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

130 Chapter Seven The Educational Effect ‘Youth Takes a Bow’ was a stage and radio show produced by Bryan Michie and Jack Hylton just before and at the beginning of the Second World War, with teenagers Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise among the cast. ‘Youth Takes a Bow’ might have served for a political clarion call in the last third of the 19 th century. The youth question troubled the late Victorians. It was in the 1880s that the phrase ‘youth problem’ was first discussed. It is arguable that, for the first time, ‘youth’ or ‘adolescence’ was being observed as a phenomenon. Population was not only increasing but it was also heavily imbalanced towards the younger end. In mid-19 th century the median age of the population was just over 26; it is over 40 today. Only a quarter of the population were over 45. Evangelical alarm bells were ringing. Victorian society faced problems in the mass. Where there might have been two or three cheeky chappies in each of 15,000 mainly small parishes before the Industrial Revolution, there were now hundreds of footloose teenagers in cramped cities and towns. Mass answers of an organisational answer had to be found. Muscular Christianity sprung into action with the notion of the disciplined youth agency. In 1882 in a mission hall in north-west GlasgowWilliamAlexander Smith established the Boys’ Brigade. It was the world’s first voluntary, uniformed organisation for boys. By 1910 it had in the UK 100,000 members and 10,000 officers in its 2200 companies. It was joined by a flurry of other such bodies like the Boys’ Life Brigade (1899) and the Church Lads’ Brigade – CLB or Cheeky Little Buggers in the vernacular – (1891). The enormously successful Boy Scout movement, something of an offshoot of the Boys’ Brigade, arose to become the largest youth organisation in the world. It has been estimated that a third