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

126 Imperial and military heroes often cited as examples of ‘Permanent Adolescence’ have been Lawrence of Arabia, Robert Baden-Powell, General Gordon and even FieldMarshal Montgomery, described by his biographer as ‘a repressed gay’ with an ‘aberrant marriage’ and an affection for young officers. Desexualised, under-sexed, repressed homosexual or asexual may be the more accurate terms for these men. This gave rise to rather odd life-styles. One recalls the juicy batch of revisionist biographies of British heroes, particularly during the 1970s, although it is only just to add that these were usually challenged by conventional rewrites of the original approving accounts. Captain Scott, Lord Kitchener, Cecil Rhodes, as well as the four mentioned, are samples. It certainly caused confusion in secondary schools with ‘houses’ named after them. There were embarrassing suggestions that Captain Scott was a snobbish incompetent, directly accused of ‘murder’ by Captain Oakes’ mother, that TE Lawrence was a masochistic compulsive liar and that Baden-Powell was a ‘perennially singing schoolboy’, whose friendship with Kenneth ‘Boy’ McLaren became a point of anguished debate. When playing the role of Cecil Rhodes on that long ago Empire day, I forbore, in ignorance, to mention he was the parent of Apartheid, a fraudulent scoundrel and one whose close friendship with Neville Pickering has been another of those ‘jury still out’ biographical items. With hindsight, it would seem that it is no coincidence that the two leading texts on the refusal to grow up were published at much the same time and exactly at the peak of this cultural and social process. Robert Baden-Powell ‘s highly influential Scouting for Boys was published in 1908 and JM Barrie, himself something of a permanent boy with a quaint if fairly innocuous interest in children, wrote Peter Pan in 1904. He also ran the Allahakbarries itinerant cricket team. It is of germane interest that, according to her biographer Gillian Freeman, Angela Brazil ‘never grew up’ and was ‘an unflagging seeker of jolly times’, organised children’s parties all her life and modelled her fictional teachers on her The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching