The Summer Field

98 Neither football nor cricket would have developed as they have but for the public schools and if either has any good standards that is due largely to that influence … you can tell an audience at Marble Arch [meaning Speakers’ Corner] if you like that the games we now enjoy were developed from the back alleys of London, Birmingham, Leeds or Wigan (all fine cities) but the appeal although emotional would not be true to fact. As Fry hinted, just as the Corinthian, the amateur who played for classical Greek ideals of the love of the game, was on the retreat by 1955, so Corinthians were having to battle for their place in history too. Fee-paying schools did a job for rich parents; they took boys off their hands for much of the year and trained them to take their parents’ place. You could argue that games played in a Corinthian spirit taught character and exercised the body; except children could play among themelves naturally. Schools were supposed to give children what they wouldn’t touch otherwise, such as classical literature. As Fry also recalled in 1955, he was a classics master for two years at Charterhouse. Though the cricket there was ‘of course good’, ‘they had no cricket master at all … but I did not teach cricket; I was not allowed’. As Fry was already an England cricketer when at Charterhouse, was that school making best use of its staff? Popular literature, including that by authors as lastingly famous as P.G.Wodehouse and H.G.Wells, harped on about the exciting and enviable time boys had at fee-paying boarding schools — including playing sports all year. Then as now we were supposed to look up to such schools; were they as fine as they liked to pretend? * If Latin was not much use when you left school, nor was cricket. Why did fee-paying schools make so much of either? Cricket suited fee-paying schools’ love of customs and vocabulary that made them unique, meaning: better than the rest. According to W.H.D.Rouse’s History of Rugby School in 1909, new boys under 16 showing promise at the game were placed in the ‘Young Guard’. So that any boys could play cricket at odd times in season, they were allowed to go into afternoon lessons dressed in flannels and blazer, and blue shirts, worn to this day by Rugby boys to play cricket. Some men plainly took interest in their former schools, and sport in particular. On Saturday, June 13, 1914, Arthur Lloyd-Baker visited his old prep school at Folkestone – ‘and found to my intense surprise that the fathers’ match was on’. The Saturday after this he returned to his other former school, Malvern Link to play (‘The field was curiously unchanged – even the poor little pavilion still remains’). Some took pride in their old school. In July 1874 at a dinner in London of Old Reptonians, Mr Justice Denman spoke of Repton’s success, ‘not only in intellectual distinction but in the character of the men it turned out and on the cricket field and river’. Repton boys (including later C.B.Fry) no doubt enjoyed any break from the classroom as much as Will Richards’ common lads at St Mark’s. Cricket was a good fit with fee-paying schools’ stress on the moral nature and athletic ability of boys, rather than what Schooling