Chapter 2 “The Grand Old Game” The Complex History of Cricket in Cape Breton, 1863 to 1914

John G. Reid

Arichat, Bridgeport, Dominion, Florence, Glace Bay, Inverness, New Aberdeen, New Waterford, North Sydney, Port Hawkesbury, Sydney, Sydney Mines, Whitney Pier—some of these places are large, some small, some are in effect portions of larger communities. But what they all have in common is that they are places in Cape Breton where cricket was played as an active sport at some point—and in most cases for an extended period—during the years going up to 1914. The list is undoubtedly incomplete because a lack of documentation is one of the major obstacles to any comprehensive portrayal of the complex history of Cape Breton cricket, and yet it gives some sense of the geographical reach of the sport. The names of the clubs, similarly, give an impression of the social diversity involved. Some of the clubs simply bore the name of a city, town, or village—the Sydney Cricket Club, the Arichat Cricket Club, the Bridgeport Cricket Club, and so on—but others were more descriptive. In Sydney, not only did clubs bear titles such as the Phoenix Club, the Ramblers, the Micmacs,1 the Rustics, and the Undefeatables, but they also had such counterparts elsewhere as the Renwick Club of Glace Bay and the Ramblers of North Sydney. At least six junior clubs existed at various times in Sydney alone, and among them the League of the Cross Juniors exemplified the way in which Cape Breton cricket—unlike the situation in some parts of mainland Nova Scotia—was far from being an overwhelmingly Protestant sport.

Workplace clubs were also conspicuous, examples being the Dominion Iron and Steel Club (along with the Dominion Iron and Steel Juniors), the Steel Workers Cricket Club, the Open Hearth Cricket Club, Dominion #1 Colliery, Dominion #2 Colliery, and the Intercolonial Railway Club. Not quite in the same category was the Whitney Pier Cricket Club, which of course bore the name of its neighbourhood in Sydney rather than that of a place of work, but nevertheless its membership consisted largely of steelworkers of African descent and more immediately of Caribbean origin. The Sydney Firemen’s Club, meanwhile, was also not strictly speaking a workplace team, since it represented a volunteer fire department, but it too had its place in the configuration of Cape Breton’s earliest codified team sport (with the possible exception of curling) and in the spectrum of social diversity that characterized it so strikingly. The diversity, it must be said, does not seem to have extended to gender. Cricket was an overwhelmingly male sport, and—unlike in mainland Nova Scotian locations such as Truro or Weymouth, where women’s teams can be documented—in Cape Breton, there appears to be no surviving evidence of even limited forms of women’s participation. Otherwise, however, this was a sport that to a significant degree crossed—though of course it could not and did not fully transcend—the boundaries of social class, race, ethnicity, and religion.

But interesting as all this may be, why does it really matter? Reconstructing the history of cricket in Cape Breton and in other parts of what became Atlantic Canada—or Canada more widely—has the addictive fascination of bringing to light a story that has been long forgotten. Popular memory of Cape Breton cricket has long faded, and even the historiography of Canadian cricket tends to tell a story of a sport that was allegedly an imperial sport played by a social elite, beloved of recent English immigrants but quickly falling into a deserved obscurity.2 Yet in any area of sports history, context is everything. Without the ability to fit into a broader societal framework, even the most rousing story of a sport or pastime lacks any real grounding. So what is the context that gives meaning to Cape Breton’s profound and long-lasting association with the sport of cricket? At the deepest level, the history of sports—like, say, the history of religion or the history of education—explores a broad element of the human experience that in some form or other has characterized every human society that has ever existed. Not only are we physical creatures whose bodies demand to be exercised, but also sporting contests offer opportunities to negotiate social differences, whether through serious and even hostile contention or through the building of bridges via friendly competition and the socialization that accompanies it.

Cricket, in particular, has a large international historiography that reflects its ability to provide a unique global perspective on the distinctive expressions of sport in many divergent societies. Cricket originated in the south of England and reached an advanced stage of codification by the end of the eighteenth century, but even before that time, it had long been diffused to North America, and it was undoubtedly carried in a rudimentary form to the Maritime colonies by Planters and Loyalists. Yet this is only one of many examples of the diffusion of cricket in contexts that have become globalized and continue to evolve to the present day. Historians in recent years have explored this phenomenon extensively. For example, Benjamin Sacks has shown how in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Samoans adopted and transformed cricket as a way of preserving Indigenous sporting customs in the face of the disapproval of religious missionaries.3 In the 1980s, refugees from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began to play cricket in Pakistan, and some thirty years later, the Afghanistan national team made its first appearance in the Cricket World Cup, representing a sense of national identity despite civil conflict.4 In Kenya, meanwhile, the ongoing efforts of the club known as the Maasai Cricket Warriors to combat the social costs of HIV/AIDS as well as environmental and cultural challenges have attracted global attention.5 And of course cricket today is also one of North America’s fastest-growing sports, largely as a result of the efforts of players of South Asian origin. Cricket in Cape Breton, therefore, can be examined within the framework of our understanding of a sport that offers diverse international perspectives along with sophisticated historical literature spanning a number of centuries. The idea that at one time prevailed even among some historians that cricket in Canada was somehow an exotic sport reserved largely for the social elite and for English migrants is a prime example of the kind of mythology that cannot survive the application of an informed analysis. And in Cape Breton, cricket both reflected and influenced the ways in which industrialization transformed island society and reconfigured social affinities and differences.

However, the first documentation of the organization of a cricket club in Sydney—not necessarily, of course, the first club to be formed—might, if taken in isolation, give at least partial support to the notion of cricket as a sport for the social elite. On 1 June 1863, according to the Cape Breton News, the Sydney Cricket Club held an organization meeting. With a membership consisting of “twenty-six gentlemen,” the club proceeded to elect officers and cocaptains of the team. Seven of the nine individuals mentioned by the newspaper can be identified from census records, and three were lawyers. Among the lawyers was one of the two cocaptains, Newton MacKay, while the other cocaptain was Edmund Outram, described in a later census simply as a “gentleman.” The meeting was chaired by Frederick Wiley, a printer by trade who was one of three out of the seven who had been born in England. Of the others, MacKay had been born in Scotland, and the remaining three in Nova Scotia. At least two of those, John Burchell and Murray Dodd, had both parents born in Nova Scotia—census records of the time made no consistent distinction between Cape Breton and Nova Scotia, despite the years during which the colony of Cape Breton had existed autonomously. The newly elected club president, Charles Crewe-Read, was a retired militia colonel and one of three who was an adherent of the Church of England. Two were members of the Presbyterian Church of the Lower Provinces, and two were Methodists.6 Readers of the Cape Breton News were already well aware of the extended reach of cricket within the British Empire, as the newspaper had reported in the previous year on the exploits of an English touring team in Australia,7 but the composition of the Sydney Cricket Club (the Sydney in Cape Breton, that is) helped define how the sport functioned closer to home. It was an association of the locally respectable, formed in the context of the coal boom of the 1860s and the imperial orientation that went with it, although the complex stratifications of social class that would later emerge from heavy industrialization were not yet evident. By the early twentieth century, the presence of rival industrialists James Henry Plummer and James Ross as honorary club presidents—a position in which they were joined by other local worthies such as Church of England archdeacon David Smith, Bridgeport medical doctor Marcus Dodd (younger brother of Murray Dodd), and North Sydney cable station manager W. E. Earle—showed that this was an associativity that more fully embraced the upper ranks of the new industrial order.8

The association of the Sydney Cricket Club with a social elite was an element of its character that never entirely disappeared, even though the team itself became significantly diversified, especially in the early twentieth century. In this regard, the club initially stood closer to the Wanderers of Halifax than to the clubs in towns such as Digby and Yarmouth, where doctors and lawyers were regularly outnumbered by skilled artisans, retail clerks, and other members of the middle ranges of a highly localized society.9 Murray Dodd, who became a judge and a prominent Conservative politician, was just one of the early members to retain a lasting association with the Sydney club. Cricket did tend to run in families, and one of the most successful Sydney batsmen of the turn-of-the-century years was Noel Crewe-Read, a veteran of the Spanish-American War of 1898 and son of the 1863 club president.10 Thus, when naval vessels from cricket-playing countries visited Sydney, a match with the Sydney Cricket Club was a standard element of the entertainment provided for the visitors. The practice began at least as early as August 1871, when James Hill—a Sydney schoolteacher and diarist—recorded the visit of the naval gun vessel Philomel and noted that “Philomel’s men and town people [were] playing cricket.”11 The tradition then ranged from the steam frigate USS Powhatan in 1883 to the ten-thousand-ton British cruiser Cumberland in 1913; the encounter with officers and cadets of the Cumberland drew a crowd of some two thousand, and the Sydney Daily Post—headlining its front-page report “Fine Exhibition of the Grand Old Game”—took the attendance as a sure sign of a bright future for the sport in Cape Breton.12 It was a confirmation of the comment in the rival Sydney Daily Record a few years earlier—reporting, also on its front page, on a practice session held by the Sydney Cricket Club in adverse weather conditions and making an implied comparison with the still-new sport of baseball—that “to watch these players fielding in pools of water ankle deep gives one an idea of the strong hold that the grand old game has upon its devotees, and is the clearest indication that though games may come and go, yet cricket, as far as Sydney is concerned, will go on forever.”13

It was also true that insofar as the Sydney Cricket Club retained elements of its socially elite status, the relationship with the sport of baseball was at times a troubled one. The histories of baseball and cricket, here and elsewhere, are sufficiently intertwined through club connections and the many nineteenth-century players who participated in both sports, so it is not extravagant to regard them in this era simply as variant disciplines of a single bat-and-ball family of sports; nevertheless, tensions could exist.14 A “short but merry game” of cricket in 1902 between Sydney players and the crew of the personal steam yacht of the industrialist James Ross gave rise in the Sydney Daily Record to a snobbish comment on the shortcomings of “the cheap and garish attractions of baseball.”15 More substantive was a bitter quarrel that originated in 1911, flared up again in late 1912, and smouldered on into 1913, when the cricket club made improvements to the grounds at Victoria Park and, while refusing to allow local baseball players to take advantage of the facilities, allegedly attempted to undercut fundraising efforts by the baseball club. No less a figure than the mayor of Sydney, the prominent lawyer A. D. Gunn, reportedly declared of the cricket club that “this interference . . . has got to stop or the first thing they know the park commissioners will take their crease and turn it into a baseball field.”16 Even within cricket itself, moreover, also in 1913, the Sydney Cricket Club incurred class-related and racially influenced tensions with the team known at the time as the “West India XI of the steel plant”—the forerunner of the Whitney Pier Cricket Club—when the West India players declined to play a match on the basis that the manner of the Sydney club’s invitation had shown disrespect. The matter was sarcastically reported in an item in the Sydney Daily Post, noting that “the southern gentlemen complain that they did not receive a formal challenge, and don’t care to indulge unless all of the preliminaries are attended to in society fashion.”17 Eventually rearranged for the following weekend, the match turned out to be an ill-tempered affair, left unfinished amid allegations of time-wasting levelled against the West India club.18 Thus, Cape Breton cricket in the early twentieth century carried over certain elements of the social elitism of the Sydney Cricket Club and showed fault lines that clearly reflected social divisions.19

Yet the Sydney Cricket Club was only one part of a much more complex cricket culture, a culture that ultimately brought about substantial changes even to the club itself. As in many parts of the Nova Scotia mainland, rural and small-town cricket flourished in a number of centres. One of them was North Sydney, where a club was organized in 1874, although the North Sydney Herald pointed out that it was in reality a renewal of an older club. The newspaper provided no details of players or officials but did commend the benefits of “such manly out-door sports” to the young men of the town: “The time spent on the cricket-field if it may be the loss of a half-dollar or so to the hard working plodding mechanic is in reality a gain to him.”20 By 1887, a rivalry had developed between North Sydney and Sydney as contenders for the trophy known as the Burchell Cup.21 Also playing by that time were the cricketers of Port Hawkesbury, although almost no detailed evidence of the composition of the club has survived. In September 1885, the Colonial Standard of Pictou reported that “a cricket match has been arranged between the ‘Black and Tans’ of Hawkesbury and the ‘Stump Guards’ of Mulgrave.” The only players named were an unspecified member of the Bourinot family and a local medical doctor, P. A. Macdonald. Some five years later, an item in the “Hawkesbury Happenings” column of the Enterprise of New Glasgow expressed regret that adult cricket had succumbed to the attractions of baseball but placed its hopes in a newly formed “juvenile ‘cricket club.’”22

The nearby Arichat Cricket Club, however, is better documented, at least for the 1880s. The sport was new to Arichat when first played in 1883, and a newspaper report indicated that six members of the team had previously not even seen it played. Nevertheless, of the eleven club members who can be identified—all of playing age with the two possible exceptions of J. Edward Carbonnell and Edmund Power Flynn, both of whom were older than the others and may have been club officials—all except the English-born Carbonnell were Nova Scotia born. With the further exception of Flynn (whose parents were Irish born), all had at least one parent born in Nova Scotia. While the team also had two additional players, unrecorded in the census and likely of English origin, who were employed by the cable station in Canso and presumably travelled by water to play their cricket in Arichat, the club represented no mere importation of an exotic sport. In terms of religion, the four Roman Catholics narrowly predominated, as did the five Irish in self-identified ethnic origin, while occupations were decidedly in the middling range: retail merchant, bookkeeper, surveyor, telegraphist, and the like. Thus, it was a small-town club highly comparable to such clubs in mainland Nova Scotia, even though of more recent foundation, except for a distinctively Cape Breton leaning toward Roman Catholics and, in this case (though not necessarily elsewhere in Cape Breton), Irish-descended Roman Catholics. Noteworthy in the latter group was David Hearn, who played for Arichat in 1883 and would later become a lawyer, Crown prosecutor, cricketer, and cricket umpire in Sydney. His kinsman James Hearn was already by 1883 a lawyer and cricketer in Sydney, and James’s son William would become a prominent merchant and captain of the Sydney Cricket Club. Thus, although the Hearn family conformed to the existing social profile of the Sydney club in occupational terms, they did introduce a new element of Irish Catholicism.23

Yet the opening of the Sydney steel plant in 1901 was a turning point in many areas of life in Industrial Cape Breton, and not least in terms of sport. While it is entirely likely that coal miners played cricket long before the turn of the century, as they did in substantial numbers in both Cumberland and Pictou Counties, the era from 1901 to the eve of World War I saw an unprecedented expansion of the sport among miners, steelworkers, and related skilled trades. As early as August 1901, a Sydney team played and clearly but not one-sidedly defeated the Dominion Iron and Steel Company (DISCO) club. Among the DISCO players was John Elvey, an English-born machinist who over the ensuing decade would play for the Open Hearth club and other steel plant teams—and ultimately for the Sydney Cricket Club. A further indication of gradually increasing diversity in the Sydney team was the appearance of the Tobin brothers. From a Sydney family in which both parents were Nova Scotia born (though they had at least one Irish-born grandparent) and their father, James Tobin, still listed as a steel plant labourer in 1901 at the age of sixty-five, the younger brother Charles was an accomplished batsman who—as a locomotive fireman and later a locomotive engineer—played also for the Intercolonial Railway team. The older brother, William Tobin, meanwhile, was a fast bowler of sufficient hostility, and a cricket report in the Record in 1904 referred to him as “‘Billy’ Tobin, the famous bowler.”24 Intermittent recruitment of both miners and steelworkers from the United Kingdom at times replenished the ranks of cricketers, and prior to one match in July 1903, an item in the Record deemed it worthy of mention that the Steel Plant team to face the Sydney Cricket Club—unsuccessfully for the steelworkers, as it turned out—would have “almost a team of Englishmen.”25

But there was no shortage of home-grown players. On 1 August 1904, at the Provincial Workmen’s Association picnic held at Glace Bay, a match between the cricket teams from Dominion #1 Colliery and Dominion #2 Colliery ended early because of a dispute over umpiring. Of the twenty-two players on the field, however, fifteen can be identified. All except one were Nova Scotia born, the exception being Gilbert Darroch, a miner whose family had emigrated from Scotland when he was eight years old. Although the Dominion #1 team included Harry Dodd, son of the local physician Marcus Dodd and nephew of Murray Dodd, not surprisingly, the other players were miners or other colliery workers such as pit drivers and a machinist. The only religious denominations represented were Roman Catholics (ten) and Presbyterians (five), while in terms of stated ethnic origin, two were Irish, Harry Dodd was English, Pat Gouthro was French, and the remainder Scottish. Two—Archie McInnis and James McKillop—gave their mother tongue as Gaelic.26 Many of the same players also played for the Bridgeport or New Aberdeen clubs—here, as in Pictou County, the miners’ club could readily be seen and felt as a community club.27 Also a centre of coal miners’ cricket was the Florence colliery, near Sydney Mines. It was a convention in both cricket and baseball clubs to base intraclub matches on an arbitrary distinction, most often married versus single players, but revealingly, for the cricketers at the #4 colliery at Florence, it was underground workers versus bankheaders.28 Although in 1903 the schedule for the recently formed Cape Breton Cricket League included only the Sydney Cricket Club, the Sydney Fire Department, the Steel Workers Club, and the Phoenix Club of Sydney, by 1907 the league had been joined by clubs from—among others—New Aberdeen, Dominion, and Bridgeport, and on 1 July of that year, the Record devoted a substantial part of its front page to reporting on five league matches as it observed that “local interest in the grand old game of cricket is growing apace.”29 Growing pains emerged in the following season, when a dispute arose over possible poaching of players by New Aberdeen at the expense of Dominion and Bridgeport, but it still seemed to a writer in the Record that “cricket in local circles is surely king this season.”30

The Sydney Cricket Club, as well as playing in the local league and at one point fielding both an A and a B team, was also increasingly pursuing opportunities to play off the island. The 1908 version of what the Post ironically termed the “Cricketers Deep Sea Tour,” for example, took the players to matches in Charlottetown and Pictou County.31 The club also in some respects continued its traditional role as the socially elite cricket club of the island, and during the summer of 1909, it played a series of friendly matches with teams from the Royal Canadian Regiment (RCR) and the Royal Canadian Engineers. The opening match with the RCR on 22 July 1909 at Victoria Park had a festive air, as it attracted “a large attendance of the local enthusiasts of the grand old national game.”32 At one level, for the Sydney Cricket Club to entertain a visiting military team was normal enough, especially as a number of the RCR players would also have been members of the Halifax Garrison team that played in the Nova Scotia Cricket League. The difference in the summer of 1909 was that the same players, when not playing cricket, were training their guns on striking miners who no doubt included cricketers from the Cape Breton League. The New Aberdeen club, for one, was forced to withdraw temporarily from the league—as the Record reported blandly, “the strike at the mines prevented the Aberdeen team from playing.”33 New Aberdeen did resume its league schedule and on 7 August 1909 played a home match with Sydney Mines on the same day as the Sydney club played the latest of its engagements with the RCR, but the comments on the matter that may have been made by striking miners have remained undocumented.34 However, the affair offered yet another indication of how sport—in this case, Cape Breton cricket—can reflect and exemplify the fracturing within any society where it is played.

In a different sense, however, the rapid evolution of Cape Breton cricket during the industrializing years gave evidence of social integration. In early July 1906, the Sydney Cricket Club arranged a preseason, intraclub match between the “Gentlemen of the Professions” and the “Non-professions,” perhaps based loosely on the long-established English encounters between the Gentlemen and the Players. The Gentlemen of the Professions had a predictable enough lineup of lawyers, doctors, and clergy, along with an engineer, a bank clerk, and the merchant William Hearn, by now a long-serving but still elegant batsman as well as being the club’s wicket-keeper. The Non-professions included, of course, William Tobin, as well as the Intercolonial Railway (ICR) train dispatcher James Murray and three of the four cricket-playing Menzies brothers—three watchmakers and a tinsmith—who were the sons of the Sydney watchmaker and jeweller John Menzies.35 An important difference was that for the Gentlemen, the Sydney club tended to be their sole cricket allegiance, while the Non-professions also played for other teams, whether the Steel Works, the ICR team, or (since Richard, or “Dick,” Menzies was the fire chief) the Sydney Firemen. Nevertheless, with this modest degree of diversity, the Sydney Cricket Club entered the Nova Scotia Cricket League. The league had begun in 1906 as an essentially localized circuit, including three teams from Halifax and one from Windsor.36 In the following year, the strength of cricket on the Pictou coalfield was shown when the newly entered Westville club took the championship by winning every game. Interest in the fielding of a Sydney team in the league, as with suggestions of a play-off series between the Nova Scotia champions and the winners of the Cape Breton League, initially went nowhere, but the Sydney club did play friendly matches against Nova Scotia Cricket League clubs before finally entering the league in 1910.37

The route to a first league championship in 1912 included following the lead of other Nova Scotia Cricket League (NSCL) teams by hiring a professional player-coach in 1911—a Mr. J. Gardiner, who had reportedly “played in the game in England, Scotland, Ireland, India, and Malta”38—and also through further diversification via the integration of African-descended players from the Steel Workers Club. In 1911, William Knight became the first—a 1910 immigrant from the Caribbean who was described in a later census as a labourer in the open hearths.39 By the time of the Sydney club’s dramatic and unexpected defeat of Stellarton on 17 August 1912—“seldom, if ever, has such a scene of enthusiasm been witnessed in local sporting circles,” commented the reporter for the Post—one of the opening batsmen was Alfred Prescott, another steel plant worker from the Caribbean, and the winning catch was taken by Gerald Suett, who was also the Steel Workers’ captain. Given that William Hearn, now forty-two years old and a player for the Sydney Cricket Club since the 1880s, was still the wicket-keeper, the shift from exclusive gentlemen’s club to pragmatic and successful competitor in the pre-eminent league in the Maritimes was evident.40 The 1913 league season finished inconclusively, as the Garrison club was unable to fulfill its scheduled commitments,41 but then in 1914, Sydney had two clubs in the competition, with the entry into the league of the Whitney Pier Cricket Club. That season too went uncompleted because of the outbreak of World War I in August, but not before the Sydney and Whitney Pier clubs had met in a match attended by “a large number of citizens.”42

No matches were played in the Nova Scotia Cricket League after the declaration of war on 4 August 1914, and the formal abandonment of the season was announced just over a week later. “Owing to difficulty in obtaining men on the part of the clubs,” the explanation went, “it has been thought best to cancel all the fixtures.”43 No doubt unanticipatedly at the time, the interruption also brought an end in a larger sense to the lengthy era during which cricket had been a major—at its height, the pre-eminent—organized team sport in Cape Breton and beyond. But why so? Cricket did not stop entirely in 1914, as efforts were made to revive the sport intermittently after the war. A league including the Sydney, Sydney Mines, and Whitney Pier clubs operated at one point during the 1920s, amid plans being made to incorporate this competition into a new and expanded version of the Nova Scotia Cricket League.44 Travelling in 1924 for a series of encounters with Halifax clubs, the Whitney Pier team could reportedly draw “a large crowd of cricket enthusiasts” to a match with the Halifax West Indians.45 Yet by that time, there was an air of marginality about cricket that contrasted with its mainstream status in Cape Breton sporting culture up until 1914. As a playground sport or on streets and in fields, informal versions continued to be played by young people far into the twentieth century, as Don MacVicar recalled from growing up in Glace Bay and playing with his brother and other neighbourhood friends “some kind of cricket—in the field, with three tin cans, a ball about the size of a baseball”; likewise, Debbie MacIsaac recalled that in Scotchtown, cricket was played by many elementary-age children as recently as during the late 1960s and that “it just seemed to be handed down by the older kids.”46 But in a larger sense, the sport had long declined. A tempting though simplistic explanation is to observe that it had been superseded by baseball. It was true that there had been debates in the Sydney press, notably in the spring of 1913—reflecting wider debates elsewhere—as to the relative merits of baseball and cricket as regards speed of play and attractiveness to spectators. To one correspondent of the Record in May 1913, who signed simply as “Ball Fan,” the reality was that “cricket is a grand old game, emphasis on old; baseball is new, emphasis on new, and is the game of today.”47

Others, however, would have been surprised by any prediction of cricket’s decline. As recently as in 1901, an item in the same newspaper noted that “whatever dispute there may be among the older athletes regarding the predominance of cricket or baseball, there is no doubt that with the youngsters cricket is ‘the game.’”48 A column in the Record in May 1914 observed similarly that “cricket appears to have still a strong hold in the sport life of Sydney and no summer sport is likely to supercede [sic] or take its place in the community.” The item emphasized the interest among “young lads,” and another piece in the Post a few weeks later likewise identified “a sign of the times” in that “in all sections of the city the youth are now daily to be seen playing the grand old national game.”49 Yet there were other, contrasting signs of the times. Media coverage of baseball was one factor, as in an era when daily newspapers were hungry for copy, the Associated Press fed daily baseball news and scores to readers on a scale with which intermittent reporting of test matches in England, Australia, or South Africa—or indeed of Philadelphia cricket—could not compete. The baseball coverage continued to flow, moreover, as the United States maintained its neutral status while major cricket-playing countries saw their sporting activities curtailed by the war.

Closer to home, much as baseball continued to struggle in Cape Breton and in mainland Nova Scotia to make the transition to semiprofessional competitions, cricket as a sport had yet to reach a stable model of organization. Overt professionalism was confined to the hiring of professional player-coaches by major clubs—such as Gardiner in Sydney—although in Pictou County and elsewhere other forms of compensation for players may well have been practised. When the provincial champions from Westville were invited to visit Sydney in 1908, it was unclear whether their nonnegotiable demand for a payment of $50 represented a fee or coverage of expenses, but certainly in English cricket at the time payment of alleged expenses was a major covert form of professionalism. Even beyond the matter of payment, participation in a provincial league had to be paid for somehow involving travel costs and the supply of equipment. The organization of the clubs, however, was essentially noncommercial, and in Sydney, even the charging of a modest admission fee to spectators was impeded—despite occasional hopeful requests for voluntary contributions—by the reality that the field in Victoria Park was on public property.50 Finally, the formation of the Nova Scotia Cricket League itself—and its counterpart in southwestern Nova Scotia, the Bay of Fundy Cricket League—may have undermined the sport by eroding more traditional local cricket cultures only for the intervention of World War I to ensure that any transition to a sustainable business model on a larger scale remained incomplete. The war itself undoubtedly also had a major impact, and an item in the Sydney Post in 1927 noted that many of the active players of the Sydney Cricket Club had enlisted in 1914 and had been either killed or wounded or had never returned to Sydney—“and so the local club was virtually put out of business.”51 In any event, with the exception of a decreasing number of hold-outs that notably included Whitney Pier, Stellarton, and Truro, the years following World War I brought an end to cricket as a major sport in the region.

During its long active period, however, Cape Breton cricket was historically significant in a number of respects. It was, first of all, a settler sport. With settler colonialism a relatively new phenomenon in the Cape Breton of the nineteenth century and Indigenous dispossession carried out largely through environmental degradation and displacement, outdoor sports and pastimes had an important role in normalizing settlement by representing the devotion of space to activities that—for the settlers—were healthy and harmless. Cricket in Cape Breton, as in most areas of mainland Nova Scotia outside of Halifax, was unique as a summer team sport up until the very late years of the nineteenth century and so took a role not only in the social and cultural life of settler communities but also in forging social linkages that created wider networks and involved women as well as men. When the Arichat Cricket Club visited North Sydney in August 1883, it was for a “friendly encounter” and one for which “a number of their lady friends” accompanied the Arichat players.52 All of this was important in the consolidation of settler society, although none of it was especially unusual or uniquely characteristic of Cape Breton—the same can just as well be observed for, say, Digby or Yarmouth Counties.53 More singular is the role of cricket in a rapidly industrializing society of mobile populations in the Industrial Cape Breton of the early twentieth century. The fault lines of class and race and ethnicity were all too clear in the formation of clubs and in the sometimes troubled relationship of the Sydney Cricket Club with groups that did not fall within the bounds of its traditionally cozy status as a gentlemen’s club. Yet cricket also, however imperfectly, reflected and perhaps advanced the building of social bridges and even hesitant attempts at sport integration. Unlike in Pictou County, where the more socially elite forms of cricket in the towns of Pictou and New Glasgow declined markedly as they were overshadowed by the teams from mining communities large and small, the Sydney Cricket Club consistently shared the playing surface with teams from Sydney Mines and North Sydney on the one side to Bridgeport and New Aberdeen on the other. No doubt the experience on all sides was sometimes uncomfortable, and certainly there were times when it was fractious. But cricket in Cape Breton, and in the Maritimes more generally, was always a sport within which social differences were negotiated directly. Thus, pre-1914 cricket history in Cape Breton had its own distinctive patterns yet all the while fulfilling the more general role of sport history as a sensitive barometer of social and cultural trajectories during an era of profound industrially influenced change for the island.