Fraser-Sampson - Cricket at the Crossroads: Class, Colour and Controversy from 1967 to 1977

I n 1967 British society was outwardly conventional and conservative. Those attending cricket, or even football matches, did so in a jacket and tie, and gave up their seats on trains and buses on the way home. Yet underneath this hard, polite exterior lay something altogether darker an implicit belief that one person could be naturally inferior to another (and therefore treated as such) simply on grounds of class, colour, or ethnic background.

For those who were subjected to such a belief, or who took exception to it on grounds of principle, it could easily lead to anger, an anger which would at various times during this story spill out into the open. On two occasions in particular, this anger would swirl around the MCC in its cricketing bastion at Lords. On each occasion they would ignore it to secure their short-term objectives, but on each occasion, by ignoring it, emerge with their reputation badly dented.

There was also uncertainty born of frustration and confusion. The old ways were being swept away, to the consternation and dismay of some, and the exultation of others. Yet, whichever side of the fence you were on, nobody seemed to know quite what was going to replace them.

There was anger and despair born of the bitter social divisions which had always plagued Britain, perhaps uniquely so. Not for nothing did foreign competitors refer mockingly to the constant labour unrest that paralysed the UKs factories as the British disease. Between 1967 and 1977 over 60 million working days were lost to strikes.

These divisions between north and south, working class and middle class, them and us had always been explicit within the game of cricket, with cricketers being classified officially as either gentlemen (amateurs) or players (professionals), and both treated and described differently. The distinction was formally abolished after 1962 and the MCC tour of Australia that winter, managed by no less a personage than His Grace the Duke of Norfolk, was the last to take place under the old system, with the players being accorded different treatment according to whether they were amateurs or professionals, even down to how their names were recorded and to which events they were invited.

There was anger born of a growing recognition that successive governments had badly mismanaged the economy, and yet it was the people who were going to have to pay the bill. This period would see the highest rates of income tax in history, a devaluation of the pound, Britain going bust and having to ask for an IMF bail-out, and retail prices trebling, leaving professional cricketers, already poorly paid in 1967 and without a trade union to argue their cause, dramatically worse off in real terms.

In due course, a sea-change in economic management would come from a grocers daughter from Grantham, and a sea-change in the fortunes of professional cricketers would come from the grandson of a penniless horse racing punter from Tasmania.

Yet in the meantime, it was in the game of cricket that many of these conflicts and tensions would play themselves out. Of course individual character and personality would play their part, as would both destiny and chance, but underpinning much of what would happen on and off the cricket pitch during the ensuing decade was a strong, ongoing and increasingly resented sense of them and us. During the ten years from 1967 onwards the cricket world would be shaken to the core as the consequences of this division played themselves out. By 1977 both British society and the sport itself would look quite different.