The Summer Field

99 they knew. Character and athletics, handily vague, hid the fact that many boys came away from years of expensive education not actually knowing much. Fee-paying schools liked to bring on the most sporty boys because matches between neighbours were one of the few ways, in an age of far fewer exams, that rivals could outrank others. Hence Oxford and Cambridge Universities made much of their matches. For instance on Tuesday and Wednesday, July 7 and 8, 1914, the elderly Essex vicar Rev Denys Yonge - he had been to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in the 1860s - watched the last two days of the Varsity match at Lord’s. Afterwards he wrote in his diary: Out in the morning, out in the afternoon. Such a fiasco. Oh my dears, Cambridge were licked. Break out in tears. 73, oh what a collapse indeed. Blush all old Cantabs for you have great need. Oxford great defeat last spring on river is now occupied. I mourn, I weep, I shiver. Though his diary had a Biblical, even apocalyptic, tinge, Yonge was sharp enough to remember that Cambridge had won that year’s Boat Race. Given that Yonge cared so much, imagine how rival headmasters felt in Devon in July 1894 when Newton College made 490 for five in three hours against Plymouth College, ‘splendid testimony to the skilful training of Bentley, the ‘coach’,’ according to the Torquay Times . Leading fee-paying schools kept their reputation partly through cricket, reinforced by periodicals and Wisden . Repton and Charterhouse were among 20 schools with reports of their cricket in The Field in July 1934; the two most reputable schools of all, Eton and Harrow, had photographs of their captains on the front cover. J.W.Hearne in a 1911 article hailed the Oxford-Cambridge match as ‘a spectacle of dress and fashion … rank, wealth, beauty, talent in all their Schooling Fourth form cricket ground, Harrow School, north London, about 1905.