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

101 The Flood (2) HK Rodd The Wonder Man innings, with the implication that, even in 1946, a posh school still regarded half a game as somewhat vulgar. The Town bat first and thrive handsomely until Henley turned to Raymond Seal, who proceeded to register a hat- trick in his first over and take a fourth wicket in his second over. The Town wilt slightly but struggle on to reach the wholesome total of 201. Henley and Judd start brightly for St Luke’s but the score is only 102 for 4 when Raymond goes out to bat, with his team needing a hundred to win and time and light closing in. With six to win, the last man in and drops of rain falling, Seal completes a scintillating knock with the winning hit, just as the clouds open and the rain pours down; ‘Raymond Seal has come into his own, and the Old Country was not such a rum go after all..The School was making whoopee in the Great Hall, and the playing field held nothing but the scent of bruised grass and the memory of a great day’s cricket.’ All of this must serve to demonstrate the thrust and power of the Thomson ‘story papers’ and their off-shoots and allies in the minds of a vast readership of youngsters. Then after some thirty or forty years of literary dominion there was an abrupt change, concomitant with the shifts in daily life during the 1950s and early 1960s plus the basic changes in the tempo and tone of the cultural pattern, be it in music, television, consumerism, sexual mores and, most particularly, the evolution of youth cults somehow segregated from the adult world. For one of many examples of that changing dynamic concerned the youth issue itself. While not entirely vanished, the concept of the older generation providing church and allied agencies to occupy and succour young men and women, often in uniformed organisations, was eroded. With astute commercial backing, the post-World War II youthful generations became much more self-governing by way of cults. In dress, music and in other ways, they devised a means of segregating themselves much more autonomously than hitherto from the generality of society. This is one of many illustrations of the fundamental turnaround in British