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

114 consumption, indigestion, possible blindness and even death. It was claimed by English medicos that two-thirds of diseases were related to the habit, while a specific dimension was that of mental health, with ‘masturbatory insanity’ a commonplace diagnosis, where once Satan would have been more directly invoked. These perils, especially the loss of sight, clung persistently in boyhood lore for many years. Although some doctors went so far as to advise the use of spiked rings or the tying of boys’ hands overnight, the more acceptable remedy or preventative was the busy loss of wholesome energy through pronounced physical exercise. Relevantly, one modern expert, Alan Hunt, has written, ‘the distinctive feature of this anti-masturbation panic is that it was directed at middle- and upper-class teenage males who were presumed to be attending residential boarding schools.’ Another authority, James Hamilton, has asserted, with equal relevance, that ‘schoolmasters, sportsmen and imperialists were particular offenders’, not, one hastens to add, as practitioners but as panic-stricken advocates of prevention. Thus the urgency with which games were encouraged in schools, and the stories about schools followed that lead assiduously in selling the same prescription to youth at large, had a very much sharper edge than casual observation would suggest. When Edward Thring of Uppingham boomed out his warning sermon in chapel condemning ‘the worm- life of foul, earthly desires’, he was motivated not only by his strong religious faith but by a most genuine sense of alarm about the physical and mental health of his charges. The horror was confounded by the Victorian cautionary dread of frankness in sexual matters, a negativity that bothered many authors, including Charles Dickens, and led Thomas Hardy, frustrated by the critical dismay at his candid treatment of the subject in his later novels, to give up prose fiction altogether. So there are no more than hints and nudges in the school-based stories, with the finger pointed at the cowardly bullies who dodged proper sport and the languid pupils who avoided strenuous exercise. The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching