Lives in Cricket No 21 - Walter Read

120 powers improved rapidly. For quick scoring he has few equals, and there is no one the cricket-loving public watches with greater delight. The very first over he is on the alert for a loose ball, and I do not envy the bowler when he has got well set. Like most of our great batsmen, he has his pet hits. A long hop on the off-side is his especial delight. He makes no attempt to pull it to the on, as one or two powerful hitters do, but steps back with his right foot, and smites terrifically hard between point and mid-off. He plays every ball clean and hard, however good the length of it, and on the leg side he is exceptionally strong in placing. Of late years he has fielded close in, but he is also good in the long-field; and it is an open secret that he can keep wicket fairly well, and bowls lobs at a pinch. In 1881, for Surrey v Yorkshire at Huddersfield, he kept wicket while Yorkshire scored 388 and did not give a single extra. 196 The division between amateur and professional, though apparently clear-cut was blurred at the edges. For landed gentry, playing the game for recreation, makingmoney from it was, inmost cases, an irrelevance. They didn’t need it. For the professionals, the hired labourers and working classes of the game, it was supremely relevant. They did need it. In the middle, straddling the dividing line, was an amorphous, not too well defined group, who could not afford to play regularly purely for the love of the game. Some – like Edward Pooley, George Lohmann and Ernest Hayes – from middle class backgrounds avoided the hypocrisy of shamateurism and threw in their lot with the professionals, in Lohmannn’s case, doing much to enhance the status and respectability of the professional cricketer. Edwin Diver is an interesting example of one who started as an amateur and, against family opposition, transferred to the professional ranks. The dilemma for W.G.Grace and W.W.Read was that, financially, they could not afford to be amateurs and socially, could not afford to be professionals. Between them, however, they demonstrated that, if thick-skinned enough to deflect the criticism of those who objected to the paid amateur ethos, it was possible to have it all, to make a reasonable living from the game while retaining their social status of gentlemen and the privileges of amateurs. Rev R.S.Holmes, with a Utopian vision of a more egalitarian society, took the moral high ground. 196 Cricket p 361 Last Years