As far as I know there wasn't a picket line during the Notts cricket strike of 1881, or even a menacing slip cordon. But it was a tough, traditional labour dispute for all its unfamiliar features, and one which ended in a very familiar way - with the workers losing the battle, but eventually winning the war.
It’s generally known that cricket was the western world’s first major organised, codified team sport, but it’s sometimes forgotten that it was also the first professional team sport. While posher games like soccer and rugby struggled to remain amateur, cricket, as it grew from its origins as a peasant pastime, was employing full-timers at least as far back as the 1720s.
The reasons for this do not exactly sing to the glory of the greatest game. High-level organised cricket matches (as opposed to the traditional game on the village green) existed for two main purposes: so that one rich patron could gain prestige when his team beat that of another rich patron – and above all else, so that well-to-do young rakes could gamble on the outcome.
In its early years, football was played pretty much “in-house” – posh boys played against other posh boys – and they kept it that way for as long as they could. Cricket, by contrast, was a sport in which the classes mingled. As such, it was always a potential site of class conflict.
The Gentlemen vs Players fixture was one of the longest-running series in cricket history, lasting from 1806 to (incredibly) 1962. The gentlemen were, theoretically, upper and middle-class amateurs who played for the love of the game, as opposed to the filthy proletarian pros who only turned out for cash. In practice, the supposed amateurs were often paid more in expenses than the professionals were in wages.
Unsurprisingly, the Players won a lot more matches than the Gentlemen. Various attempts to correct this undesirable record were made over the years, not least because a predictable result made for poor betting. Frequently, the Gentlemen were allowed more men in their team than the Players (18 against 11, for instance, in the 1836 game).
But the most laughable of all the measures introduced to make the fixture more competitive was what became known as the Barn Door Match of 1837, in which the Gentlemen were given an extra stump to aim at, and all four stumps were much bigger than the three which the Gents defended.
The Players won by an innings.
The strike by seven professionals at Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club began on June 2nd 1881, in a match at Old Trafford. By this time county cricket was the main source of employment for the pros, and it was not a happy workplace. Professionals had to be available for every game, but would only be paid if they were picked for the team. They were banned from arranging their own matches on days when no county games were taking place. The strikers demanded season-long contracts, to make their employment less precarious. They also wanted a guaranteed benefit match at the end of ten years service.
One of the leaders of the rebels was Alfred Shaw, famous as the first man to bowl a ball in Test cricket, and one of the finest bowlers of his time. As a ten-year-old he had been sacked from his first job, that of human scarecrow on a farm, for playing cricket when he should have been scaring crows. His tendency to get above himself was known to his employers long before the 1881 dispute; in 1873 he’d refused a coveted place on a tour of Australia when he discovered that his pay would be just 10% of the “expenses” paid to the amateur, WG Grace, and that the pros would travel second class while the gentlemen went First.
Nottingham’s management stood firm against the strike, and it ended in defeat. The next great cricket strike took place in 1896, just days before the final and deciding Test Match in a thrilling series between England and Australia.
Over the previous couple of decades, top level cricket had become enormously popular, at home and abroad, and consequently the game was enormously profitable. Five England players wrote to the cricket authorities demanding that the pros should get their fair share of this bonanza. In response, they were dropped from the England team.
So important was the fixture that the strike become something approaching a national crisis. Newspapers accused the strikers of behaving unpatriotically, and insisted that the reports of the gentlemen amateurs raking in pots of money were lies, exaggerations and left-wing propaganda. It was made clear to the five that if they went through with their strike, their professional careers would be over. Three returned to work, signing letters of apology.
This strike, too, was lost – but the key demands of the strikers, that professional match fees for Tests should be increased to £20 per game and that amateur expenses should be regulated, were quietly agreed shortly afterwards, as a direct result of the rebellion.
Cricket in this country finally abandoned the distinction between amateur and professional players in 1962; the Football Association took until 1974 to follow suit, while the Rugby Football Union only legalised professional payments in 1995.
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Sources:
Start of play by David Underdown (Allen Lane, 2000)
WG’s birthday party by David Kynaston (Bloomsbury, 1990)
https://think-left.org/2012/12/29/ungentlemenly-conduct-the-1881-nottinghamshire-cricket-strike/
http://ourhistory-hayes.blogspot.com/2011/12/george-lohmann-surrey-england-and.html
Morning Star, 20 August 2009
Morning Star, 30 June 2011