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

99 The Flood (2) HK Rodd The Wonder Man the key to the code. Interestingly, when Hotspur changed from text to pictures, Red Circle followed suit, continuing in strip-cartoon format throughout the 1960s. Given a readership of, roughly speaking, ten to fifteen year olds, the authors presumably knew they would be writing for three overlapping generations, yet they undertook, with some success, a gamble on a recurrent Red Circle story. It is possible they recognised, and the same was sensed of the Gem/Magnet reading demographic, that young adults did not forego the pleasures of these ripping yarns. Some may have read 26 years’ worth of Red Circle stories, many of which, when summer came around, featured cricket incidents. Like their Gem/Magnet predecessors, Hotspur and company took on hardback form for the Christmas annual industry and other such publishing ventures. Champion , for example, was further published as a pocket-sized monthly, Champion Library , which included contributions from Triumph , the least successful of the main Amalgamated Press products of this kind; it merged with Champion in 1944. Champion was not especially cricket-orientated. Its chief sporting antagonist was ‘Rockfist Rogan’, later ‘Rockfist Rogan RAF’, whilst it featured private sleuths, first, Panther Grayle and, second, Colwyn Dane, ‘the Outlawed Detective’; there was at that time a yen for two syllable forenamed and one syllable surnamed investigators, so they followed in the lineage of Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake, Philip Trent and Charlie Chan. I have a copy of a Champion Book for Boys annual. Like many such books of the age it is unpriced and, more sadly, undated. But wait; employing the legendary skills of Panther Grayle and Colwyn Dane, I have discovered it is of the 1946 vintage. It has a schoolboy rugger player on the front cover (a year before in 1945, it was a schoolboy cricketer hooking vigorously). On the inside cover the inscription begins ‘to Billy from Mum wishing you a..’, the words abruptly terminated causing a mystery far beyond the combined cunning of Panther Grayle and Colwyn Dane to solve. The