Lives in Cricket No 52 - Schooled in Cricket (2nd edition)

64 Chapter Eleven A man of his times who became a role model for other players Yorkshire cricket had always had its amateurs and its class divisions – somehow in some ways more sharply delineated than in other places. The golden age of cricket with a never setting sun on the spoils of an empire is, it seems to me, a concept quite foreign to genuine Yorkshire folk for whom sport was a relief from hard toil. The so-called golden age of the ‘Edwardian’ period had given way to what Jim Kilburn of the Yorkshire Post describes as a ‘silver age’ by which he meant that the standard in the 1930s was high and nowhere higher than in Yorkshire. The all-time greats of the earlier period included two of the statistically best all-rounders of all time (still well in the top six today by any measure) – Wilfred Rhodes and George Hirst. By the 1930s (and right up to 1938) Hirst was coach for Yorkshire at Headingley. Rhodes was still involved in coaching and imparted his bowling skills to his successor as left-arm spinner at Yorkshire, Hedley Verity. Nearly all the Yorkshire team of the 1930s were professional cricketers steeped in Yorkshire tradition who would assist in the movement away from amateurism and in the advancement of professional cricket in its best sense – long before various excesses gave the word professionalism a different meaning and brought that word into disrepute. When we talk of professionalism in respect of Johnny Lawrence and his forebears we are talking about total honesty and fair play, commitment, industrious values, loyalty to one’s fellows and a seriousness of purpose which not by design but by its very nature was soon to make the idea that the amateur had such a special place in the game as he had at that time seem unjust and anachronistic. To be an amateur would continue to mean unremunerated but it was high time for the term to lose its special aura as professionals such as Johnny Lawrence showed they could