Cricket Witness No 6 - His Captain's Hand on His Shoulder Smote

118 Coventry Patmore’s poem The Angel of the House (1853) composed in sincere tribute to his wife Emily Augusta, believing her to be the perfect woman, is an attractive example of this – as far as it goes. It was a man-made concept, inclining towards forcing women into a secondary, passive and self-sacrificing role. It was constantly trotted out when access to property, to educational and professional opportunities and to the suffrage was discussed. There is little point in judgemental hindsight. The schools, the literature and the cricket in both is almost wholly masculine; the masters, pupils, authors and readers would have seen nothing odd about that. It would be another hundred years before progressive sentiment began fundamentally to campaign for genuine gender equity. Yet this solidity of male opinion, shored up by the battering of stories of boys playing cricket and football and avoiding social interchange with girls, is hard to shift. A hundred years on in 2009 Sarah Taylor was assessed by competent judges as the best wicket keeper of the four fielded in the men’s and women’s England v Australia Twenty20 tournamants of that summer. These same judges did not offer an explanation of why, therefore, she was not playing for the ‘senior’ eleven..and being paid the same money. That ‘masculinity’ factor offers a neat introduction to the second of the three contextual areas to be considered: imperialism. It is not easy to explain to those born around or after the Second World War how intense was the impregnation of Empire in the common culture before that time and since about the 1870s. The rapidity of the dissolution of the British Empire, a momentum resultant on the impact of World War II, was paralleled by an equally speedy decline in imperial glorification. The fulcrum of imperial worship was Empire Day, 24 May, previously celebrated as Queen Victoria’s birthday. From soon after her death until 1958 when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan quietly changed it to the much more humdrum Commonwealth Day, 24 May was the occasion of huge demonstration and adoration. In 1925, for example, The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching