English cricket – who gets to play is a question of class

Daniel Norcross
Journalist and Broadcaster

You don’t need to be a fan of Cricket to be acutely aware that in England it has become synonymous with fair play, decency and moral probity; that taking part and how you deport yourself on the field of play is more important than successfully pulling off victory. Heavens, even the phrase ‘that’s not Cricket’ is deployed in all walks of life to denote some ethical failing. But how did a game rooted in gambling and forged in disputatious contests in the 18th century, which frequently descended into ill temper both on and off the field of play, become synonymous with good conduct; as a byword for English, specifically English, values that ennoble the English above all others?

Many writers have observed this peculiarity but none have comprehensively demonstrated, as Duncan Stone does in Different Class; The Untold Story of English Cricket, that it is a symptom of a class war, won hands down by the English male ruling elite. Even those writers who have touched upon this thesis, such as American Marxist Mike Marquesee in his polemical Anyone But England, have not used the amateur or recreational game as their dialectical tool of choice.

Stone begins by walking us through a pretty familiar tale of institutional hypocrisy that begins in the late 18^th Century and reaches its apotheosis in the ludicrous distinction between Gentlemen (amateur cricketers who in theory, but certainly not practise, gained nothing financially from playing the sport), and Players (professional athletes who were paid to represent a team). There is little strictly speaking new in Stone’s analysis of this period. Bumptious establishment figures like Lord Hawke, Lord Burghley, C.B. Fry (the undeniably gifted turn of the century all round sportsman, Nazi-sympathiser and wealthy creation of public school and Oxford) and Pelham Warner (another Oxbridge product and at various points captain and manager of the England cricket team) all feature prominently as architects of an ancien régime that, Stone implies, exists to this day, and that, like its French predecessor, will require nothing less than a revolution to overturn.

But the inescapable conclusion one draws is that this is by design; the English cricket establishment has had no interest in broadening inclusivity, preferring to keep it as a sport for people from the ‘right sort of family’.

What Stone does do so well is demonstrate how this self-appointed establishment moulded English cricket’s puerile exceptionalism and impacted how the game was able to develop and grow (or should that rather be, stagnate) as other less prissy sports, such as Football and Rugby League embraced the spectacle of their games, rather than imputing some mystical value system to it that by its very definition sought to exclude ‘the wrong type of person’.

As we move into the guts of Stone’s thesis, the reader will need to apply a certain obduracy and determination (appropriately, since this charge is so often levelled against the professional cricketer in the mid-20th Century to contrast with their worthier amateur counterparts who apparently played the game simply for fun and to enrich their moral soul). No committee meeting of regional leagues from Yorkshire to Sussex via all points in between is deemed unworthy of note. In fairness to Stone, the evidence for his thesis becomes more compelling with every wrong turn taken by the  Club Cricket Conference in the South of England who went out of their way to protect ‘friendly’ cricket and block the establishment of a league or competitive structure.

To a shocking degree, even to someone such as myself who has played club cricket in the South of England for over 30 years, Stone details how clubs in the increasingly middle-class commuter belt either side of the Second World War valued the class of the opponents on their fixture list, over the quality and competitiveness of cricket. In turn, the composition of their own teams reflected this class prejudice as working-class players were increasingly excluded from playing for clubs that owned their own grounds in leafy suburban idylls, such as Oxted in Surrey; the side being filled with ‘the right sort of chap’.

Even when sense finally prevailed and leagues such as the Surrey Championship sprung up in the late 1960s and 70s, echoes of an exclusionary tendency come in the experience of teams made up of British Asians and West Indians. Like their white working-class counterparts in the suburbs, they had and still have for the most part, no grounds of their own on which to play. Leagues routinely excluded these clubs and it has only been through the tireless persistence of men such as Hanif Mayet of Mount CC in Yorkshire and Iftikhar Mehmood of Waltham CC in East London that British South Asians are integrated at all in to what might be termed the club cricket mainstream.

Stone does great service to men such as Mayet and Mehmood who have challenged the establishment by recording in detail their struggles and placing them in the context of a wider malaise. He also reminds us that cricket doesn’t need to be run in this exclusionary way. Fabulous facts leap from the page, such as that the Miners Welfare Fund distributed over £30 million into health, education and leisure, largely in the North of England between 1920 and 1951, £625,000 of which was invested in South and West Yorkshire for sport alone in 1929. Workers’ co-operatives, it would appear, spent far more money on supporting grassroots cricket than the supposed custodians of the game, the MCC, ever have. But the inescapable conclusion one draws is that this is by design; the English cricket establishment has had no interest in broadening inclusivity, preferring to keep it as a sport for people from the ‘right sort of family’, a phrase former England Cricket Board Chairman, Giles Clarke, used to describe former England captain Alastair Cook’s progenitors.

Stone’s concluding chapter synthesises his hitherto suppressed infuriation that the game he loves has been so badly served by its supposed curators. And while he offers not much in the way of hope for a brighter future I shall present him with at least a possible light at the end of the tunnel. Since publication of Different Class, a new initiative, The ACE (Afro-Caribbean Engagement) programme, has sprung up. The brainchild of Ebony Rainford-Brent, the first black woman to play for England, it initially aimed to revive interest in the UK’s Afro-Caribbean community; an interest that had waned significantly since its high point of the 1980s as the game was hollowed out by government cuts and the scandalous sale of state school playing fields. Rainford-Brent began with a strict focus on that one community but has since acknowledged that the issue is wider than race; it is class. To that end, the programme now looks to extend its remit to working-class boys and girls in the major urban centres of the UK. She gets it. Stone gets it. The hope is that in time the English cricket establishment as a whole will get it.

Copyright © Daniel Norcross