The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  The 1908 Olympic Games were opened by the King, who no doubt took pride in the discovery that, of the 1,001 athletes who marched past him on the opening day, 226 were British.3 All the participating countries apart from America and the three dominions of Canada, Australia and South Africa were European. The United States topped the unofficial championship table.4 The Games ended on a controversial note when C. B. Fry, regarded as an authority on all things athletic, suggested that, in future, Olympiads should be limited to contestants from the Empire and the United States of America. He feared that the Europeans did not understand the true spirit of the noble event. His reservations encompassed Greece where the Games began.

  Fry was in a constant state of agitation about what he regarded as the deteriorating standards in sports of every kind. His views reflected the prejudices (which they called principles) of the Marylebone Cricket Club, cricket’s governing body and the home of its establishment. The increasing importance of ‘players’ and the consequent reduction of both the number of ‘gentlemen’ taking part in the game and their influence upon it filled the MCC with dread. Paradoxically, while football was sweeping the country as a result of the working class enjoying more leisure, The Times attributed cricket’s problems to the ‘fact that people have to work more than they did forty years ago’. The apparent conflict can be reconciled. ‘The people’ whom The Times wanted to run cricket were, by and large, significantly different from ‘the people’ who played and watched football.

  Cricket’s old guard was typified by Lord Hawke who, despite possessing very little talent for the game, captained Yorkshire for twenty-seven years. He told the Manchester Guardian, ‘I am no advocate of wholly professional sides … Amateurs are, to my mind, the moral backbone of the county sides. Once you do away with them, you will inevitably create an eleven which will only play for the gate.’5 However, ‘gentlemen’ with a private income which allowed them to spend the whole summer in the field and enough talent at least to compete with the growing army of ‘players’ were becoming increasingly hard to find. The county played amateurs whenever they could, for reasons of cost as well as of attitude. The great Sydney Barnes was on the point of leaving home to join the Warwickshire team when he received a telegram, ‘Do not come, amateur playing.’6 But the problem was complicated by the ‘gentlemen’s’ ungentlemanly habit of demanding surreptitious payment. The Honourable R. H. Lyttelton – poet, politician and right-hand bat – turned King’s Evidence in an article which was published in a sporting anthology called County Life. The winning of matches being the golden key to financial prosperity, the Committee have been driven to adopt a system of paying the amateurs money and what, thirty years ago, was done in one or two instances is now a matter of universal practice.’7

  Lyttelton was in favour of payment but against deceit. ‘The calling of a profession is, in every way, an honourable and good one. What puzzles many of us is, this being the case, so many should opt for the profession but deny the name.’8 But Lord Hawke understood why men of birth and independent means did not want to be confused with the journeymen who batted and bowled for money. In 1909 he devised a formula by which they could be paid, but remain ‘gentlemen’. He explained it to The Times: ‘The real distinction is not whether A receives £5 or £2 for playing in a match, nor whether B receives £200 and his expenses of £50 and his expenses for representing England on tour, but does he make his living out of playing the game?’

  To be fair to Lord Hawke and his like, it must be explained that his interest in preserving amateurism – even sham amateurism – was motivated by more than a desire to keep the classes apart. He believed the professional would change the nature of the game, a view that was widely shared by other genuine cricket lovers. P. C. Standing, in Cricket Today and Yesterday, expressed the widely held fear that cricket would follow football and become a business: ‘The sordid side of what should simply be a splendid sport is to be deprecated by everyone having the interests of the game at heart. We cannot rest satisfied if it is to degenerate into a mere gate money affair.’

  The undesirable option of gate money was not a necessity for most cricket clubs. Yorkshire, Middlesex (spared the expenses of their own ground), Lancashire and Nottingham could survive without the patronage of wealthy supporters. So could Surrey. Though, when the size of the crowd made it impossible to host the Cup Final at the Oval without risking terminal damage to the outfield turf, the County Club lost a substantial part of its income. Most counties survived on a combination of patronage and ticket sales, both of which depended on a combination of exciting play and constant success. The real dilemma of Edwardian cricket was how to reconcile those two often conflicting objectives. Nobody was sure how it could be done. Everybody was certain that the problem had been caused by cricket becoming too competitive. The Manchester Guardian expressed regret that a league – with the elevated title of the County Championship – had put such a premium on winning. The newspaper accepted that ‘it is too late to accept that originally cricket was a game and that the element of grim toil is a little out of place. The obvious reply is that the championship is here to stay.’ But, it then piously added, ‘We shall never, we hope, forget that the game is more than the championship.’9

  Variations on the theme that some sportsmen took winning more seriously than gentlemen should were a feature of Edwardian sporting journalism. Philip Noel Baker (destined to become one of the founders of the League of Nations, a Member of Parliament and a Minister of the Crown) was, in 1912, no more than an Oxford middle-distance runner. His description of United States training methods, written in Granta, was wistfully envious.

  The American athlete specialises in one or two events: before any race of great importance he devotes most of his energies and time to training: he has a coach – often a professional – who likewise devotes his entire time and energy to coaching: he has an organisation behind him which is managed by paid organisers. The system depends on organising ability and intelligence supported by a reasonable amount of money.10

  The men who ran county cricket felt no such envy. When P. C. Standing wrote ‘Professionalism, pure and simple, nobody has a right to shy at, but it is essential to regulate the relations between those who pay to play and those who are paid to play’, he meant something more than that it was necessary for the professionals to be kept in their place. He meant that it was essential to prevent professionals acquiring so much influence that the game abandoned its nobility in favour of the wish (perhaps even the need) to win. The distinction which such men believed divided the amateur and professional approach to cricket is illustrated by the progress of play in the final Test Match – England versus Australia – in 1902. It was the classic game of what is still called ‘the golden age of cricket’.

  On the final day, with the Ashes already won by Australia and only self-respect at stake, England needed 263 to win. With the score at 48 for 5 all seemed lost, but in came Gilbert Jessop, a gentleman batsman who had proved his amateur status by playing cricket for Cambridge during four consecutive seasons but failing to take the examinations which might have resulted in his graduation. He scored 104 in seventy-five minutes off seventy-five balls. The two dropped catches, which might have ended his innings, were forgotten. Gentlemen like Jessop gave the game dash and daring.

  When Jessop was out, after the thunder and lightning of the fastest hundred in Test Match cricket, England still needed 76 to win. In the end, it was the partnership of two Yorkshire professionals, George Hirst and Wilfred Rhodes, which completed the victory. The way in which they scored the winning runs has also become part of cricket folklore, though the character of the fable is quite different from the legend of Jessop’s century. Rhodes, the last man in, was supposed to have said to Hirst, ‘We’ll get ‘em in singles.’ The story is apocryphal. But it demonstrates the attitude towards the game which Edwardians believed was typical of professionals. Perhaps they were not far wrong. The professionals’ livelihood depended on winning. It was Rhod
es who, irritated by the slackness in the field of a young colleague, cried out to him, ‘We don’t play for fun you know.’

  The Edwardian Establishment wanted to play in pursuit of an Olympian ideal. It was typified by C. B. Fry whose record of runs – two thousand in a season six times, a thousand in twelve, ninety-four centuries, a first-class average of over fifty and the undefeated captaincy of England during the triangular tournament of 1902 – qualifies him for a place in the pantheon of great cricketers. But his defining characteristic was his apparently effortless superiority. At Wadham College, Oxford – where of course he graduated with first-class honours – he was regarded as the intellectual equal of F. E. Smith, his exact contemporary. His choice of career was an anti-climax. He financed his cricket, and his numerous other sporting activities, by journalism. He edited the Champion (a boys’ weekly paper) and C. B. Fry’s Cricket Magazine as well as writing regularly for the Daily Express. Fry was absolutely open about how he earned his living. That was a great improvement on the behaviour of many of his colleagues. Many ‘gentlemen’ – including Sir Pelham (‘Plum’) Warner, a crucial figure in the government of cricket for over fifty years – reported matches in which they took part, but wrote under the cover of a pen name or the anonymity which Edwardian newspaper editors preferred to by-lines. They completed the deception by describing their own exploits in the third person. In 1904 Punch published a cartoon of a cricket match in which the fielders were all writing in shorthand notebooks.11

  Despite the extent of their achievements and the elegance of their style, it was neither Fry nor Jessop who came to personify the glory of the golden age. That distinction belonged to A. C. MacLaren, captain of Lancashire and England. MacLaren scored a century on his first class debut, a month after leaving Harrow. Five years later, he made 474 in 470 minutes. He treated the professionals who played under him in much the same way that he treated his under-gardeners, and took an almost equally de haut en bas view of his relationship with the governing committee of the MCC. In 1901, the authorities at Lord’s declined to organise a tour to Australia – according to R. H. Lyttelton because they could not or would not pay the ‘amateurs’ the fees and expenses they demanded for a winter in the Antipodes. MacLaren took over and selected his own ‘England team’. The MCC did not respond to MacLaren’s initiative with good grace. Lord Hawke decreed that, since Rhodes and Hirst were paid winter wages, they were Yorkshire property all the year round and could not join the touring party. The tour was a sporting failure, but a great financial success.

  Edwardian cricket accepted professionals like Hirst and Rhodes as great exponents of the game. Their record allowed nothing less. Rhodes was the only bowler in the history of the game to take 4,000 first-class wickets and he worked his way up the batting order from number eleven to number one. Hirst took 2,800 wickets and scored more than a thousand runs each season during nineteen consecutive summers. Yet there was a fear throughout cricket that if too many men with similar motivation came into the county game it would acquire the character which was typified by S. F. Barnes of Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Lancashire and several Lancashire league clubs. Barnes was almost certainly the greatest bowler of his age and perhaps the greatest bowler of all time. In three of the first four Australian innings during the MCC tour of 1901–2 he took 6 wickets for 4$ runs, 6 for 42 and 7 for 121 – but he found it hard to treat ‘gentlemen’ with appropriate respect and constantly worried about long-term security and pay rates. The MCC would have been willing, if not happy, for a handful of such men to play in the county game. There was a fear that the profession would take cricket over.

  Talented amateurs left cricket to pursue sterner (and more remunerative) occupations. Gilbert Jessop said that he could not afford to play in the ‘expenses only’ tour of Australia in 1903–4 and chose, instead, to report on the matches for the Daily Mail. Both C. B. Fry and (later) Sir F. S. Jackson turned down the leadership of MCC tours to Australia. Sir Pelham Warner, who stood in when C. B. Fry pulled out in 1911, took the world role of the Marylebone Cricket Club very seriously. He asked, without the slightest irony, ‘whither should the Empire turn for guidance but to the club which has grown up with the game?’12 But although the MCC regarded itself as the paradigm of imperial glory, in the real world too many of its replica proconsuls preferred the real thing to the reflection. Sir F. S. Jackson gave up the game to become a Member of Parliament, junior minister and Governor of Bengal.

  Romantics made a concerted attempt to revive the spirit of chivalry. E. V. Lucas, writing in The Times, knew that something must be done, but was not quite sure what it was. ‘Any step that can bring sentiment again into first-class cricket’ was to be welcomed.13 ‘Hard utilitarianism and commercialism have for too long controlled it.’ The alternative approach was represented by Alfred Lyttelton, brother of the rashly frank R. H., who suggested that the Laws of the Game (or the rules that clarified them) should be changed in a way which made watching cricket a more attractive pastime. He proposed that the lbw law should be changed to prevent the batsman from ever defending his wickets with his pads, wherever the ball pitched or the batsman stood. He justified the revolutionary suggestion with the intolerable allegation that ‘at present cricket is somewhat dull’.14 It was dull, in critics’ opinion, because of the supremacy of bat over ball. Part of the problem was the improving quality of wickets. Whatever the reasons, the number of drawn matches had increased by 20 per cent in a century.

  Neither Lyttelton’s proposal nor the suggestion by the Lancashire County Club (accepted a hundred years later) that the Championship should be divided into two divisions with promotion and relegation, was acceptable to the MCC. Sir Pelham Warner spoke for the men who rejected any form of change: ‘I assure you I have the best interests of the game at heart. I have played it all over the world and I think I am entitled to an opinion. This has been the finest game in the world to many generations. So I ask you to beware how you tamper with the present laws.’15

  Cricket had made one change in the rules of the County Championship in 1900. A team which on the second day had bowled out its opponents for 150 runs less than its own first innings score was allowed to require them to ‘follow on’ – bat again immediately But the instinct of both the county committees and the governing MCC was otherwise to leave things as they were. Indeed, there were dreams of returning to a cricketing Camelot in which the rules were never broken, amateurs were never paid and the governing classes were allowed to govern. The fact that it had never existed made it all the more attractive. At least Lord Hawke attempted to make the dream come true in one respect. When he eventually resigned as Yorkshire captain he secured the succession, first for Sir Everard Ratcliffe and then Sir Archibald White. Neither of them was a player of first-class quality. Both could be relied upon to resist revolution.

  The extraordinary paradox about Edwardian cricket was the way in which – despite all the huffing and puffing and authorities that were wholly unrepresentative of the paying public – it remained a truly national game. The era which began with the retirement of W. G. Grace and ended with the emergence of J. B. Hobbs embraced all the classes. Victor Cavendish’s diary for June 1902 records with rejoicing the end of the Boer War. Rowland Evans’s diary does the same. But it was not the only cause for celebration which both the aristocrat and apprentice engineer noted with equal delight. On 3 June Cavendish wrote, ‘Education Bill. Majorities good but progress not very fast. Yorkshire beat Australians by five wickets. Got them out for 23.’ Young Rowland, writing about the same day, was more expansive. ‘In the morning we had Solid Geometry. In the afternoon we had art. I drew a Marsh Marigold and painted it. Father went on his bicycle to Leeds to watch Yorkshire versus the Australians. Yorkshire were all out for 107 and then the Australians went in and came out for 23. One of the lowest totals ever. There was a very big crowd.’

  Rugby Union, like cricket but for different reasons, saw no reason to change its ways. The 1870s had been its decade of rules�
� revision and, after the introduction of the points system in 1886, the game seemed to have become what both players and supporters wanted it to be. The great schism of 1895 was brought about by an argument about pay – ‘compensation for bona fide loss of time’ – not how the game was played. Rugby League – the Northern Union as was and the product of that rebellion – changed its rules to please the crowds in 1906. The size of teams was reduced from fifteen to thirteen to encourage more open play, and the loose rucks and mauls were replaced by the ‘play the ball rule’, which required a player in possession when he was brought down to pass the ball behind him with a back-heel between his legs. So, instead of a tackle being followed by a heap of writhing bodies, the running and passing game was resumed at once. Rugby Union saw no need to find additional ways of pleasing the crowds. Its crowds were already both substantial and enthusiastic.

  They were not, however, as large and enthusiastic as the crowds for Rugby Union in Wales. Swansea in the early years of the century regularly attracted crowds of 20,000, and a visit from Cardiff swelled the home gate of their opponents. In Bristol in 1903 the usual 5,000 increased to 8,000 and in 1905, when only 12,000 spectators watched Ireland play England, 40,000 saw Ireland play Swansea. Wales confirmed its domination of the game by defeating the previously invincible New Zealand All Blacks in 1905.

  Edwardian Rugby Union, like all Edwardian amateur games, grew anxious about the increasing domination of professionals. Many small Welsh towns built their whole social life round the rugby club, and there was general agreement that a sovereign, dropped into a player’s boot while it was awaiting his arrival in the changing room, was a price well worth paying to keep the team’s local character. The Scots took exactly the opposite position. They thought that sham amateurism would inevitably lead on to the open employment of mercenaries and were so rigid in their opposition to all forms of reward and remuneration that they refused Pontypridd permission to make a presentation to D. M. McGregor, a Scottish international. When the French champions, Stade Bordelais, advertised for a halfback – offering the incentive of a well-paid local job – the Scottish Rugby Union insisted that the club be expelled from the French League.