Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

91 was responsible for the belief that dirtying one’s hands commercially was hardly suitable employment for a gentlemen. 4 Certainly there was between the wars a determined resolve to keep cricket clean of the damaging effects of the profit motive that it might retain its moral sheen. In press commentaries on suggestions or wishes to lighten up or popularise the game it is interesting to remark on the use of ‘circus’ as the likely outcome of such debasement. Of much relevance to this study, there is an equally consistent theme of the value of the amateur in guaranteeing the degree of purity so admired by cricket lovers. Amateurs were the standard bearers of the moral virtue of the game. More mundanely, even allowing for some being in receipt of often exorbitant expenses, fielding many amateurs did help to lower the wage bill. It would be difficult to visualise a more non-commercial condition. The system was not a feasible money-making proposition and the cricketing oligarchs who ran the system were anti-trade. The weather factor was another perverse risk; the heat of 1921 brought 285,000 paying customers to Yorkshire’s home fixtures; a moist 1922 saw that total fall to not many more than 200,000. As today, Test receipts helped but these, too, were variable; Bradman’s 1934 Australians were the reason why £45,000 was doled out to the counties in 1934, following a rather more fallow 1933 when there was not much more than £5000 available after the then not over-strong West Indians had been the tourists. In effect, the counties struggled through the inter-wars years to maintain financial viability. 5 Essex had losses in twelve, Kent in seven, Lancashire in six and the highly successful Yorkshire in three seasons. In 1936 only three counties made a surplus. There continued to be a reliance on what in the theatre would be termed ‘angels’. Such haloed figures included Sir Julien Cahn who gave generously to both Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire; the businessman Alfred Cockerill who donated an estimated £10,000 to Northants, and the Fry chocolate company who purchased the Gloucestershire county ground at Bristol and let it out free to the club. Bazaars and concerts, the sort of social fund-raising events which would more normally be associated with a local church, were organised at the summer’s end to fend off the wolf from the pavilion door. Today’s sponsorship may be more focused and graphic; it is not unprecedented. There was any amount of tinkering in the 1920s and 1930s, perhaps illustrating the tremulous, nervy yet peculiarly timid mood of Britain in that period which one of its best historians David Thomson called ‘incorrigible immobilism’ . The minimum number of matches played varied and counties had shorter and longer fixture lists while eight different scoring devices were used to make some sense of so flexible a competition. There was some slight meddling with the laws but, apart from the application of the LBW ruling to balls pitched on the off side, there was nothing much that endured. Birth or residence continued to control the destiny of the professional, although the amateur enjoyed some leeway by way of eligibility. Cricket and Class in the Inter-War Years