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

117 actually have to grapple with the grimy bodies of one’s menial opponents. The nobility was never to be found in one of those hundreds’ strong, hours-long scrimmages that passed for football. Cricket fitted perfectly as the ‘manly’ game for well-mannered young gentlemen – and this was the fashion in which it was interpreted to the youth of Britain through its associated literature. But where did this great emphasis on ‘Manliness’ leave womanliness? Back at home is the brief answer. Pankaj Mishra, the award-winning Indian essayist and novelist, in a long article on the history of masculinity (‘Man Trouble’ The Guardian March 7 th 2018) wrote of how ‘upper class parents in America and Britain had begun to send their sons to boarding schools in the hope that their bodies and moral character would be suitably toughened in the absence of corrupting feminine influences. Competitive sports which, were first organised in the second half of the 19 th century, became a much-favoured means of pre-empting sissiness.’ Very authentically, the schoolboy novels and story books exclude, apart from the odd saucy tom-boy sister, the female of the species almost entirely. It is known that girls read the boys’ literature, perhaps because they yearned to have such jollity in their own lives, perhaps in default of other reading matter. If the Angela Brazil type of girls’ story was imitative of the boys’ model, this was because it was largely true of the original girls’ boarding schools, with Cheltenham Ladies’ College (1853) and Roedean (1885) among the most well-known, although Miss Dorothea Beale, founding headmistress of the former school, agreed with Frederic Farrar about the gratuitous pride that often afflicted Athleticism. There was, therefore, a situation in which boys were kept separate from both girls and womenfolk and this condition was widely transmitted to millions of mainly male readers about the fictional equivalent of these schools. It was characteristic of the general Victorian attitude whereby men occupied the ‘public’ and women the ‘private sphere’. It was, on its better days, more about difference than inferiority. The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching