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

140 term, there would be cricket. Much of British secondary schooling still remains locked in the sterile moulding designed in the 1900s, docilely accepted then by a public saturated by a deluge of school story images. If ever there was a case of nature imitating art, this was it. It was, nevertheless, Christmas Day for cricket. Practically every new grammar school made cricket the compulsory game. All had to play cricket on the games afternoon or, in some cases, on Saturdays. The school would run three or four elevens with fixtures against other schools while internal ‘house’ competitions would engage two or three teams from each of four or more ‘houses’. There might be swimming and athletics and the usually dreaded cross country but cricket reigned supreme, its superior place guaranteed by its high cultural status at St Dominic’s and Greyfriars. It should be recalled that many of the teachers of such new schools had not themselves been at boarding schools but had, like the pupils, picked up the vernacular and the modus operandi mostly from their reading. Either way, they bought into the idea wholly. A majority of masters usually associated themselves with the umpiring and chaperoning of teams. Some of it may have been peer pressure but most teachers seemed willing enough, even if their occasional woolliness over the niceties of the LBW law proved a trifle irksome, as well as being prepared to enlist for the staff versus school game at the end of the summer term. There had, of course, been schools cricket outside the public school sector before 1902, much of it depending on energetic individuals and varying from area to area. Although, as we have seen, school literature is primarily located in the boarding schools, there were plenty of day schools similar in style, several of them taking in a modicum of boarders. All of them, as a matter of course, included cricket in the syllabus. These were chiefly private-venture or proprietary schools run as business sometimes on a joint-stock basis. They were aimed at the commercial classes who could afford reasonable but not outlandish fees for their children The Educational Effect