ABSTRACT
The extensive interest in cricket was a major reason why cricket was regarded as a totem of Englishness between the wars. The numbers playing cricket were higher than those playing any other team sport except association football and in some localities more played cricket than football. Far more paid to watch association football than cricket, but it is likely that the numbers of cricket spectators compared favourably with other team sports and except for test matches were higher than those who watch cricket in the 1990s. Those who played cricket were probably drawn from a wider spectrum of society than any other team sport in England. Whilst much more research needs to be undertaken into the social composition of the following for sports in the 1920s and 1930s, impressionistic evidence suggests that the social ambience of association football and rugby league was very largely working-class, whereas rugby union in most of England was a sport of the better-off. Cricket was as much a sport of the upper and middle classes as, say, croquet, real tennis or golf, but unlike them, it was also a sport with an extensive working-class following.
