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

116 this evangelicalism was school-orientated. The alliance of cricket and Anglicanism was intimate. 209, a quarter, of the 795 varsity cricket blues of the Victorian era were ordained and hundreds more in holy orders were cricketers, all bringing a devotion for the game to their parishes and livings. The curate in the village team is no fictional fancy. Jack Williams records that during the 1920s 258 of the 395 cricket clubs in Bolton, Burnley and Oldham were church based and there were districts with sufficient support to run leagues just for Sunday schools. It was, as I have elsewhere concluded, a matter of ‘Christianity at the crease.’ Former pupils who became schoolmasters, many of them ordained, also ensured that cricket both as a corporal and a spiritual exertion, was maintained among the next generation and so the wheel turned, strengthened all the time by the flow of books and story papers appertaining to their efforts. As a final instance of the clerical/cricketing dualism, and one which adds art to literature in this respect, is a famed stained glass window. In ecclesiastical style, it shows the Lancashire and England players, Richard Barlow, AN.Hornby and Richard Pilling, bent over the altar of the stumps. It is similar to the kind of pigmented glass-work to be found in every church and cathedral. In everyday practice, cricket suited the needs of the religious aspect of Athleticism more than the football codes. As a team game it also placed specific obligation on each individual; in the summer the grass was greener and, one hoped, the weather was finer and there wasn’t the rough and tumble of those mob-like footballing encounters. Cricket was milder and more ruminative. But it still had an adequate element of toughness. After all, it used a very hard ball. Colin Cowdrey once raised the question of why cricket wasn’t played with a soft ball and, putting aside mention of more primitive manufacturing conditions, the answer must include that ‘Manliness’ factor. During the 18 th century it had been the ideal sport for the landed gentry to play with and against their estate workers. One had to be valiant in the face of perilous bowling but one didn’t The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching