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

111 The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching cricket among children and young adults. Social history is full of cases of causes and effects being interchangeable. Did the sudden rise of British population towards the end of the 18 th century and after cause the Industrial Revolution to happen to meet these new needs? Or did the onset of the Industrial Revolution stimulate the increase in population by producing the resources that would enable more people to survive? Many historical equations are reversible. The wise American commentator James Galbraith wrote ‘under Capitalism, man exploits man. Under Communism, it’s just the opposite.’ In its minor way, the relationship between cricket-loaded stories and cricket itself exemplifies the same chicken and egg reversal. During the long years in which cricket built a substantial playing and watching community and then sustained it for a further generation or so as the premier national game, it was tirelessly tracked by an outpouring of school-age literature that revelled adoringly in the game. Over the hundred years under review there was apparently an interaction – the more cricket was played recreationally and watched professionally, the more was cricket written about, fact and fiction, and vice versa . So cause and effect pursued one another on and on in a virtuous upward circle. Within this evident interaction, there was a highly specific and very intense emphasis on youth around the ten/fifteen age range. Thus several generations of boys and, if less so, also girls, were brought up and entered adulthood many of them with an abiding interest in and often a fervent dedication to the sport. The more they read, the more they played and watched; the more they played and watched, the more they read. Escapism is, of course, the staple fare of childhood if not adult reading. Children’s literature of all kinds provided the heroes and the scenarios for personal internalised romance but it also supplied a stage for juvenile collective theatre, such as the wild west hostilities of Cowboys and Indians or the steely clash of the British army and the German Wehrmacht. If the northern urban landscape could cater