Donald Coleman published ‘Gentlemen and Players’ in 1973. With its engaging blend of scholarship and love of cricket, it has moved well beyond the frontiers of economic history, and it must surely be his best-known essay. It develops the theme that in English business since the Industrial Revolution and especially over the last century or so there have been on the one hand ‘educated amateurs’ – the Gentlemen – and on the other hand ‘practical men’ – the Players. The Gentlemen have had a liberal education at or nearly at public schools, the Players vocational training elsewhere; and the gap in social standing, though not uncrossable, has yawned wide between them.

The engineer may be taken as a representative ‘practical man’, and this is particularly true of the nineteenth century, when higher education in engineering was neglected in English universities and regarded with suspicion by engineers themselves.In 1871, there were only twelve professors of engineering in the United Kingdom, and only twice as many twenty years later. It may be worth while, therefore, with ‘Gentlemen and Players’ in mind, to consider how engineers stood in Victorian society, especially since at the present day professional engineers in Great Britain are sorry for themselves, being neither so highly regarded nor so handsomely rewarded as their colleagues elsewhere.

Sir Monty Finniston, an engineer himself, has a characteristically brisk explanation for the engineers' plight.