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

12 The Origin; Tom Brown’s Schooldays At the risk of pedantry, one must acknowledge that Tom Brown rather than Tom Hughes was responsible for what followed the book’s publication. Thomas Hughes’ social and political aspirations were more nuanced and more radical than what ensued. The slant that was placed on Tom Brown’s Schooldays by those many who sought to utilise it as a schedule for school-life, indeed life itself, was a cruder version than the author perhaps would have preferred. Nonetheless, he would have recognised his identity in the outcome. Thomas Hughes was born in 1822 in Uffington, then Berkshire, now Oxfordshire, the son of John Hughes, who had been an Oxford contemporary of Thomas Arnold. He played a rough and ready form of cricket with the local boys and then, after three years at a prep school in Twyford, near Reading, he went to Rugby in 1834, aged eleven. Thomas Arnold had been headmaster of Rugby since 1828 and his changes, not just in the syllabus but in the tone of the school, were beginning to tell. Thomas Hughes’ evident reverence for the great headmaster was observed from a distance; he never entered the intellectual and high- minded elite that clustered around Arnold. He followed in his father’s footsteps by going up to Oriel College, Oxford, in 1842 – the year Thomas Arnold, died, aged only 46, worn out by his indefatigable endeavours, both professional and domestic – Mrs Arnold, mother of ten children, discreetly complained about her husband’s sexual avidity. Thus, Thomas Hughes never had the opportunity to further any connection with him as an adult, but he consorted at Oriel with the headmaster’s son, Matthew Arnold, poet, school inspector and prominent commentator, and with AH Clough, poet and scholar and one of the most accomplished and favoured of Thomas Arnold’s Rugby alumni . Thomas Hughes played in the Varsity Match of 1843, his 15 not out one of the best innings Oxford could manage as they were defeated by 162 runs, but his very selection was welcomed by the Rev. James Pycroft, for, as he wrote, ‘there