Class Peace: An Analysis of Social Status and English Cricket 1846-1962

Download or read book Class Peace: An Analysis of Social Status and English Cricket 1846-1962 written by Eric Midwinter and published by Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cricket, in its modern formulation, was in the ascendant as a national sport from early Victorian times to the immediate post-World War II years. That corresponded, roughly, to a hundred or so years span in which the working and middle classes were most distinctively identified – and yet were most solidly united in values and attitudes. This curious amalgam of cross-class ‘cultural integration’ characterised cricket then, most notably in the ‘Gentlemen and Players’ convention but also in recreational cricket and among what was in those days the huge spectatorship for cricket. County cricket, especially, with its unusual combine of the plebeian professional and the bourgeois amateur, is a classic example of how an aspiring working class and an earnest middle class contrived to find common ground, and even some mutual respect, without ever disturbing the overt social barriers. In cricket, as in society at large, there was ‘class peace’ rather than class war.