A Sticky Wicket

Team Downton

 

 

Cricket, or the game that takes forever, shall always be a mystery to Americans.  P.G. Wodehouse hit upon this in his novel Picadilly Jim when the butler endeavors to explain it to an American.  Mr. Crocker bluntly asks, "Doesn't anything ever happen at cricket?" to which his trusty butler smiles and takes on the meaning of sticky wicket (which basically means the turf is wet, which is great for American football and a disaster for the British cricket).  No one can blame Branson for not wanting to learn how to play, as there are more rules than in a basic jurisdiction.

Here are a few basics associated with cricket, just so you can sound highly knowledgeable when watching cricket on the BBC.  Sports dress is called one's kit, so getting changed for cricket would be referred to as getting kitted out.  Please do not use the term pants when you are looking at their uniforms.  Pants only works in America, it refers to underwear in England.  Try the term trousers. Cricket team players wear white, referred to as whites (imagine that), so it is easier to see the red cricket ball as it is being bowled. Cricket Clubs have their own sweaters, with coordinating piping colors to match their club. Cricket helmets are highly encouraged, as it is not a pretty sight to see someone bludgeoned by a cricket ball.

With the Chauffeur?

I looked it up.  As scandalous as the potential union of Lady Sybil with the chauffeur, Mr. Branson, would be, it was possible.  Once in a while, high-born ladies married their gentlemen servants, after all, one would know them better than an upper class man who one met at tea, was proposed to at dinner and married the next season.  However, it goes without saying that if one did marry down in rank, it provided great amounts of gossip.  If a lady married outside of her class, then she joined him, not the other way around.  Lady Henrietta Wentworth had plans to marry her footman, John William Sturgeon in 1764.  She planned to become simply Mrs. Sturgeon, give up her fancy clothes and move with him to Ireland to be with his family.  Sound familiar, non? 

The reality though was as Lady Mary expresses to Lady Sybil, "Oh darling, darling, don't be such a baby.  This isn't fairyland.  What did you think? You'd marry the chauffeur and we'd all come to tea?". Sybil would have to be prepared to give up everything: all money, family, status, everything she has and knows to marry a man.  Can you blame her for stalling in her decision?

Thanks to E. S. Turner for publishing What the Butler Saw: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of the Servant Problem by Penguin Books, 1962, and for helping me expand my knowledge of this area.