenge, that there had been a disdain of industry, technology and money-making that had led to economic decline or, at least, a failure to realise the maximum possibilities of such enterprise. It was claimed that the establishment and, crucially, its public school values,