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

121 migration to the distant Empire peaked at 250,000. Quite a few returned but many stayed, with cricket bats in their baggage and cricketing ethics in their heads. Incidentally, many more emigrated during Victorian times to the United States than to the British colonies but, of course, they were relatively few compared with the numbers from other European countries. Only sporadically did cricket prosper there in consequence. Much more so than today, those British-only settlements, in the conventional expatriate tradition, were distinctly Anglophile. If anything, they out-Englished the English. Schooling is an example. There were Wellington College, New Zealand; Harrison College, Barbados; Kingston College, Jamaica College and St George’s College, Jamaica. There were Dale College, the Diocesan College, the South African College and Port Elizabeth Academy in South Africa; and Rajkumar College, Rajkot in India; while in Australia there were a series of what were termed ‘little Rugbies.’ These pioneered cricket as their models had done in England. Rajkumar College was the exception that proved the rule that they provided for the English. Rajkumar was for the sons of wealthy, princely Indians who might one day emulate the English, as one of its alumni Prince Ranjitsinhji sensationally did. For the most part, it was believed that cricket was not for the indigenous races of the colonies. The imperial edict, supported by the cruder scientific notions of the day, was that theywere inferior. Therewas a stifling exclusiveness that embraced all non-English stock. In 1851 Rev James Pycroft, an early cricketing archivist, had proclaimed that cricket was a ‘panegyric’ on English character; ‘none but an orderly and sensible race of people would so enjoy themselves.’ A century later in 1945 Neville Cardus wrote that none except the people of England or of English-speaking countries have excelled at cricket. Its rules and its general legal system tell of the English compromise between individual freedom and corporate responsibility... it somehow holds the mirror up to English nature.’ The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching