ABSTRACT
Discourses on cricket between the wars emphasised that it expressed Christian morality. Taking an interest in cricket, but particularly playing cricket, were represented as almost a form of religious observance. Some described cricket in language usually reserved for religious occasions and institutions. The sports journalist Bernard Darwin, for example, in 1940 wrote that a big match at Lord's would impress spectators 'particularly with the solemn rite or ceremony'.1 In 1931 'Second Slip' in The Cricketer claimed that The Church militant has always been an upholder of the game.'2 Cricket and the churches were considered to be mutually supportive. R.L. Hodgson, whose regular column in The Cricketer was headed 'A Country Vicar', wrote in 1922 that 'the cricket field is quite an appropriate place for the parson, and the parson not only an appropriate, but a welcome, figure in the foreground'.3 In 1937 the Worcestershire and England fast bowler Fred Root, or perhaps his ghost writer, felt it necessary to claim in his autobiography that 'the sporting parson is the very centre of our village cricket'.4 Cricket was also seen to represent a distinctively English expression of Christian morality. Dean Inge, the Anglican cleric, wrote that 'I still maintain that cricket is probably the best game yet devised by the wit of man, and, as Milton says, when Providence has a great idea, he reveals it first to his Englishmen'.5 Because cricket was so widely assumed to reflect Christian teachings, appraisals of the social significance of organised religion in England between the wars have to consider the role of churches within cricket.
