Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

94 Cricket and Class in the Inter-War Years the religious aura in which Victorian cricket was suffused, it is proper to underline the continuing influence of the churches. Cricket flourished yet still as a pastoral expression of a religion that was believed in or accepted by all classes; it was Christianity at the crease. In Bolton, Burnley and Oldham in the early 1920s 258 out of the 395 teams – itself an impressive total - were church based. This was singular but not wholly so; many areas had a goodly proportion of church clubs and some districts were able to arrange local leagues solely for Sunday Schools, just as there were specialist works leagues, the collieries around Mansfield being a sturdy example of a competition involving pits only. If there were some evangelical substance in that ecclesiastical continuum, there was likewise no diminution in the chivalric rural dream, with village green cricket celebrated in the flesh and in the word, the bat and the pen equally embroiled. Sometimes the two were in concert. J.C.Squire, poet and critic and the Mr Hodge of A.G.Macdonell’s much-loved England, their England team is a case in point. Leader of the Invalids touring literati eleven, he lovingly adhered to the ‘rural root’ of the game, for, he argued, ‘few men...would not rather play on a field surrounded by ancient elms and rabbit-haunted bracken than on a better field with flat black lands or gasworks around.’ W.G.Grace and Don Bradman might be numbered among those few men but it was an honest enough sentiment for the recreational cricketer. Literature between the wars provides several illustrations of rural cricket, many of them with class undertones and occasionally overtones. A couple of examples are E.M.Forster’s Maurice written and located in 1913/14, revised in 1932 and 1959/60 but not published, because of its homosexual content until 1971 after his death, and L.P.Hartley’s The Go- between , published in 1953 but set in the days of the Boer War. Both have episodes based, not on country house matches as such, but on ‘hall’ and village annual matches, meaning that the stately home eleven includes servants. Thus the eponymous Maurice, a gentleman visitor and reluctant member of the ‘Park’ eleven, has a profitable partnership with the footman Alec with whom on the preceding evening he had formed a passionate gay relationship. The night’s shared excitement prefigures the day’s cricket in alliance. It is reminiscent of all those Talbot Baines Reed The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s typology of school stories which end in a cricket match in which two close friends – Oliver Greenfield and Horace Wraysford in the St Dominic’s illustration - wholesomely join in a winning stand celebratory of their amity. The Go-between , possibly better known because of its faithful film and television versions and latterly as a musical, has Leo Colston, a visting youngster, acting as the innocent messenger in a clandestine and cross- class affair between Ted Burgess, a tenant farmer, and Marian Maudsley, daughter of the the lord of the manor and affianced to Lord Trimingham, who plays in the ‘Hall’ team. Called on to field Leo ‘catches out’ the impassioned farmer when he seems to be winning the game for the village, just as he unwittingly serves as the one who catches out Ted in