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

139 It is of passing interest that one of Will Hay’s schools, Narkover (a borrowing from JB Morton, ‘Beachcomber’ of the Daily Express and his ‘By the Way’ column), and Chiselbury the school of his bucolic successor Jimmy Edwards – a sort of jovial Wackford Squeers to Will Hay’s wilier Mr Chips – are reminders of prisons. The satirical ‘penitentiary’ motif was certainly very apt. It also acts as a reminder of why Frank Richards and company chose the boarding school for their ambit of production. It was chosen simply because it circumscribed a discrete number of characters within an exclusive setting, isolated from family and community alike. All else was literally out of bounds. It was done for the same reason that Agatha Christie has Miss Marple detached from the world in a country house cut off by snow with a short identifiable list of murder suspects. You never find Hercules Poirot as part of his investigations doing house-to- house interviews on a 10,000 unit housing estate. It is what the adept script writer David Croft, he of Dad’s Army and other television series, called a ‘trapped environment.’ Frank Richards knew the literary value of keeping his cast of boys in claustrophobic quarantine – but it was an unappetising recipe for general education and for a bustling, progressive society. A significant aspect of this familiarity through prodigious reading was the fact that it had alerted many boys and girls to what to expect. Among very many reported examples of this was HE Bates, author of The Darling Buds of May , who wrote of going to Kettering Grammar School where ‘I knew very well..I should have to learn Latin and French and a new kind of English in which words like cads and bounders and beastly fellows played a large part.’ As a first generation grammar schoolboy myself, I knew exactly that, correctly uniformed and taught by gowned masters, I would face impositions not lines, detentions not staying in, prep not homework, prefects not monitors, break not playtime, and, daftest of all, I would be in a ‘house’. I soon found that our particular argot also included ‘doff’ for steal and ‘pills’ for testicles, leading to a peculiar outcome were one to doff a cap or swallow one’s pills. I also knew, come the summer The Educational Effect