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

125 in the last analysis, homosexual’. The public schools as what has been termed ‘the powerhouse of the nation’ managed to transmit these romanticist values of hero-worship, strict regimes and sports to Victorian society at large and for half a century beyond that. And the chief, perhaps the sole, propagandist mode for that cultural attachment was the literature published for boyhood. Its authors from Thomas Hughes onward are touched by the flame of the ‘eternal boy’. It was said of Tibby Reed that ‘he shared with Thomas Hughes the singular characteristic of remaining a lifelong boy’. His friend John Sime claimed he possessed ‘the healthy freshness of heart of boyhood’, while GA Hutchinson opined that ‘he was to the last a boy amongst boys..his heart remained young despite the burden incident to manhood’. Charles Hamilton, too, admitted to being ‘still a boy at heart’; he wrote that ‘when I’m sitting at a typewriter, I am only sixteen years old..every character at Greyfriars is a living person to me.’ Possibly the most overt authorial example is PG Wodehouse, described by JB Priestley as ‘a brilliant super de luxe schoolboy’ – and his superb creation Bertie Wooster serves as the supreme fictional personification of the schoolboy- man. One of the most curious glosses on this phenomenon was the comment of the author of David Blaize , EF Benson. He felt that ‘in many ways boys are a sex quite apart from male and female.’ His representation of the farewell of David and Frank in cricketing partnership at the end of his novel was based on his own experience. In a sense, he may have been correct. Later commentators have tended, while not deleting it entirely from the interpretation, to question Cyril Connolly’s depiction of homosexuality. They point rather to the solid male friendships of the time – Alfred, Lord Tennyson and AH Hallam; RL Stevenson and WE Henley, for instance – which were platonic, indicating that many of these men believed their relationship would have been sullied and dishonoured by a physical dimension. The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching