Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

93 Cricket and Class in the Inter-War Years played their arch-rivals Colne in the Worsley Cup Final there were 14,000 present and well-supported league clubs drew up to as many as 75,000 customers in a good year. It cannot be doubted that the huge majority of these were working class in origin and that they viewed their Saturday afternoon sixpenny cricketing venture much as they saw their winter outing to watch Blackburn Rovers or Bolton Wanderers. The one way in which cricket contrived to stay ahead of football – and it did so without conscious public relations effort – was to preserve the myth that football should not be played in summer. It was over a hundred years before the penny dropped and football encroached on the cricket season without fear of players collapsing with dehydration in the ferocious heat of the English summer. There is evidence that some non-league clubs enjoyed decent crowds, sometimes a few hundreds even at a village match and reaching some thousands for high-quality suburban and metropolitan teams. It is likely that these crowds were socially mixed, perhaps with an accent on middle class representation. At county level there is evidence that 10% to 15% of the gate income was for the stands, suggesting that these would have been middle class patrons. One must add to this the members in the pavilions, the trickiest of calculations given the lack of such records. However, a reasonable guess is that together the members and the higher payers approached the 20% or 25% of the crowd that allows one to point to the microcosm of a 25/75 class split remaining consistent. Recreational cricket remained in good health between the two wars. Allowing a wide margin either side, it might be intrepidly stated that some 250,000 adults were engaged in playing cricket each weekend of the season. It is difficult to guess at the number of actual teams. One helpful guide is the fact that just prior to World War II there were well over a thousand clubs in the home counties affiliated to Club Cricket Conference, most of which fielded at least two elevens, suggesting a gross sum of perhaps 2500 teams. Many clubs provided the basic equipment and kept the subscriptions low, so that there was a decent welcome for working class enthusiasts. Playing conditions were frequently primitive and costume was not always à la mode, but thousands contrived to be involved in the game. There is some evidence that, predictably, blue collar workers outnumbered unskilled labourers, a feature noted in Victorian times. It should be recalled that few of these adults would have played cricket at school, unlike their middle class team-mates or opponents. Schools cricket did expand between the wars – for example by 1937 there was the amazing total of 180 schools playing in the Liverpool schools competition – but throughout the country the incidence of elementary school cricket was decidedly hit and miss. The major problem in urban districts was the lack of school playing fields. Unlike the narrow format of county cricket, recreational sides sprang from any number of sources, with works team, understandably, often a little more handsomely endowed than others. Having earlier described