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

103 The Flood (2) HK Rodd The Wonder Man science fiction and space adventures of the Dan Dare brand the vogue styles. Cultural history rarely involves complete stoppages in its flow and there are always vestiges of seemingly passed over elements. Simon Sweetman, acutely and generously, has drawn my otherwise unknowing attention to Bob Cattrell and the exploits of his imaginative series celebrating the deeds of the Glory Gardens cricket club, chiefly aimed at a youthful market. The series begins in 1995 with Glory in the Cup, wherein Hooker, Azzie, Erica and their school friends form the club, and it then runs through several issues until the 2015 Return to Glory , by which time the club are visiting Australia to take on their arch rivals Woolagong CC. It is a most inventive and well-crafted concept. Then again, the Gem/Magnet brand emulated old soldiers in the trait of fading away rather than dying. A final selection from the author’s small shelf of schoolboy literature is a copy of The Gem Library . It comprises seven issues of Gem from 1922, with most of the stories, inevitably, ascribed to Martin Clifford aka Charles Hamilton. It was not uncommon, as has been noted, for these weeklies to be drawn together for repeated publication but, in this case, the date of re-printing is 1971, described as a Greyfriars Press hard cover edition. There were several such composite ‘library’ versions available. The papers are presented in facsimile, with the distinctive, or rather in- distinctive, tiny print crammed across the packed pages. The same advertisements are reproduced at the same 1922 prices, many of them apparently making their appeal to the hypochondriac schoolboy: ‘Do You Lack Self-confidence?’; ‘Why be Short?’ ; ‘Be Tall’; ‘Stop Stammering!’; ‘Nervousness’ (the Mento-Nerves Strengthening Treatment used in the Navy from Vice-Admiral to Seaman and in the Army from Colonel to Private); ‘Do You Blush or Go Pale? Away from these psycho-neurotic queries, the core of the collection is a Martin Clifford product composed of six autonomous but linking yarns, amounting to something of a novella. It is a literary tour de force, of some 24 pages