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

131 of the boys born in the United Kingdom during the first twenty years of the 20 th century became boy scouts. Apart from a disciplined concentration on courteous behaviour and energetic pursuits, there was a purposeful military dimension driven by the poor results of medical examinations of potential army recruits, especially at the time of the Boer War. These brigades and troops were, in effect, the other ranks equivalent of the public schools officer cadet corps. Scouting was born of warring, its founder, Robert Baden-Powell, scornful of those – ‘these men are called ‘politicians’’ – who sought to reduce defence costs. A pragmatic aspect of these youth movements was its ‘ecclesiastical’ reliance on church halls. There was a heavy reliance on religious premises, with the churches keen to embrace youth to what was then their patriotic, martial and imperialist bosom. To press the analogy further, there were church parades for the many as there were school chapels for the few. The church halls were also to do good service when the more relaxed mufti-clad youth clubs, with their ping pong and ‘socials’, were organised particularly in the 1930s and 1940s. The pacification of society during the Victorian epoch following the riotous upheavals of the previous century was an amazing achievement. The crime rate dropped by 50% in the last half of the 19 th century and remained at an abnormally low level until well after World War Two, when it rose to dire heights not known since Hanoverian times. The subjugation or, more kindly, the sublimation of youth played a significant role in this outcome, some of it because of the uniformed and drilled youth associations. The main answer, however, was essentially through a state system of schools, with cricket a critical element in the second phase of that development. Prior to 1870 elementary schooling had been supplied by the churches albeit with some state aid and inspection. This so- called ‘Voluntary’ system was of its nature haphazard and The Educational Effect