Lives in Cricket No 21 - Walter Read

41 been correct when he said that had the French aristocracy played cricket with their peasants there would have been no French Revolution, but off the field the social divisions of Victorian England seemed set in stone, and social mobility, though far from impossible, was less likely than it was subsequently to become in the following century. It is, however, difficult to contradict Major Wardill’s level-headed analysis twenty years later of the amateur-professional divide and the hypocrisy involved in maintaining English social class distinctions. There has been much discussion in the press of late years about the payments made to professionals and amateurs – much of the discussion being very wide of the mark – that the following pronouncements by Major Wardill to a representative of the Evening News are of interest: He could not understand why the Australians were regarded in some quarters as professionals. We have no great leisured class in the Colonies as you have here, and in order that the best men may come to England, it is necessary to conduct each tour strictly on business lines. Should profits accrue after defraying expenses they are divided equally among the members of the team to recoup them for their loss of time and salary during their eight months’ absence. If you call the Australians professionals, Major Wardill continued with a smile, then the English amateurs who come to the colonies are even more so. Take the last team for instance. The Melbourne C C paid for everything – steamer passages, rail and hotel expenses, tips etc. In addition, each man received a sum running into three figures as pin-money. And, indeed in the case of one of the amateurs, the Melbourne CC was debited with the cost of the outfit he bought before embarking. 72 Not quite on the scale of the scandal over the expenses of Members of Parliament which was to hit the U K in 2009 with its ramifications into duck-houses and the ‘flipping’ of second homes, but very much in the same vein and sufficient to suggest that the line between the amateur and the professional was blurred and had less to do with money than with class distinctions. On the whole, however, the Assistant Secretary ruse was entirely 72 Cricket 1 May 1902 Assistant Secretary... You’re ‘aving a larf