Lives in Cricket No 3 - George Duckworth

proletarians and a goodly proportion of diligent bourgeoisie. There would have been substratum of unskilled labour and a small upper crust of quite well-to-do gentlemen, but that joint middle section may have numbered, with their families, something over 50,000 of the grand total. The town was, then, compact socially as well as economically. This large heart of the population would have shared the same facilities, albeit from different angles, as in the theatre. The Duckworths would have stood on the terraces to watch Warrington ‘Wires’, while their social superiors would have sat in the stand; first, second and third class carriages on the railway trains; saloon and public bar in some of the same pubs; free and rented pew in the same churches and chapel; fee-paying and scholarship pupils in the same classroom. Come Wakes Week, and the whole town would have conveyed itself to Blackpool or Southport or Llandudno, the few at the select end, the many at the cheap end. Horace Gray and Arthur Duckworth played cricket together, an urban and factual analogue for Edgar Trine, the young toff, and Sid Smith, cad to a bricklayer, in Hugh de Selincourt’s wondrous rural and fictional account, The Cricket Match . This ‘integrated culture’ created the mind-set and the value-system that gave Warrington its character or ‘persona’, the one that youngsters would be schooled to live up to and esteem amid the communal disciplines of family, street, school, church or chapel, workplace, sports club and other social gathering. It was like the character of many another Lancashire town, doubtless with a few localised quirks and foibles. It was laconic, emotionally undemonstrative, dogmatic, complacent and a little censorious, striving after a pious respectability and contemptuous of shoddy workmanship or dealings. Then again, steeped in hard times but content to rise to the challenge, it had its whimsical, at least, its wry aspect, with a taste for the sardonic rejoinder. In the next generation, Robb Wilton, born in nearby Liverpool in 1881, came nearest to personifying this construct of human nature. After his mordant portrayal of magistrate, fireman and policeman, he achieved enduring wartime fame as the home guardsman, harassed by his wife, the steely Rita. It was no coincidence that Marriott Edgar, writer of most of the Will Hay screen-plays, located Sam Small and the Ramsbottom family in the industrial reaches of the Mersey valley, when he composed his much-loved monologues for Stanley Holloway. Intriguingly, the 18 The Background