Cricket Witness No 6 - His Captain's Hand on His Shoulder Smote

98 The Flood (2) HK Rodd The Wonder Man John Taggart ascends above these challenges to the extent of scoring 365, not out, winning the final Test and passing Len Hutton’s record 364 at one and the same time. Would that these various fictional battles with the Australians in those immediate post-war years could have been authentic representations! The Adventure did not include so much cricket as the first two periodicals but one of its serials is worth a mention, The Adventure was noted for its tales of derring-do, many of them of an Empire-building nature. One of its heroes was Bill Simpson, the Wolf of Kabul, very much in the lineage of PC Wren’s 1924 Beau Geste novel. His warrior-like native associate, the faithful Chung, was armed with ‘clicky-ba’; which militant cricketing tool, perhaps unconsciously, seemed to drive home the connection between imperial dominion and the laws of cricket. The Hotspur merits special mention because it was billed as ‘a school story paper’. Very ambitiously, it broke with the conventional frozen time of the Greyfriars scenario and opted for real chronology. Its early editors and scribes RG Thomas and AR Linden constructed Red Circle and carefully programmed its forthcoming history over 26 years through four stages as a series but not a serial as such. This imaginative conceit covered 1155 self-contained episodes from the launch of the periodical in 1933 to its demise as a ‘story paper’ in 1959. If it was to be the last of the great school creations, it was certainly the most exhaustively planned. It was a new school, built in and around a circle of three sandstone ‘houses’, the scholastic residences respectively of domestic, colonial and transatlantic pupils. Characters such as Dead-Wide Dick Doyle, forever overcoming his basic fatigue to help out at football and cricket, or Cripple Dick Archer, forever overcoming his disability for the same sporting cause, do pass through the school and leave. At the same time, and with the teacher Mr Smugg an alter ego , for Mr Queltch of Greyfriars, the value system is exactly the same, a constant reiteration of the virtues of decency, courage, candour and equity. ‘Manliness’ was still