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

113 a sort of boyish guerilla warfare was preferable to games when it came to the physical training for the same battle of life identified by the others. He was a nonconformist, not an atheist. It is also true that, as time wore on, the tone grew more secular. PG Wodehouse’s ‘Mike’ is high on Muscularity and low on Christianity, while The Hotspur , unlike BOP, did not have a resident padre. Nonetheless, the instruction is the same. Games played sportingly befit the ideal of the young man. Both mind and body are prepared for a life of service; mens sano in corpore sano . This involved what you shouldn’t do as well as what one must do. The converse of ‘manliness’ was the ‘beastliness’ of unclean sexual habits. And this was a matter of untold anxiety in the minds of those responsible for teaching young boys. Such was this angst from mid-Victorian times and lasting well into the 20 th century that authorities have not hesitated in terming it ‘the Great Masturbation Panic’. It was a complicated issue, arising, amid other factors, from shock at the sudden population rise of the preceding decades and the reawakening of religion and its adjustment to a society which was turning its back on the idea of witches and spells. A further crucial factor was the frightening resurgence of syphilis of well-nigh epidemic proportions after 1820. An underlying feature was the corresponding switch to ‘onanism’ being treated as a medical condition as well as a religio-ethical sin. This was a moment, too, when doctors were attempting to secure the professional high ground, finding clinical solutions for more and more complaints. Many had trained in Paris and had been influenced by the work of George-Auguste Tissot who theorised that the loss of an ounce of semen was equal to forty ounces of blood. Hence the strict Victorian recommendation that one act of marital sexual intercourse a month should be the norm, although many must have regarded this as erring on the side of sparseness. As for the dreaded masturbatory habit, this led to The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching