Introduction
Throughout much of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, English cricket was divided in social and cultural terms. The most obvious division, within the ‘first-class’ game (Test, English County Championship (ECC), public school and Oxbridge university cricket) at least, lay in the class-based peculiarities of the amateur / professional distinction. There were, however, significant differences in ‘amateur’ cricket beyond this elite form, and for much of the twentieth century, the game at this lower level was played within two regionally distinct cultural forms: league and club cricket. The development of these ideologically divergent cultures involved a number of contemporaneous factors, and no little hostility, in what may be regarded as a ‘cultural war’ over the legitimate form and meaning of the game. The geographical location, environmental context and ‘class’ of the social actors involved were crucial to these outcomes – principally in the south of England where middle-class suburbanites dominated.
Club cricket, which was closely associated with the rural or suburban south, was ‘middle-class’, ‘amateur’, ‘non-commercial’ and ‘non-competitive’. League cricket, on the other hand, was portrayed as a particularly northern phenomenon with close links to industrialized urban environments. As such, this form of the game has been assumed to be ‘working-class’, ‘professional’, ‘commercial’ and ‘competitive’. It is important to appreciate just how ingrained these class-specific, and regionalized, portrayals have been. The imagined identities of counties such as Surrey and Yorkshire have been influenced by these differences and they have been commonly portrayed in contemporary and historical literature.Footnote 1
Although a very small number of ‘gentlemen's’ clubs operated in the north, the vast majority of clubs, especially those that played within leagues throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, represented their communities as a whole.Footnote 2 In the south, however, particularly after 1918, cricket clubs increasingly came to represent specific class groups rather than the communities for whom they were often named. This outcome occurred, in part, due to the establishment in 1915 of an elitist metropolitan organization called the Club Cricket Conference (CCC) and its decision to de-legitimize competitive cricket in the form of cups and leagues. Under the influence of the CCC, non-elite cricket in Surrey, in the 50 years between 1918 and 1968, was dominated by values and rules that prioritized amateur and non-competitive ideals and made a good deal of club cricket a social rather than a sporting encounter.Footnote 3
As a result, the inauguration in 1968 of the Surrey Clubs’ Championship (SCC), regarded as the first senior cricket league in the south of England, was a highly controversial and divisive event. Despite much media debate in relation to the apparent need for cricket leagues in the south, and the lack of competitiveness of ‘English’ sport internationally, the CCC and its allies in the media fiercely resisted such a proposal for decades.Footnote 4 This resistance, and the class prejudices that fuelled it, is reflected in the little that has been written about this significant transition. The establishment of the SCC by the ex-England cricketer Raman Subba Row and his ‘henchmen’ had, according to Sir Derek Birley, achieved ‘the most significant social change’ by introducing ‘the South to the vulgar practice of the North’.Footnote 5 To John Kay, a league cricket historian, the SCC was the ‘beginning of league cricket in territory previously totally opposed to such a move’.Footnote 6 Birley's assertion that this was a ‘social change’ took decades (if not longer) to occur after the SCC had been established. ‘Tradition and finance’ meant that cricket in Surrey remained (at senior clubs at least) the preserve of the wealthy long after the establishment of leagues, where the costs for a junior cricketer in Surrey during the 1980s were over six times as expensive as those incurred by contemporaries in Lancashire.Footnote 7 As little discernible social change occurred, the rapid establishment of numerous leagues throughout London and the south-east after 1968 represented, more accurately, a cultural change. Given the social and cultural bias throughout the game's historiography, Kay's error is, perhaps, more understandable. For, as occurred in relation to the important role that gambling played in the game's early development, cricket leagues, so synonymous with the ‘industrialized’ Midlands and north of England from the late 1880s, have been consciously excluded from cricket's orthodox history.
Although significant, the SCC was not the first cricket league in the south of England. Competitive cups and leagues had developed throughout the south in tandem with those of the north. Indeed, it is fair to say that cricket in England was played under broadly ‘universal’ cultural parameters up to the outbreak of war in 1914. Traditional ‘friendly’ matches, one-off (or home and away) ‘challenges’ (often for a significant wager), modern knock-out cup competitions and leagues co-existed, as did professionalism, throughout all of English cricket. The establishment of cups and leagues from 1880 was supported by the elites in city, suburb, town and village alike. Moreover, not only did they serve as a modern extension of a traditional competitive games culture, but they also had a utilitarian value. Those who established competitions recognized that successful participation in them was not only good for the status of their club or community, but also the development of talent and the future welfare of the game as a whole. Why, then, having enthusiastically adopted the format, did much of the south of England appear to reject the concept completely after World War I?
This article will examine the social, economic and political reasons why competitive cricket was first deemed undesirable by a small group of elites in London and, having essentially prohibited league and cup cricket, the way in which their extreme form of ‘amateurism’ spread throughout the south-east. It argues that the study of local sporting practices – in this case, the gradual displacement of a traditional culture which promoted communal identities through competition with one that eschewed formal competitions in order to serve the social needs of particular middle-class groups, within an ever wider radius of London – may act as a barometer for the pace and nature of ‘suburbanization’ and the impact that this process had upon social relations.
Beginning with a brief assessment of the current historiography of suburbia and suburban sport, this article, which uses Surrey as a case-study, then traces the ‘suburban’ identity of that county. It follows this with an examination of the tenets of a traditional ‘sporting’ culture that appears to have transcended any differences in social structure within, or between, urban, suburban and rural England, and its resilience in the face of early middle-class challenges. The establishment of cups and leagues occurred nationwide, but it was the significant social repercussions of this ‘modern’ meritocratic approach to sport at the elite, commercialized, level which led to ‘competition’ itself being increasingly criticized. Such criticisms, which arose among a very narrow social group based in London, were largely futile in rural areas where middle-class influence was slight or remained the preserve of indigenous elites. Many attempts to challenge traditional leisure activities prior to 1914 either failed or took years to change, and it was only after increased levels of ‘suburbanization’, during a period of significant class conflict, that the middle classes were able to influence, or change, local sporting culture.
This examination of the changing culture of cricket in Surrey, during a period of suburban transformation, demonstrates the gradual acquisition of social and cultural power by comparatively new ‘white-collar’ migrants to Surrey, and their progressively fractious relationship with their poorer neighbours. Their adoption of the non-competitive values, favoured by the metropolitan-led CCC, not only created their own discrete realm of amateur cricket after 1918, but also provides evidence (in one context at least) of the symbiotic relationship that one particular ‘suburban’ fringe had with its urban core in social and cultural terms.
Sport, class and the suburb
The historiography of sport is almost entirely dominated by studies of the working-class experience within an urban context. And yet, despite Victorian towns and cities providing the stage for the growth and development of the middle classes,Footnote 8 and the central role this heterogeneous class played in the development, commercialization and spread of sport, sports researchers have essentially ignored the middle classes as participants.Footnote 9 Although the suburban realm of middle-class sport has been studied by Richard Holt, his examination of class and gender within a suburban golf club adds little to debates regarding class relations outside of the club or the suburbanization process.Footnote 10 That sports historians have failed to address suburban sport in terms more relevant to ‘urban’ specialists, or develop ideas beyond the ‘private’ or ‘domestic’ nature of the suburb is, given the historiography, understandable. Studies of suburban life have suffered from a resolute adherence to long-established (and frequently inappropriate) frameworks and indices used for measuring communities in urban rather than suburban contexts.Footnote 11 We thus know a great deal about the urban middle classes in terms of their economic impact, their political, religious or associational affiliations and voluntary culture, but comparatively little of their lives in relation to the suburban setting where the vast majority resided. Such shortcomings are now being challenged, if not currently rectified. Ruth McManus and Philip Ethington have, for example, suggested alternative approaches such as longer time periods, ‘embeddedness’, ‘urban morphologies’ and ‘interactive ecology’, whereas Laura Balderstone has advocated a greater emphasis upon how ‘suburbans’ interacted with the urban core.Footnote 12
Most recently, a special edition of the London Journal has united the sub-fields by exploring a number of pastimes as they occurred in certain London suburbs or institutions. This collection confirms the importance of leisure in the formation of social and cultural identities, highlighted previously by Christopher French, and it rejects the notion that suburbs were essentially ‘private’ by highlighting the vibrancy of associational culture within suburbs.Footnote 13 This refreshing analysis notwithstanding, the edition's emphasis upon ‘leisure’ within comparatively short time periods or particular middle-class institutions does mean the utility of the individual articles is limited in terms of broader cultural change and their relationship to the suburbanization process itself.Footnote 14 Counter to the overwhelming majority of research completed, this article seeks to transcend traditional cut-off dates, and challenge the dominance of suburban regions north of the Thames (or those within 20 miles of Charing Cross) within the current historiography.
Two questions thus present themselves at this juncture: why cricket, and why Surrey? Although golf and tennis – and their private club culture – represent the archetypal suburban sports, they are unsuitable subjects for such clubs were created, and fiercely maintained, as middle-class enclaves. Although ‘team’ variations are possible in both sports, they reinforce the individualism and ‘privacy’ prevalent throughout the established narrative challenged by Georgiou. Furthermore, their elitist ‘culture’, despite the financial pragmatism which has led to the relatively recent admission of some from the ‘artisan classes’, has, as highlighted by Rob Lake in relation to tennis, remained consistent.Footnote 15 That the culture of cricket in Surrey and the other Home Counties went from a game intimately tied to egalitarian class relations and strong community identities to one which consciously severed ties with local communities and created ‘class-specific’ clubs makes it a more suitable subject for examination. Surrey is chosen for four reasons. First, by focusing on one county, a more detailed and nuanced examination is possible. Secondly, much of what has been regarded as ‘suburban’ Surrey was in fact composed of long-established communities located at distances far beyond the broadly accepted definition of English suburbs. Thirdly, the suburban development of this county, when compared to those situated north of the Thames, appears significantly different in class terms. Finally, Surrey has been all but ignored by urban and suburban historians – especially in the period after 1914.
Surrey and the suburban identity
A great deal has been written about the social character, lived experience, form and function of suburbs, but long-held assumptions of what a suburb was, or is, persist within academic and popular discourse.Footnote 16 Like the suburbs, Surrey – ‘symbolically the most suburban county in England’Footnote 17 – has been ‘much maligned for its pretensions and character’.Footnote 18 The denigration of such areas has been the result of contemporary prejudices (George Orwell, for instance) and deficiencies in historical research. Harris and Larkham have highlighted how a narrow definition of suburbs – residential places occupied by the wealthy at the urban fringe – may be ‘analytically neat’, but that a more nuanced analysis, which considers something other than ‘commuting’ is more ‘complete’.Footnote 19
Moreover, these authors have suggested that a distinctive culture or suburban ‘way of life’ prevailed, and that this is linked to the social uniformity within such low-density residential places dominated by owner-occupation.Footnote 20 R.J. Morris, however, has suggested that culture – ‘a series of meanings which human beings attributed to politics, production and consumption’ – is affected by, but not dependent upon, variations in social and economic structure. These meanings are influenced as much by ‘resources inherited from their own past’ as any contemporary domestic or international culture.Footnote 21 As Mark Clapson has highlighted, suburbs vary considerably in terms of size, their distance from urban centres and social composition.Footnote 22 Suburbs were planned, physically and economically close to the urban centre, predominantly ‘middle-class’ and, above all else, new. But, due to age, distance and development, what has usually been regarded as ‘suburban’ Surrey might struggle to meet such criteria. In this context, therefore, to what extent was the form and timing of the cultural transformation under investigation based upon the changing social structure of Surrey, social and cultural trends emanating from London and the wider societal context in which it occurred?
Due to the Thames acting as a natural barrier to expansion, Surrey's urban / suburban development occurred later than other peripheral regions. Even after the construction of bridges and freer trade links, the majority of those moving to Surrey, according to William Howitt in 1838, were almost exclusively aristocratic gentlemen.Footnote 23 Unlike the thousands of terraced houses that sprang up in industrialized England, much of Surrey (beyond the extreme north of the county) continued to be ‘studded over with mansions and villas’,Footnote 24 and the exodus from London to Surrey that the eighteenth-century aristocrat or wealthier middle-class migrants had started ‘never lost its social status’.Footnote 25 Howitt noted how the polarized nature of Surrey's demographic and physical development resulted in a different social structure from more urban or industrialized areas. The ascendency of aristocratic gentlemen, he argued:
had produced a curiously dichotomous society. As one observer commented: ‘A vast number of aristocracy reside in the country for its proximity to town; and besides them there are the farmers and their labourers; the servants of the aristocracy estates – a numerous and very peculiar class; and the few tradesmen who supply the great houses. The many gradations of rank and property which are found in more trading, manufacturing and mixed districts do not exist here.’Footnote 26
As highlighted below, although large numbers of middle-class residents were to fill the social vacuum between the high and low of Surrey, exorbitant land prices – even at the beginning of the twentieth centuryFootnote 27 – and landowners’ reluctance to sell to railway or property developers, hindered any large-scale urban development beyond the northern districts of the county.Footnote 28 Even here, where urban or suburban development had occurred, the county's apparent ‘suburban’ image was not simply hindered; it was reversed in 1889 following the creation of the County of London.Footnote 29 Although the north had retained a significant agricultural presence, the loss of the urban areas of Lambeth, Southwark and Wandsworth, suburban areas such as Surbiton and what became the County Borough of Croydon removed much of the urban space, and the population and industry therein, from the new administrative County of Surrey. Even the Oval, the home of Surrey County Cricket Club (SCCC), was lost to ‘old’ Surrey. As Table 1 demonstrates, although the county lost less than 5 per cent of its geographical area, the population was cut by almost two-thirds (63.7 per cent).Footnote 30
Area size and population of Surrey
na = not available.
Note: Of the total population of 1,436,899 in 1881, 980,522 (68 per cent) ‘lived in the area of the metropolis’: Kelly's Directory of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, 3rd edn (London, 1891), 1131.
Source: www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide.../surrey/surrey-area-monitor.pdf accessed 21 May 2012.
Despite the incursion of the railway network and middle-class institutions – including Charterhouse School, which relocated to Godalming in 1872 – the west and east of the county remained remote and retained its rural character.Footnote 31 The removal of the urban territories in the north was fundamental in partly re-establishing the county's pre-industrial ‘rural’ state and Surrey's association with affluence or extreme wealth.Footnote 32 Such an image persisted for, unlike other counties on the periphery of London, large estates catering for the working classes were not built. Quite in opposition to the London County Council cottage estates of Beacontree in Essex, Edgeware in Middlesex and Dagenham in Kent, housing estates in Surrey, such as St George's Hill (from 1911) and Burwood Park (from 1934) near Weybridge were private developments, exclusively for the wealthier classes. The creation of the Green Belt following World War II only served to stifle the widespread development of council estates further. In so doing, it ‘saved Surrey from being a vast commuter dormitory’ and secured the county's association with the ‘Stockbroker belt’.Footnote 33 This regional association reflects a social structure in which the middle classes dominated, but when did this transformation occur, and to what extent were such social groups able to make changes to the county's sporting culture?
Leisure in Surrey
Cricket's early development had occurred within a relatively static rural environment, where the social structure of small towns and villages in Surrey had remained consistent. Even when a new wave of middle-class migrants began to arrive during the early decades of the 1800s, they failed to exert any genuine influence upon local rural life. The radical Cobbett bitterly observed how these ‘stockjobbers and negro drivers’ were: ‘A gentry, only now-and-then residing at all, having no relish for country delights, foreign in their manners, distant and haughty in their behaviour, looking to the soil only for their rents. . .They were in the village, but not of it.’Footnote 34 The ’suburban’ middle classes who would transform the county and its cricket culture were essentially absent for most of the nineteenth century, and their absence meant that traditional customs and social relationships remained intact. These relationships were sufficiently relaxed to allow local cricketers to ‘seize’ land off the local landowners without any legal repercussions. David Underdown notes how some of Farnham's ‘inhabitants converted part of the Bishop of Winchester's park into a cricket ground, without bothering to ask anyone for permission’Footnote 35 and, approximately one hundred years later, cricketers in Cranleigh similarly enclosed a suitable part of the common in 1856.Footnote 36 This behaviour was no longer tolerated in urban areas where space was increasingly valuable and the middle classes were able to influence social and cultural relationships.
Within Surrey, it was the urban north of the county that witnessed these associated changes first. Not only had the archdeacon of Surrey noted how capitalist society increasingly created ‘separate and unsympathising classes’, the popular leisure activities of the pre-industrial age were increasingly decried by the respectable middle classes within these relatively new urban areas.Footnote 37 Robert Malcolmson is one of many historians to suggest that traditional sports and popular cultural values, which had been supported by those of high and low status within pre-industrial communities, were ‘swept away’ by the growth of an urban industrial society.Footnote 38 Violent ‘mob’ sports such as folk football were, he argues, largely eradicated by the 1850s and, although this date is contested by other historians, there appears to be a general consensus that bear baiting, rowdy Guy Fawkes ‘celebrations’ and folk football in particular were ‘extinct’ by the 1890s.Footnote 39 The end of such customs in urban areas – often encouraged by the police truncheon – strongly suggest, as Thompson has argued, that the new, ‘respectable’, middle classes had reached a critical mass by which they could exert significant social, economic, political and cultural power.Footnote 40 Consequently, in the towns closer to London, folk football either fell out of favour or was suppressed in Richmond by 1840, East Molesey by 1857 and Kingston-upon-Thames by 1867.Footnote 41
In the relatively isolated towns beyond, similar prohibitions took much longer to occur as a place like Guildford (in the west of the county) ‘remained. . .a rural market town inhabited mainly by shopkeepers, craftsmen and labourers and visited by farm workers’.Footnote 42 Indeed, the town was lampooned in the 1890s for an apparent lack of progress and, some 20 years later, a significant local landowner, the earl of Onslow, was accused of keeping the town ‘landlocked’.Footnote 43 In Dorking (in the east of the county), the construction of villas had boosted the local economy, but the longevity of traditional leisure pursuits and social relations suggests that these new residents failed to make any significant impression.Footnote 44 Thus, contrary to Malcolmson's suggestion that middle-class pressure had eradicated folk football by 1850, the local game persisted in Dorking into the early years of the twentieth century.Footnote 45 In fact, not only was this custom protected by the established social and political elites, it was still being ‘played’ by them at the end of the century.Footnote 46
The petitioning of the Surrey County Council by a select group of Dorking residents may well have represented ‘a determined attempt to put an end to the custom’, but it also demonstrated how the establishment of the Surrey County Council enabled a vocal minority of residents to by-pass local government in order to effect change. The failure of the petition, and ‘a force of 100 members of the Surrey County Constabulary’ to stop the game, prompted a letter defending the tradition from the chairman of the urban district council to the Times.Footnote 47 The survival of ‘football’ in Dorking, therefore, highlights the limits this option provided, and the cultural divisions between the old and new members of the town's middle class. Whereas the established elites continued to look to their own past and customs, the arrivistes looked towards ‘metropolitan’ areas to the north, where social norms were deemed respectable and modern, and the authorities had more control. Thus, in more urbanized English towns of the period, it was the local authorities that provided leisure facilities or ‘people's parks’ after 1870.Footnote 48 The provision of such facilities in Surrey, however, remained the preserve of landowning elites as varied as the earl of Onslow,Footnote 49 the crown prince of SiamFootnote 50 and Mrs Jennings of Chobham.Footnote 51
While the endowment of playing facilities by landowning women was relatively common, it was men like Onslow who dominated. It was his donation of 10 acres of land, and the ‘public-spirited gentlemen’ who provided the money for the ‘laying down of a first-class wicket’, that ensured the Guildford (Woodbridge Road) Sports Ground, which is still used by the SCCC today, was opened in 1894.Footnote 52 Although a hierarchy existed amongst the cricket clubs that utilized this and other ‘private’ facilities, with clubs such as Richmond, Chertsey and Wimbledon at one end of the social scale, and Chilworth Gunpowder and Haslemere Working Men at the other; for the most part, customary pre-industrial relations were maintained. The Westerham Herald reported in 1890 how the decision to draft in players from other locations was regretted by the chairman of the Oxstead CC.Footnote 53 The decision to play outside men was perceived by many, such as Edward Leigh of Cranleigh CC, to be ‘evil’, for it transgressed one of the touchstones of English cricket at this time: local identity.Footnote 54 So important was this local patriotism, ‘the Oxtead people [despite little active participation] did not want new blood, and said, “we don't want your London Cockneys down here”’.Footnote 55
Prior to 1914 therefore – a time before the widespread ‘suburbanization’ of rural villages such as Oxstead – local identities and the opinions of ordinary ‘villagers’ were regarded as important by many local elites. Almost every club, village or otherwise, benefited from the support of men and women of high social, religious, military or political status. A report of a concert held by the Ripley CC in 1896 noted:
Mr. C. H. Combe M.P. took five seats; the Hon. Mrs. Stewart Wortley took six seats. The Misses Freeland also took tickets. All the reserved seat tickets were disposed of. Amongst those present we noticed the Rev. Hamilton Vernon, Mr. and Mrs. Aubery Wilson, Mr. and Mrs. Evans and others of the elite of the village.Footnote 56
Cricket remained either socially mixed, or the upper and middle classes were happy to provide working men with the facilities and financial support to play without any obvious interventionist restrictions. With the exception of the banning of gambling at the Guildford Sports Ground,Footnote 57 there was no hint of the ‘moral reform’, ‘rational recreation’ or the attempted ‘social control’ (usually via strict membership rules and fines) witnessed in the industrial areas of the north of England.Footnote 58 Moreover, unlike the first-class game, where increasingly humiliating amateur and professional distinctions were introduced after 1870, any apparent deference was, ostensibly at least, predicated upon a player's role on the field of play rather than his social position off it. A captain was always to be obeyed, of course, but, in the case of Banstead CC, it was the club's groundsman, the ‘professional’ Eddie Gilbert, who captained the first XI in 1895.Footnote 59 The false egalitarianism regularly espoused at elite metropolitan cricket dinners after 1918 was not merely ‘lip service’ in pre-war Surrey.Footnote 60
If Max Weber's suggestion – that many social elites ‘maintained possession of all offices of local administration by taking them over without compensation in the interests of their own social power’ – is true, there is little evidence to suggest that this was the case in amateur cricket within Surrey prior to World War I.Footnote 61 Social relations, in what remained rural Surrey, were always cordial, if not always intimate.Footnote 62 The Guildford Working Men's Cricket Club was supported by local businessmen and councillors, with the mayor, after the earl of Onslow had given up the position, always acting as president. Other ‘town’ clubs were keen to establish their seniority by fielding genuinely representative teams or merging with other clubs. Farnham CC, having already merged with two other clubs, announced in 1914 that it was ‘perfectly willing to play [suitably talented] members of any local club without payment of subscription’.Footnote 63 In a similar vein, Dr Phipps of the Woking Village and Westfield CC hoped his club ‘would continue to amalgamate’ and, tellingly, ‘give a thrashing’ to their neighbouring opposition.Footnote 64
The introduction of league competition
Although the eradication of more violent pastimes, and a minor attempt to curtail gambling, suggests a certain level of ‘respectable’ middle-class control, local identities, being competitive, and defeating the neighbouring opposition, remained central to the game's cultural meaning around the turn of the twentieth century. The introduction of cups and leagues from the 1880s had only served to accentuate this competitiveness. As Phipps's statement implies, competition was seen as natural and positive by local elites and many within Surrey were responsible for establishing some of the earliest cricket competitions. Richard Webster – a significant landowner from Cranleigh who also happened to be attorney general for England and Wales, and president of the SCCC – is known to have established the ‘countywide’ Surrey Challenge Cup in 1880, and the more localized West Surrey Village Cup (WSVC) in 1896.Footnote 65 As witnessed in cricket associations throughout England, cups and leagues such as these were introduced to ‘promote wholesome healthy rivalry and. . .raise the standard of cricket’ in villages and towns alike. The WSVC's successful inauguration, the Rev. A.W. Leach of Shamley Green noted, ‘had done a great deal to excite interest in cricket and he was told by those who knew that it had done so, and had made the village teams much more anxious to win’.Footnote 66 The winners that first year were Webster's club Cranleigh, and the Woking Mail reported how ‘the newly won village cup. . .was brought in to great ovation’.Footnote 67
Contrary to the game's historiography, a swathe of competitions, and no doubt similar celebrations, were soon manifest throughout rural, suburban and urban areas of the south of England.Footnote 68 Some of the most noteworthy of these competitions were the Oxfordshire Cup in 1890, which still operates today as the Airey Cup; the City of London Championship in 1892; a London Daily Newspaper League founded in 1895, in which clubs representing The Times, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail participated; the Postal Cricket League of 1897; and the Reading and District, Hastings and District and East Grinstead Leagues of 1899. In 1901, the l'Anson Cricket League, which claims to be the oldest village league in the world, was established in Farnham (on the Surrey / Hampshire border). Many local cricketers, including Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle and (of course) a blacksmith called Andrew Karn, graced the competition, but, in a move suggestive of the ambition of village clubs, many left this league ‘to enter a higher class of cricket’.Footnote 69
Significantly, in terms of what was to occur after 1918, the well-connected members of the London and Suburban Cricket Association (LaSCA) also embraced the league format. While representative of the irrelevance of county boundaries, and old identities, in London's modern suburbs (the LaSCA had some 30 member clubs from Middlesex, Kent and Surrey in 1891), these middle-class clubs were happy to embrace modern competitive structures and commercial sponsorship. Having competed for The Sportsman Challenge Cup (a knock-out competition) during the 1880s, the LaSCA, following a proposal from Mr G. Ogilvie of the Polytechnic CC, adopted the ‘American [league] system’ at a special general meeting chaired by the secretary of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC).Footnote 70 Although the Polytechnic, under the watchful eye of the famous ‘muscular Christian’ J.E.K. Studd, was later to become a senior voice within the CCC's membership against competitive cricket (and any form of sponsorship), it is clear that suburban elites at this time had no problem with competition per se.
Such men included Edwin Ash, founder of the Rugby Football Union (a fiercely amateur organization which resisted leagues until the 1980s) and a Cricket Challenge Shield for the elementary schools of Richmond in 1892.Footnote 71 By the outbreak of World War I, the league and cup formats were being enjoyed by cricketers of all classes throughout urban, suburban and rural Surrey. This included the pupils of Dulwich College where form matches ‘worked on the league system [had also] proved a great success’.Footnote 72 The ‘Great Sports Craze’, as Lowerson describes it, was not confined to ‘a maturing industrial society and its cities alone’, and the competitive cultural norms, now closely associated with the (northern) working classes, were essentially, at one time, universal.Footnote 73
This is not to suggest that this pre-industrial culture had not been challenged by external forces prior to 1914, but competition had always remained central to the game. As early as 1851, following the publication of the Rev. James Pycroft's The Cricket Field, the game had become saddled with alien values designed to ‘elevate’ what had been a popular, exuberant, competitive and occasionally violent pastime into what the Old Reptonian amateur and Classicist, C.B. Fry, called ‘a cult and a philosophy inexplicable to the profanum vulgus [the vulgar rabble]. . .the merchant minded. . .and the unphysically intellectual’.Footnote 74 The game's meaning was being slowly reinvented. In this regard, the boisterous, or ‘vulgar’, behaviour of cricketers had been questioned by some ‘respectable’ quarters of Surrey society before the end of the nineteenth century. Mr Justice Bray, lord of the manor of Shere and chairman of Shere CC, had complained that ‘shrieking and shouting [at the ground] was not pleasant to the ears’, and he thought the committee should draw up a code of rules which would enable them to remove those who did not obey them.Footnote 75 Free-spirited exuberance such as this was likely to have been extremely common during the years prior to those where respectability was deemed essential in almost every social circumstance, and its early demise in London was recalled by the ex-Essex player Henry Preece in 1924:
Forty or fifty years ago in country cricket matches it was the custom when a man was out for one of the fielding side to throw the ball in the air as high as he could. The practice died out in London some thirty years ago and I remember our amazement and humour when Barham, who had just come from the country, picked up the ball and threw it skywards. The other men thought he had gone crazy, but I had seen the old country practice and remembered it.Footnote 76
Metropolitan trends, and attitudes similar to those expressed by Bray,Footnote 77 were to become more common as the middle classes migrated to rural areas. And yet, the gradual introduction of relatively reserved or respectable behaviour was supported as much by members of the working classes as it was by the middle classes.Footnote 78 This was not, therefore, the most significant change to cricket's culture in Surrey, for a more fundamental change relating to league and cup competition was still to occur. Although this change originated within, and would proliferate in tandem with, ‘suburban’ London, as the LaSCA's adoption of the league format would suggest, such a change was not based upon suburbanization and local relations alone. Indeed, it was to be social, political and economic factors emerging toward the end of the century from within and outside of sport, which led to the eventual rejection of competitive cricket by metropolitan and suburban elites. Arguably, their decision to establish, and then implement, a non-competitive form of ‘upper-class’ amateurism, went even further than the methods used to undermine those disliked by those running cricket nationally.
Competition is questioned
Respectability was always central to ‘gentlemanly’ status, but, for many new middle-class ‘gentlemen’, so was the respect of one's social inferiors. As commercialized sport and meritocratic competition had proven to be the ‘great social leveller’, it was necessary for increasingly insecure sporting gentlemen (almost universally amateurs – publicly at least) continuously to adapt the concept of amateurism and introduce discriminatory distinctions in order to preserve their social status in the face of popular professionalism.Footnote 79 In brief, the status security enjoyed by the mid-Victorian gentleman amateur was increasingly challenged. In 1913, The Field explained the state of affairs that had existed previously:
One great distinction, far sharper than it is to-day, cut across all sport, and, indeed every department of activity, the distinction, namely, between those who were gentlemen and those who were not. Nothing could alter or qualify this distinction of birth. If a gentleman ‘turned professional,’ as we say, he remained a gentleman. . .In fact, when a gentleman and not-gentleman met in athletic rivalry. . .the feeling that it was ‘man to man’ yielded to the knowledge that it was man against gentleman.Footnote 80
This feeling was increasingly undermined by public interest in the County Championship and Test matches, which led to a rise in status of professional cricketers such as George Lohmann of the SCCC.Footnote 81 The Field continued:
In the present stage of evolution games have been both democratized and universalized. As soon as the patronage of the public was assured it was inevitable that some games should be exploited on business principles. This result has had its good influences. There is one interesting effect of public patronage generally, which shows how public games react upon social life; that is, that not the professional only, but the amateur also, have become in a sense ‘the servants of the public’.Footnote 82
This unwelcome consequence was to be avoided at all costs, and separate travel arrangements, dressing rooms and entrances to the ground for amateurs and professionals were gradually introduced. These methods are regarded as the key tools for the control of professionalism by amateurs, but the MCC's assiduous refusal to reorganize fully the ECC and tailor the game to the needs of the paying public, as the leagues in the north did, must be considered a further defence. As Dobbs suggests, ‘to the country-house set, the very concept of a league had all the connotations of the northern masses swaying, cheering and booing at football matches’.Footnote 83 Professionalism, commercialism, vulgar working-class crowds and gambling were increasingly associated with competition. George Lacy, a well-known critic, argued in 1894 that the County Championship was ‘reducing cricket to the level of mere popular show’ and suggested that undesirable spectators might be eradicated by ‘raising the entrance money to at least a shilling’, while others proposed ‘a new form of county championship, confined solely to amateur players’.Footnote 84 The meritocratic developments associated with the league system had not been lost on the more reactionary cricket elites with influence beyond the ‘first-class’ game either, and they also went on the offensive.
One of the earliest salvos in non-first-class cricket's cultural war emanated from the Rev. R.S. Holmes in 1894. Holmes, a regular columnist in Cricket, identified how league competition in his native Yorkshire had stirred up a good deal of local interest and passion. Unlike the positive rivalries engendered by the WSVC, this purportedly different ‘northern’ competitiveness was to be decried. Essentially repeating the charges laid at the foot of northern football supporters the previous year by G.H. Shepherd,Footnote 85 Holmes wrote that ‘rowdyism. . .and [the] outcry about umpires. . .all arises from this excessive competition; and you may rest assured this is fed by gambling’.Footnote 86 As with the denouncement of ‘rowdy’ or exuberant behaviour, it was individual amateurs such as Fry, and metropolitan commentators such as Lacy or Holmes, who first advocated anti-league views.
The establishment of the Club Cricketers’ Charity Fund (CCCF) in 1910 provides evidence of the distinctly metropolitan origins of what were, even for the time, extreme opinions relating to professionalism, commercialism and paying spectators. In a pseudo-editorial in the CCCF's Official Handbook of 1913 titled ‘Curse of the Championship’, H.V. Dorey let loose a tirade against competitive cricket, and the ‘blighting and killing effect of the tournament, league, or championship system’.Footnote 87 He bemoaned the fact that although county cricket was no longer the ‘game of the village green’, cricket remained ‘the sport for the amateur, or the man who played for the love of the most glorious game the world has ever seen’. But there was a dark cloud obscuring this romantic view: the professional who benefited from popular competitions. Dorey continued: ‘in these days we have the spectacle of Notts [Nottinghamshire], Yorkshire and Surrey. . .sending an eleven into the field wholly composed of professionals. This is a result entirely due to the championship system’. Dorey regarded the rise of (commercialized) competition, and its bedfellows, the professional and the paying customer, as the death knell of cricket. The future, he argued, should the county game remain unchecked, would be cricket as a Saturday game operating like the ‘Football League, with its motley teams of paid players and all its attendant evils’.Footnote 88
Little could be done within first-class cricket where the professionals and public interest were, despite such prejudices, vitally important. But in club cricket where the game was not ‘trapped by its own popularity’ these ideas could be implemented.Footnote 89 Dorey's opinions were given formal administrative weight after 1915 following the CCCF's reformation as the London Club Cricket Conference (LCCC). Established by a veritable ‘Who's Who’ of the international cricket world, these men, almost all of whom were public school educated, passed a set of rules that would, in tandem with the suburbanization process, ‘enforce’ their class-based, anti-competitive, ideology throughout the south-east of England.Footnote 90 The most significant of these rules was ‘Conditions of Membership’:
5. It shall be an indispensable condition that this London Club Cricket Conference shall neither recognise, approve of, nor promote any Cup or League system, and no club connected with a Cup or League competition, or playing a man as a professional, except the groundsman, shall be qualified to attend any meeting of the Conference. Any club subsequently joining a Cup or League competition, or playing a professional other than a groundsman, shall, ipso facto, cease to become a member of the Conference.Footnote 91
In insisting that matches were essentially non-competitive, non-commercial, non-professional and unrewarded, the Conference had developed an extreme form of ‘upper-class’ amateurism – even Olympians were able to compete for medals. There was, of course, a distinct ideological basis for such decisions and, in keeping with the social fears that motivated them, the Conference was consciously populated in its early years by elite London clubs alone.Footnote 92 The Conference's high social status, which afforded it a good press (many committee members, like Dorey, were well-known cricket writers), and the inter-war spread of its values coincided with increased levels of middle-class migration to Surrey and the Home Counties. These allied factors notwithstanding, they were not sufficient to overturn the long-held social and cultural values discussed previously. It was to be much broader political and economic factors that would prove influential in middle-class clubs, beyond London, deciding to follow the Conference's example. A decision that would ultimately lead to the demise of the game's traditional culture promoted by earlier generations of local elites such as Webster. Against such a background, the somewhat reactionary values of Surrey's new middle-class residents were to become broadly universal, for many, within both the established and migrant middle classes, began to act against their poorer neighbours in their own self-interest.
Class relations deteriorate, 1918–39
The political, economic and social issues which led to the class conflict of the inter-war period had antecedents which pre-dated the end of World War I. The rise of the Independent Labour Party and high levels of trade union membership, which were followed by record levels of strikes during the hostilities, put the social and political elites on guard. Events overseas, most notably the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, further heightened fears of working-class hordes among the upper reaches of English society. The expansion of the franchise, the first Labour government and the increasing influence of trade unionism at home only served to confirm that such fears were genuine.Footnote 93
An increasingly distant relationship between the classes, both on and off cricket fields, arose in the decades following World War I.Footnote 94 The inter-war period was, of course, marked by an economic depression and high levels of unemployment nationally, and this led to an extended period of social unrest, which included six national hunger marches, the General Strike and the Jarrow Crusade.Footnote 95 Although the greatest hardships in England were concentrated amongst the working classes of the industrial north – where the heavy industries of mining, steel and shipbuilding dominated – the towns and villages of Surrey were also affected. In Dorking, the first six matches of Dorking CC's 1926 season were cancelled due to the General Strike, and six years later the local economy was still perilous as ‘five applicants turned up for the post of groundsman – not exactly a lucrative position in those days’.Footnote 96 Allied to this financial insecurity, the working classes were increasingly shunned by their wealthier neighbours. Whereas William Drowley, chairman of Horsell CC and master builder of numerous middle-class homes in and around Woking, stated in 1896 that he ‘was looking forward to the time when workmen will not have to work so many hours. . .and [become] more independent as men who rejoiced in being alive’, middle-class attitudes towards working men hardened after 1918.Footnote 97 The breakdown of previously cordial relations following the war was influenced by the upper and middle classes’ realization that ‘the strategy of restricting working-class demands upon society to the margins had. . .failed’.Footnote 98 The social and political elites increasingly feared a working class whom they regarded as a central problem. But, although their fears of Bolshevism far outweighed any real threat, it is clear that they affected social and sporting relations.
Despite the carefully nurtured apolitical image of English sport, somewhat hysterical references to ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘collectivist philosophies’, unfairly associated with the professional ranks and the northern counties in particular, were a recurring motif among cricket administrators and journalists following the war. Lord Harris and P.F. Warner used ‘Bolshevism’ to decry any hint of industrial action by professionals, while Neville Cardus wrote in 1922 that ‘Too many Lancashire, Nottinghamshire, and Yorkshire elevens have overdone the collectivist philosophy, turning out just “utility” teams, mechanically efficient.’Footnote 99
This highly politicized defence of their own power, which was reinforced by the centrality of amateurism to first-class cricket's cultural meaning, began to permeate all levels of cricket in the south. That the north had remained culturally consistent since the introduction of cups and leagues meant that such notions, and the undesirable habits of (northern) urban life, were still being used to attack professional sport (and large working-class crowds), even after World War II: a speech by General Sir Walter Kirke to the Whitley Village British Legion games league in 1949 linked ‘Communist agitators’ to urban life in towns and cities, where ‘the majority of people seemed to spend their time watching professionals’.Footnote 100 Following World War I, such fears saw many in positions of influence, who had previously advocated cross-class unity, talking of self-preservation. The value of the volunteer movement and a ‘spirit of self-sacrifice’ for the common good had been expressed in a speech by a Dr Page in Guildford during 1915.Footnote 101 By 1921, however – at which point 21.5 per cent of the population of Surrey were deemed to be white-collar workersFootnote 102 – the Guildford branch of the Middle Classes Union heard Page state a very different case. In light of the post-war changes, Page proposed that ‘instead of being pugnacious, the Middle Classes Union only desired to use that instinct of self-protection and self-preservation, which animated every creature’. The middle classes, he contentiously argued, felt that
the burden laid on them was disproportionately heavy to that laid on other classes and that, with incomes reduced by taxation, and by the depreciation of money, they were in a position which almost threatened them with extinction. . .Labour, during the years of the war, had never received or extracted a higher price for every service which it rendered.Footnote 103
Such an attitude towards ‘labour’ could not have been more different to those previously expressed by the middle-class sponsors of the Guildford Working Men's CC: ‘What’, claimed honorary member and future Mayor J. Mason in 1904, ‘can be more desirable than to be associated with a body of men who reckon amongst their number the King, the Prime Minister and the Mayor of Guildford – working men assuredly’.Footnote 104 Despite the absence of large working-class communities based around single industries, organizations such as the Middle Class Union demonstrated how many among the middle classes in London, and now Surrey, were not prepared to ‘play a subordinate role in the new order’ in either political or cultural terms.Footnote 105 Whereas senior cricket clubs had been happy to meet working-class clubs in competition, support their efforts, or even merge with them prior to 1914, prejudicial attitudes were increasingly prevalent among the middle classes in county towns and villages and upon their cricket fields.
Despite Guildford's first suburb (developed from 1862) being a highly successful mix of villas and artisan dwellings, house building in the early twentieth century predominantly consisted of middle-class developments similar to the Abbotswood Estate (from 1912).Footnote 106 Byfleet (five miles from Woking), which was described as ‘a resort for business people’ in 1896, was no different.Footnote 107 The ‘town’, which still had fewer than 2,000 residents by 1901, was one of many small ‘towns’ or ‘villages’ in Surrey that attracted very wealthy industrialists – including Charles Butler Jnr, of the Lambert and Butler Tobacco Company – during the late nineteenth century,Footnote 108 and the Byfleet CC was one of many which embodied the increasing social retrenchment of the middle classes. Although the club had allowed the ‘junior’ Byfleet Village CC to use their ground while their own was being made ready in 1919, they rejected the idea of a fixture against them in 1923,Footnote 109 for they had already (by 1921) developed a very exclusive list of fixtures against the likes of the MCC, the Stock Exchange, Yellowhammers and Butterflies; a team exclusively selected from Eton, Charterhouse, Harrow, Westminster and Winchester old boys.Footnote 110
In Ewhurst, an isolated village located 10 miles from Guildford in the Surrey hills, residential construction appears to have been dominated (after 1870) by very large houses, such as ‘Woolpits’, which was designed by Sir Ernest George for Sir Henry Doulton in 1884. By 1921, in order to ‘restore the Ewhurst Cricket Club to its former famous position amongst the clubs of the county’, the club, like Byfleet CC, sought fixtures with well-known metropolitan clubs rather than their neighbours. In order to achieve this ambition, they were compelled to adopt the rules of the Conference and reject league competition.Footnote 111 Ewhurst had competed in the Hurtwood League – one of a small number of leagues in west Surrey during the 1920s – with Peaslake, Holmbury St Mary, Oakwood Hill, Forest Green and Cranleigh Working Men, but the committee decided to withdraw from the league in 1928. Having refused to share their ground with the Ewhurst Pals Club in 1921, a special general meeting of the club decided that ‘friendly fixtures were more sporting than any league match’.Footnote 112 Although Ewhurst informed the League's honorary secretary that they desired to ‘play friendly games with the [league's] clubs as heretofore’, their withdrawal immediately severed ties with a number of local teams. The members’ apparent desire to mix with a better ‘class’ of opposition resulted in the previous year's league fixture against Cranleigh Working Men being replaced by a friendly match with Royal Grammar School old-boy club, Old Guildfordians.Footnote 113
This change in attitude, towards matches with teams of local working men and the prioritizing of friendly matches with elite ‘metropolitan’ clubs over meaningful competitive leagues, also occurred in neighbouring Cranleigh where increasing numbers of migrants began to price out the indigenous workers. A swathe of villas had been built during the 1890s to cater for the burgeoning middle-class population attracted to the area by not only the fresh air, but also the railway station and public school, both of which had opened in 1865. The popularity of the village among middle-class migrants, and World War I hindering, or stopping entirely, the building of cottages for local workers in Cranleigh and beyond, had left the village with little social housing.Footnote 114 By 1926, 28 applications were received by Hambledon rural council for the village's one vacant council house.
This issue, it was argued, was ‘largely due to the acquisition by strangers of cottages formerly occupied by local workers’, and a similar situation appears to have existed in Woking, where 600 applicants were waiting for council housing in 1927.Footnote 115 Migration, and the long-standing failure to build sufficient housing for local working families throughout Surrey, had enabled the middle classes finally to achieve a critical mass. Consequently, they were now able to dominate even the remotest parts of west and east Surrey, in cultural terms that their metropolitan counterparts would recognize. This included cricket and, reflecting the broader deterioration in class relations, the game was transformed not only in terms of its social configuration, but also its cultural form and meaning.
Conclusion
Although of interest to some, a superficial examination of cultural change within amateur cricket in Surrey is not, strictly speaking, important in its own right. That certain cricket clubs in Surrey came to reject what had essentially been a universal culture of competitiveness, and the inclusive community identities at its heart, only achieves historical significance when the reasons for this change, the specific form it took and how it was achieved are fully contextualized and applied to broader historical issues such as suburbanization. This is something sport historians have failed to do in the past, but their counterparts interested in urban, or suburban, history have been similarly negligent of the contextual opportunities of sport. It is clear from this case-study that sport may provide new insight to the problematic conception of suburbanization and the complexities of suburban life. Although unable to deliver all the answers – indeed this article has further highlighted the polymorphous nature of suburbs – this examination has provided an enhanced awareness into the diverse origins of one form of middle-class ‘suburban’ culture; notions of ‘embeddedness’ and how social and cultural hegemony may have been established; how peripheral suburban communities were influenced by, and interacted with, the urban core; and the importance of utilizing longer time periods in assessing social and cultural change.
Although, at first glance, this study highlights a relatively linear process, the social, political and cultural origins of a new, elitist, sporting culture, and its geographical spread throughout Surrey, has illustrated a number of factors relevant to any future study of the suburbanization process. Although this cultural transformation originated within a relatively small group of highly influential metropolitan elites, the adoption and spread of their values took a long time and relied upon factors that, very often, had little or nothing to do with the game itself. And yet, the choice of cricket has been crucial in rebuffing the stereotypically ‘private’ image of suburban sport and suburbia more broadly.
Unlike planned suburbs where the new residents were able to develop an identifiable ‘suburban’ way of life unhindered by pre-existing social structures or culture, Surrey's indigenous elites, and their poorer neighbours, were able to resist, or simply ignore, most middle-class challenges to traditional social and cultural relationships prior to 1914. Despite co-ordinated campaigning, and even the occasional victory, it was only after the significant changes brought about by the Local Government Act of 1888 that this group of ‘outsiders’ were able to effect any noteworthy change. As the membership of the LaSCA suggests, traditional county boundaries – even before the changes of 1889 – had little relevance to suburbanites. It was, therefore, the centralization of administrative power, following the establishment of the Surrey County Council that proved most significant. Not only did this increase metropolitan influence upon the county as a whole, it also provided middle-class groups with the opportunity to by-pass indigenous, and more traditional, elites in order to effect social and cultural change.
This rather indirect approach was less necessary following World War I, as old and new members of the social and political elite appear to have united – even in areas where the working classes were numbered in hundreds, rather than tens of thousands – over their shared fear of an apparently recalcitrant working class. The ascension of these middle-class outsiders into an established, and ultimately dominant, group was thus all but assured. However, it did not happen overnight, nor was it uncontested. It was not until the late 1930s – following decades of middle-class migration and social and cultural conflict – that the non-competitive ‘friendly’ cricket culture, so synonymous with the south of England until the 1970s, became broadly universal. The timescale required for this transition suggests, therefore, that the cultural dominance of the middle classes, so fundamental to Surrey's contemporary suburban identity, was established decades later than has been previously suggested, or that such claims represented a qualitatively different suburban form.Footnote 116
Although metropolitan influence had increased after 1889, ‘old’ Surrey, as represented by the traditional competitive culture and strong community identities of the pre-war period, only gave way to a modern ‘suburban’ Surrey after 1918. As the inter-war culture of cricket suggests, community relations were, very often consciously, dismantled by dominant middle-class groups in the name of ‘good sport’ and ‘sociability’. This was reminiscent of the ‘private’ culture observed within golf or tennis clubs, and yet, although the game fractured along fault lines of class and culture, cricket was more ‘exclusive’ than private. While the local working classes played amongst themselves (often within obscure and unreported leagues), the middle-class clubs coveted visits from the elite metropolitan clubs. Regional or local rivalries did not strictly disappear, but ‘class’ or ‘education’, rather than ‘place’ or ‘community’, became the basis for such rivalries. In the absence of any objective competition through which to demonstrate a club's seniority, certain cricket clubs sought to attain status by inviting elite metropolitan or suburban clubs to them, while offering a taste of the game's romanticized rural past in return. Surrey had become, culturally, if not strictly in environmental and geographical terms, a part of London.
