Five very different boys in England in 1937: the occasion for the get together was the annual cricket match between the elite boarding schools Eton and Harrow.
Image: Getty
The photo, taken around a cricket match in 1937, is an icon of criticism of the British class system, which has now been widely publicized again. But the truth of the motive is different from what was thought for a long time.
Cricket has always been romanticized as the epitome of those qualities that English public schools try to instill in their pupils through sport, in order to send them out into the world as ambassadors of the ideal of fair play. Of course, sport is also about winning, but it is part of the English self-image that the manners in a competition should be just as important as victory. George Orwell saw cricket as an expression of a distinctive English trait: the “tendency to value ‘form’ or ‘style’ above success”. This view is difficult to maintain today. Cricket, as traditionalists love, with its tests of endurance and skill lasting up to five days, requires a luxury of time that our accelerated society neither can nor wants to afford. For many decades, enthusiasts of the game’s leisurely rites have been at odds with sports promoters wanting to expand cricket’s audience and generate higher returns.
As early as the Victorian era, the loss of old values due to increasing greed for profit was lamented. At the beginning of the twentieth century, EV Lucas grumbled that cricket had become a more or less mechanical business rather than an occasional pastime of enthusiasm and conviviality. In the eyes of cricket traditionalists, the year 1963, which the poet Philip Larkin proclaimed as the birth year of intercourse and thus an annus mirabilis, is an annus horribilis that opened the floodgates to commercialization. In that year, the rules-making Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), founded in 1787, not only abolished amateur status, dating back to the days when gentry ‘gentlemen’ used to play against paid working-class ‘players’. Added to this was the introduction of the first of several shortened game formats, the aim of which was and is to increase the entertainment value of the sport, not least with a view to lucrative television broadcasts, and to adapt cricket to the needs of modern life.
#truth #photo #closer #boys