Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

95 Cricket and Class in the Inter-War Years his scandalous love-life. Ted blows out his brains (another case for David Frith?); Lord Trimingham, ever the toff, marries Marian and pretends to be the father of Ted’s child by her, and Leo, in the hazily simmering heat of a pre-1914 summer is, in this Freudian referenced classic, traumatised sexually for life. As well as these two excerpts there are several books that use the country house or village green game as an instalment within the whole, whereas there is one novel entirely devoted to rural cricket and this, too, has a definitive class component. This is Hugh de Selincourt’s semi- autobiographical The Cricket Match , published in 1924. Hugh de Selincourt captained the West Sussex side of Storrington for seven years and this was the model for the fictitious Tillingfold club. Like two other books published about the same time, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Galloway (1925), the story occupies one single day. J.M.Barrie, who showed a keen interest in cricket, declared this to be ‘the best book written about cricket or any other game’ while John Arlott wrote that ‘one cricket novel stands high above the remainder...(as)...a fully realised novel.’ Tillingfold is no idyllic hamlet with a duck pond and an oldest inhabitant. It has seven pubs and several shops; football and motor buses encroach and the team play their rivals Raveley on the recreation ground. Times they are a-changing. The characterisation is unforced and the writing shows great sensibility. There are generational and psychological variables as well as class distinctions, as Paul Gauvinier, an enlightened captain aka de Selincourt in flimsy disguise, leads his team to a thrilling but not over-dramatic two run victory. The class angle is carefully handled, with privileged Edgar Trine, son of the big house and Sid Smith the impoverished brick-layer and quick bowler able to join easily together as cricketers but experiencing discomfort as social animals. The social gradings of the players who fall between these two extremes are nuanced very neatly. As a portrait of recreational cricket, social strains, warts and all, in the period between the wars, it is both authentic and stylish. 7 1. Wynne-Thomas op.cit. p. 150, See Simon Sweetman Dimming of the Day; the Cricket Season of 1914 (2015) for an excellent analysis of the immediate effect of World War I on cricket nationally. 2. Gerald Howat Cricket’s Second Golden Age; the Hammond/Bradman Years (1989). 3. Eric Midwinter ‘The Profession of Gentlemen’ Cricket Lore vol 1 issue 3 (1992). 4. Corelli Barnett The Audit of War (1986) and Martin Wiener English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1981) are recommended works on this topic. 5. Jack Williams England and Cricket; a Cultural and Social History of the Inter-war Years (1999) chap. 8 pp 161/182 on the financial issue; but this comprehensive and intently researched study is a major source for this period. 6. op.cit pp.59/60. 7. Eric Midwinter Quill on Willow; Cricket in Literature (2001) passim for these and other examples of literary treatments of cricket.