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

108 The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching of these three schools. While, obviously enough, hockey was a more likely element than cricket in the works of Angela Brazil and her compatriots, the tenor and thrust of all these stories were exactly the same as in the boys’ fiction. In construct, language, plot and characterisation, they were a precise equivalent, with, above all, the message of righteous moral values and decent behaviour predominating. It all added to the massive load of boarding school literature of a fairly narrow nature. Although beyond the possibility of scientific measure, it may scarcely be doubted that cricket in the real world benefited for the better part of a hundred years from this strange phenomenon. In so far as Kathryn Hughes is correct in suggesting that reading then was ‘as essential as breathing’ – and it is worth recalling that for most of this period there was barely any cultural alternative for the non- reader – then a substantive amount of cricket language and lore was ‘breathed in’ by each young generation. No sport has ever enjoyed so prolonged and intensive an advertising campaign. Apart from some bits and pieces of boating and rowing and some occasional athletics, cricket reigned in splendour in the summer term. It is clear that the authors recognised and acted upon what children knew of sport in their day-by-day lives. Association football, for instance, figures largely, even if, as decades passed, rugby football became the winter game of choice in many boarding and also day academies. In many ‘rugby’ schools – my own grammar school was one example – football was frowned upon with scorn and forbidden. However, the writers were aware that rugby was not as familiar to readers as football, especially as, from the formation of the Football League in 1888, the idea of becoming a loyal fan of a football team developed, very much more so than in the rugby world. The differing time-lines of sporting history played a part in this. Cricket had the advantage of an earlier momentum. Although some of its chroniclers are a trifle optimistic