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

11 Chapter One The Origin; Tom Brown’s Schooldays It all began with Tom Brown. In a sense, it all finished with him as well. Within the pages of Thomas Hughes’ classic are all the seeds of what followed. These included a social creed that long endured for a prospering nation and a framework of schooling that was quickly adopted, and, later, became the blueprint for all youngsters. Tom Brown was also the model for the school-type literature that swamped the market for a hundred years and conditioned the public both to identify with this creed and accept the imposition of that educational pattern. A major aspect of this influential book was the role of cricket. Tom Brown’s Schooldays , published in 1857 but set around 1840, provides one of the first popular renditions of the game as a moral venture or exercise. It did so just at the time when, freed from the boisterous, unseemly and often corrupt nature of its Hanoverian decades, cricket was emerging, not just as the first mainstream national sport, but as a game elevated to ethical nobility. By its telling inclusion of a cricket match, this pertinent novel ensured, first, that school tales would thereafter rarely fail to include their allotment of cricket and, second, that fee- paying schools and, by extension, state secondary school programmed along the same lines, would naturally include cricket as an essential part of their curriculum. That, increasingly, over the better part of a century millions of boys, and also girls, constantly read cricket-associated stories and frequently played school-associated cricket provided the game with a cultural foundation of enormous strength and solidity. During this time no sport anywhere in the world had the benefit of so compelling a cultural booster.