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

107 The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching and range of its incidence. Measuring its influence on social life with especial consideration of cricket is more nuanced. It is intended to devote this chapter to its general outcome and the following chapter to the particular effect of school- based literature, with cricket a chief ingredient, on the nation’s educational history. In turn, this present chapter has its sectional division. First, the sheer weight of school- cum-cricket reading will be assessed apropos its sustenance of the playing and watching of cricket in everyday life. Next, three contextual aspects will be examined from a cricketing standpoint. These are the religiosity of Athleticism alongside the now more controversial issue of ‘Manliness’, the Imperial dimension, and the notion of ‘Permanent Adolescence’. Needless to say, this trio is undoubtedly interrelated in terms both of the literature and the cricket. One is able to gauge from the sales and estimates of sharing and swapping which occurred that during this lengthy era up to 75% of youngsters were readers of this brand of literature. This includes girls as well as boys. It is believed that girls first read the boys’ school books until, later, gender specific stories were published, after which, perhaps, they read both. The doyenne of the girls’ school market was Angela Brazil who, beginning with The Fortunes of Philippa in 1906, wrote some fifty boarding school novels. Said by her biographer Gillian Freeman to have been ‘an unflagging seeker of jolly times’, she based her work on her own school, Ellerslie, and her aim was to teach, the authoress wrote, ‘a sense of duty to impart a code of honourable behaviour’ in British girls. In this stern task she was accompanied by other women novelists such as Bessie Marchant (By Honour Bound ), Kathlyn Rhodes ( Schoolgirl Honour ), Winifred Darch ( For the Honour of the House ), Mabel L Tyrrell ( Miss Pike and Her Pupils ), Ethel Talbot, Doris Peacock, May Wynne and a host of others. Later still, from the 1940s, Enid Blyton weighed in with six St Malory’s , six St Clare’s and five The Naughtiest Girl (Whyteleafe School) books, with Pamela Cox and Anne Digby providing between them twelve continuation sequels