Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Education, Income and Status: Amateur Cricketers in England and Wales c. 1840– c. 1930

2010; Routledge; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17460263.2010.505401

1746-0271

Peter Cain,

Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes

Abstract The importance of the amateur element in English and Welsh cricket during the nineteenth and early twentieth century is well known. However, there is not much in-depth information available on the economic, social and educational background of amateur cricketers. This article tries to fill this gap using the information gleaned from a large sample of obituaries, mainly those printed in Wisden. These sources have their weaknesses, which are analysed in the article, but they do provide a good picture of the schooling of amateur cricketers, their main occupations and sources of income, and their county affiliations during the period chosen. The evidence presented is then discussed in the context of recent work on the importance of the growth of service-sector employment in the period and its regional distribution. The article ends with a critical look at amateur cricket and its mores in the context of the current debate on ‘character’ which was a key element in the intellectual and cultural formation of the British gentlemanly class from which amateur cricketers emerged. Acknowledgements I should like to thank Richard Holt, Dilwyn Porter and David Kynaston for helping an amateur in this field to avoid making too many unprofessional mistakes. Notes 1. For studies of amateur cricket, and amateurism in general, see: Derek Birley, A Social History of English Cricket (London: Aurum, 1999), and the same author's Sport and the Making of Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) and his Land of Sport and Glory: Sport and British Society, 1887–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); Dennis Brailsford, British Sport: A Social History (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1992); Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), esp. ch. 2; John Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes, 1870–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), esp. ch. 6; Jack Williams, ‘Cricket’ in Tony Mason, ed. Sport in Britain: A Social History, ed. Tony Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 116–45. David Kynaston, WG's Birthday Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) is also very insightful. 2. Joseph Bradley, ‘The MCC, Society and Empire: A Portrait of Cricket's Leading Body, 1860–1914’, in The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire, Society, ed. J.A. Mangan (London: Cass, 1992). See also Mike Marqusee, Anyone but England: An Outsider Looks at English Cricket, 2nd edn (London: Two Heads, 1998), esp. ch. 3. 3. Mike Huggins, ‘Second Class Citizens? English Middle Class Culture and Sport. 1850–1910’, in A Sport-Loving Society: Victorian and Edwardian Middle Class England at Play, ed. J.A. Mangan (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 15. 4. Benny Green, ed., The Wisden Book of Cricketers’ Lives (London: Queen Anne Press, 1986). 5. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 6. P.J. Cain, ‘Empire and the Languages of Character and Virtue in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 2 (2007): 1–25. 7. Green, The Wisden Book of Cricketers’ Lives, introduction. 8. Six schools provided two cricketers each: Christ's Hospital, Brighton College, Radley, Oundle, Eastbourne and Rossall. A further nineteen schools produced one each: Wimbledon, King Edwards Birmingham, Cranleigh, Sutton Valence, Bruce Castle, Mill Hill, Bury St Edmunds Grammar School, Blundells, Beccles, Whitgift, Christ's College Brecon, Felsted, Bishop Stortford, Bedford Modern, Skipton Grammar School, Downside, Bromsgrove, Amersham Hall and Aldenham. 9. Two went to London University and two to Edinburgh. 10. Green, The Wisden Book of Cricketers’ Lives, 883. Theobald is not actually included in the sample because there is evidence only of his playing school cricket, but others in the sample who went to Oxbridge and did not obtain Blues may have faced similar circumstances. 11. A few excelled at a range of sports including cricket. See, for example, the Wisden obituary for L.G. Crawley (1904–1981) and his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 12. Times, Feb. 18, 1964, 12. 13. Green, The Wisden Book of Cricketers’ Lives, introduction. 14. Pre-1914 Blues could still have been alive in 1984 when Green's list ends, but it is statistically highly improbable that all of them were. 15. R.T.P. Davenport -Hines, Dudley Docker: the Life and Times of a Trade Warrior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 159, 166, 185; Times, March 22, 1960, 18. 16. Davenport-Hines, Dudley Docker, 15–16. 17. T.J.H. Bishop and Rupert Wilkinson, Winchester and the Public School Elite: A Statistical Analysis (London: Faber & Faber, 1967). For a broader survey see T.W. Bamford, The Rise of the Public Schools: A Study of Boys’ Public Boarding Schools in England and Wales from 1837 to the Present Day (London: Nelson, 1967). 18. In Table 7 engineering (3.5 per cent of Wykehamists’ occupations if born in the 1880–1889 cohort) is classed as business though it could be argued to be on a profession on a par with medicine. See R.A. Buchanan, ‘Gentlemen Engineers: The Making of a Profession’, Victorian Studies 26 (1982–3). 19. W.D. Rubinstein, ‘Education and the Social Origins of British Elites’, Past and Present 112 (1986), 173–4. 20. C.H. Lee, The British Economy since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); W.D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain, 1750–1900 (London: Routledge, 1993). See also P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2000 (London: Longman, 2001), ch. 3. 21. The figures are derived from C.H. Lee, British Regional Employment Statistics, 1841–1971 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), Series A. employment categories, 22–7. 22. W.D. Rubinstein, ‘The Size and Distribution of the English Middle Classes in 1860’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 144 (1988): 65–89. 23. Rubinstein, ‘Education and the Social Origins of British Elites’, 199–200. 24. I am grateful to David Kynaston for reminding me of this. 25. Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1989), 119. 26. Rupert Wilkinson, The Prefects: British Leadership and the Public School Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964) remains the best introduction to this aspect of public-school culture. The re-shaping of Oxbridge to meet the needs of the new service intelligentsia is dealt with in Sheldon Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 27. P. Gowan, ‘The Origins of the Administrative Elite’, New Left Review 162 (1987). 28. B. Frindall, ed., The Wisden Book of Cricket Records (London: MacDonald, 1986), 335, 337. 29. C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary (London: Hutchinson, 1963), part 5. 30. J.A. Hobson, Work and Wealth (London: Macmillan, 1914), ch. XI. 31. S. Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 32. W.E.H. Lecky, The Map of Life: Conduct and Character (London: Longmans, 1899), 50–1, 295. 33. Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Burke to Blair (London: Yale University Press, 2006), 123. 34. Lecky, The Map of Life, 32–5. 35. Lecky, The Map of Life, 32, 59. 36. J. Ruskin, Unto This Last (London: George Allen, 1906 [1862]), paras 17–21. 37. Xenophon, Oeconomicus (ed. S. B. Pomeroy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 135, 235–7. 38. M. Roberts, ‘W.L. Jackson, Exemplary Manliness and Late Victorian Popular Conservatism’, in Public Men: Masculinity and Politics in Modern Britain, ed. Matthew McCormak (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 123–42. 39. Green, The Wisden Book of Cricketers’ Lives, 490. 40. Lecky, The Map of Life, 225. 41. Lecky, The Map of Life, 224, 247–8. 42. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 43. For these themes see the classic studies by J.A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) and his The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (London: Frank Cass, 1998). When in 1905 the All Blacks’ rugby team thrashed every English club they encountered on their tour, some commentators took this to be a sign of national degeneracy and failing character induced by too much urban living. See Bob Howitt and Dianne Haworth, 1905 Originals (Auckland: Harper Collins, 2005), 86–7. 44. On Surrey payments to amateurs see D. Kynaston, Bobby Abel: Professional Batsman, 2nd edn (New Malden: Night Watchman Books, 2007), 127–31. 45. I rely for my factual information here on Simon Rae, W.G. Grace: A Life (London: Faber & Faber, 1998). 46. Birley's A Social History of English Cricket, chs 8–12, has many examples.