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

123 between the school stories and the imperial tales. Together they helped furnish a mind-set that guaranteed both that cricket was dominant in the Empire and negligible elsewhere. Ironically, of all that the British brought to their possessions, cricket is one of the few common denominators among the vestiges left over since independence was granted. There is a curious paradoxical aspect to this training for a lifetime of dutiful service. If the Muscular Christians and Empire-builders had stuck rigidly to their Corinthian principles, they might have been expected to have abided by St Paul’s injunction that ‘when I became a man, I put away childish things.’ But the old boys of the great schools didn’t. They clung tenaciously to them, so much so that the national formulae of cricket and other sports were directly negotiated by former public schoolboys and varsity students and graduates. There can be no doubt that school days were supposed to be the happiest days of their lives, if only in that their working lives were going to be so stressful and demanding. It was almost a reversal of the standard religious message, with a kind of blissful educative Eden preceding the hard slog of a Beau Geste future. All those fictional end of story cricket matches, with friends lingering over the charm of a prosperous century stand, are images of that belief. School was the enjoyable lull before the inevitable storm. Yet, in this respect at least, the childish things were not put away but were, in cricketing terms, carried into adulthood and conveyed to every village in England and every part of a vast Empire. It is true that the requirement to exercise the body was as essential in manhood as in boyhood, but, frankly, cricket is not the most practical form of maintaining physical fitness. What is clear is that, from mid-19 th century, there was an urgency among the elite - and it was an urgency that proved infectious among all those boys who had read about cricket in the books and story papers – to enjoy cricket as young adults. The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching