Lives in Cricket No 7 - Richard Daft

Chapter Four Professional At the beginning of the season of 1859, Richard decided that he could no longer afford to play cricket at his own expense and turned professional. In future, he would be paid to play for George Parr’s All England Eleven and for Nottinghamshire in the few matches which the county would expect to play each summer, as well as for the Players against the Gentlemen, North versus South, and other representative matches. The change, for Richard, would be immense: many years later, in 1886, the magazine Cricket commented that such a move by an amateur involved ‘no small amount of courage’ and that ‘relations between amateurs and professionals, although pleasant, were well defined and strictly kept.’ Instead of wine and lunch in the pavilion, it meant pie and beer with the other professionals and the public in the tent: quite a scrimmage with the probability of offers of refreshment from the public, but there was so much more to face up to than that. English life was rigorously stratified. Many professional cricketers came from the higher reaches of the working classes, from the retail trades, or were craftsmen at the loom or frame or other light industrial work. Richard, with his inherited wealth, does not fit easily into this pattern. On the whole, the amateurs met their professional colleagues only on the field of play. They used separate changing facilities, almost invariably entered the arena through different gates and when playing away from home, lodged in separate accommodation, the players sometimes two to a bed in boarding houses, whilst the amateurs stayed at hotels. In the published scores, amateurs were designated ‘Mr’ or ‘Esq’: if the paid player was allowed his initials, they followed his surname. More often, no initials were given. Richard seemed in an ambiguous category all of his own. Many match scores simply called him ‘Richard Daft’. To some contemporaries, there was more to the status of ‘a gentleman’ than whether or not he was paid to play. Sir John Astley 24