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

120 Nigerian background, and PC Wren’s renowned Beau Geste (1924), a story of Englishmen in the Foreign Legion, are two other samples from a host of possible choices. JM McKenzie, most accomplished of imperialist historians, wrote, ‘most societies clearly reveal both their moral norms and their political ideologies through their efforts to aculturate their young.. a powerful zone of intellectual, ideological and moral convergence..a particularly strong relationship developed between education, the juvenile press and the imperial propagandists.’ In this ‘aculturalsation’ the sporting and imperial elements walked hand in hand. It would be a nice conceit to claim that, because of cricket in schoolboy literature, it became the game of choice in the Empire, but history is not as kind to historians as that. Nonetheless, school stories, plastered with sport, and heroic tales of Empire alike reflected the ongoing social condition. A trump card in the hand of those who urged on a schooling isolated from perceived female weakness and centred on physical stamina and moral resolve was the imperial one, the court card, so to say. As army officers, missionaries and colonial administrators, it was expected that many public schoolboys would dedicate their lives and careers to the cause of Empire. World War One, although a hideous shock to the ‘imperial’ system because it culled so many of these brave former pupils, was a victory for the British Empire. The mystique was sustained for a further generation. What must also be factored in is the subordinate role of many non-fee-paying schoolboys, albeit readers no doubt of the school-lit presses. There were hundreds of recruits to the armed forces who patrolled the colonies, with India an especially important posting. There were thousands of migrants heading for those parts of the Empire attracting the ‘white’ settler. Before 1914 around four million emigrated from the British Isles to Canada, 2.4m to Australia and New Zealand and 1m to South Africa. Various government schemes encouraging this were used and they continued after World War I, when emigrants continued to flow overseas. In the year 1923 The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching