Lives in Cricket No 21 - Walter Read

122 what an Editorial in the Irish Times called the ‘final frontier of amateurism’. 199 Cricket, until 1963 existed in an uneasy symbiosis between amateur and professional with separate hotels, separate dressing rooms, separate gates and initials differently positioned on scorecards. Society too has changed: the rise of organised labour from its nineteenth century origins; the erosion of the class system in the twentieth, especially after the First World War; the subsequent blurring of a class-based political system to the point where the two parties which, led by Gladstone and Disraeli, opposed each other through the nineteenth century, are in coalition government in the twenty-first….all this was not foreseen by Walter Read and his contemporaries. Classwassignificant.Therewerebroadlythree–aristocracy,middle- class and working-class – but subdivisions within each and movement, usually upwards between the lower two. Other than by marriage or inheritance, movement to the aristocracy was not an option. Fuelled by Mechanics’ Institutes, Education Acts and an ethos of self-improvement epitomised by the plethora of schools in Reigate, those in the middle-class, whether by birth or upward social mobility were, like Walter Read, reluctant to surrender that social advantage. Dr Donna Loftus writes, The economic boundary of the ‘middle-class’ was not clear. Some members of the middle-class used their wealth to buy land and stately homes, becoming as rich, if not richer than the aristocracy. At the same time, many members of the skilled working class could earn as much if not more than some members of the lower middle-class. 200 A well-known sketch on the BBC’s Frost Programme in the following century when the class system was breaking down, but still present, puts the situation in comic, but no less graphic, terms. Three men, of decreasing heights and parallel decreasing social status stand in a line and say: “I have got innate breeding, but I have not got any money. So sometimes I look up to him.” (the middle-class man) “I still look up to him, because although I have money, I am vulgar. But I am not as vulgar as him (the lower-class man). So 199 27 March 2010 200 Loftus The Rise of the Victorian Middle Classes Open University 2010 Last Years