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

102 The Flood (2) HK Rodd The Wonder Man economic, social and cultural life in Britain over the last sixty or so years. Skipper had already died, slain by wartime paper shortages as early as 1943 after 544 stirring issues. In 1959 Hotspur was relaunched as the strip-picture based New Hotspur. In 1961 Rover absorbed Adventure , and in 1963 Wizard . Champion closed in 1955. Soon all the ‘story book’ formula periodicals had perished. Cricket tales as such also disappeared with the closure of text-based comics, although football - think Roy of the Rovers – was perpetuated to some degree in the new-style colour strip versions. It may have been because the swifter action of soccer leant itself to the pigmented brashness of the new comics. The gentler, white garbed tempo of cricket was perhaps more handsomely conveyed in print. It may, however, have indicated that the natural place of cricket in the youthful mind and life-style was declining and cricket was not so popular has it had been for the best part of a hundred years. There was also a curious interlude with Victorian echoes. The post-war years heralded the importation of sensational American horror comics, which caused the same frisson among the moral hierarchy has had penny dreadfuls nearly a century before. Marcus Morris (1915-89) was an Anglican priest in the Charles Kingsley tradition, as his two religious tracts, Jesus; the Road of Courage and Mark, the Youngest Apostle, signify. His newspaper article ‘Comics that Bring Horror into the Nursery’ was the preface to his launch of Eagle in 1950, an attempt, almost in the wake of BOP , to provide wholesome fodder of a high ethical tone that would appeal to children and pass muster with their parents. Just to cover the demographic bases, he later published Girl for the distaff side and Swift for younger children. Alas for cricket, indeed for sport at large, he found little or no room for games in the modernised excitement of highly coloured picture stories From the early 1950s the Fleetway subsidiary the Amalgamated Press produced, to compete with Eagle comics such as Tiger , the base for Roy of the Rovers, and Lion . Sport tended to take a back seat, with