The Summer Field

100 greatest and fairest forms are then present at Lord’s’. Likewise, at matches between Eton and Harrow at Lord’s, men and women wore light or dark blue to show which side they were on; and similar, regularly-playing rivals were Westminster and Charterhouse (‘a fine fashionable gathering at Vincent Square’ in central London), and Clifton and Cheltenham in Gloucestershire (‘all the fairest beauties of the West Country crowd down to the chosen school ground to see and be seen’). As Hearne put it, at Lord’s you saw ‘Society at cricket’. You went on such occasions to see old friends and show off your children and yourself. Grammar schools aped all this, playing neighbouring grammars. * For all the attention given to the boys, and the seriousness that adults gave to the first elevens, standards inside the fee-paying schools were uneven. Douglas Jardine, a former captain of Winchester College and England, admitted in The Field in July 1936, ‘the coaches who put so much love into their labour have done their jobs too well in recent years’. Most coaching was of batsmen (graceful) rather than bowling (sweaty). Batting was proving too good for the bowling; hence too many drawn games, Jardine wrote. When Jardine said that in rowing as in cricket, it was ‘only human’ for schools to look for future prospects, ‘and suit their methods in some degree towards producing material suitable for Varsity boats or elevens’, he was revealing how ruthless and businesslike fee-paying schools were. State schools, and the teaching of other sports, were no different. The anonymous ‘Coach’ in the Lichfield Mercury in July 1936 recalled: A few years ago when games were permitted the boys were given what equipment was available and had to work out their own salvation – a method akin to the old idea of teaching swimming by throwing boys into the water and leaving them to their own resources! The obvious result of this haphazard procedure was that only boys with some natural aptitude ever learned to play games at all and few of those with skill and intelligence. Today however thank goodness! methods are entirely different. Even if a teacher in any school wanted to bring on children, he only had one pair of hands. As his headmaster and parents would judge him on how well the school team did, if he had sense he looked after the most talented. It meant everyone else got second best. In Two Exiles , Malvern College headmaster H.C.A.Gaunt’s history of the school’s wartime evacuations, ‘the sound of cricket floated from the Great Lawn’ in the summer of 1940 at Blenheim in Oxfordshire: The senior pitches were all that could be desired, though the Junior pitches were rougher and more confined, and in early May the out- fielders could be seen standing knee-deep in daffodils and narcissi. Even the most expensive and reputable schools ignored the less gifted. In his 1935 book Antony: A Record of Youth to honour his dead son, who had been at Eton during the 1914-18 war, the 2 nd Earl of Lytton recalled that most boys at Eton neither rowed nor played cricket regularly, and found Schooling