Talking of books
Historians at play
Benny Green
The anomalies of Edwardianism continue to exercise the minds of an age which is more extravagant only in its method of dealing out death and destruction. As the bulk of Edwardian social life has generally been ignored by historians too preoccupied with the demanding task of locating Mr Balfour's morality, Lord Northcliffe's conscience and Sir Edward Grey's brain to bother very much about the mechanics of grandfather's life-style, it follows that vast tracts of the Edwardian landscape still remain unsurveyed, and of all these tracts, none has been more studiously ignored than that little dell behind the hill, Spectator sport. Brian Dobbs has made the interesting discovery that in Edwardian sport the same inequalities existed between the classes as obtained in politics, diet, education, housing, in fact life generally. A truism perhaps, but one which has never really been touched on, except perhaps by G. M. Trevelyan, who has suggested that, "if the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their
peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt," and by R. K. Ensor, who has quite correctly written that the development of organised games ranks "among England's leading contributions to world-culture." It therefore gives me some pleasure to say that Dobbs's Edwardians at Play (Pelham £4.00) is a fascinating and indispensable book, for every man and women who has ever tried to kick a half-volley or address a golf-ball. And having praised Edwardians at Play in such fulsome terms, I can now feel free to adopt familiar Shavian tactics and pitch into its shortcomings with a clear conscience.
There are flaws in Dobbs' reasoning, gaps in his chains of deductive reasoning which suggest that the themes of the book have not quite been thought through, and I can illustrate wnat I mean by offering four particularly glaring examples. On the question of Hypocrisy and the Cash Nexus, an area where the Edwardians show up so badly as to become figures of irresistible fun to our own impoverished age, Dobbs rightly draws attention to Lord Hawke's idiotic indiscretion at a cricket dinner. "Please God no professional shall ever captain England." In another paragraph he notes the indisputable fact that Dr W. G. Grace, captain of the Gentlemen on so many occasions, made large sums of money from the game. What Dobbs should then have done was to link the two facts, and to point out to the gormless shade of Lord Hawke that when he so piously prayed that no professional should ever captain England, a professional already had, and his name was W. G. Grace. Or to put it another way, what was wrong with Hawke was not his lack of decency but his lack of perception.
In another section, Mr Dobbs looks around with some enthusiasm for sticks with which to beat the late Lord Harris, the Kent cricketer who rose, if that is the right word, to the control of MCC finances. Later we hear of the feeble shilly-shalling over racial discrimination when Ranjitsinhji encountered prejudices delaying his entry into varsity and later international cricket. But what we don't get is the link between the first and the second, which is a shame because it Makes such a good joke. It was Lord Harris who kept Ranjitsinhji out of the England side in 1896 on the grounds that Ranji had been born in India. Lord Harris, already an ex-captain of England, was, by the way, born in the West Indies.
Then there is the Olympic Games chapter, in which we are told that the 1896 revived Games sank into a swamp of chauvinism from which it has never since emerged and that this was due to the septic national egos of the period. But I am afraid that national egos have always been septic. Pericles and company would have laughed like a drain at the idea that the original Games were an international affair. On the contrary, the original Games worked because they were confined to one culture, one family, one social group, to men who worshipped the same gods.
Finally Mr Dobbs is intrepid enough to attack Sir Neville Cardus for painting a deceptively roseate picture of Edwardian sport. For my own part, I would never attack a writer as felicitous as Cardus if my own style included such gems as "wholly partial" and "Dame Football, a jealous goddess, has been ever thus in her frowns and smiles." Well, it has been ever thus that when writing a defence of the under-privileged, it is bad practice to nominate as one of the villains of the p:ece as authentic a son of the streets as Cardus, who knows more about the privations of Edwardian working-class life than Mr Dobbs put together, as the saying goes. The most important issue of all in any book about the Edwardians is how far the working classes were able to extract any happiness from their route to and from the tradesman's entrance. I am afraid that Mr Dobbs has ducked it. But read his book all the same, for he has not ducked much else.
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