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

141 and they modelled themselves on the public schools, whilst perhaps at the same time offering some science or even book-keeping. It was the briskness of these schools that had helped drive the rather stodgy, old grammar schools into decline. HG Wells, who had some experience of teaching in such establishments, includes them in his novels. One of his earliest, Love and Mr Lewisham , published in 1900, has Mr Lewisham teaching at the Whortley Proprietary School, while his very last novel, published in 1941, You Can’t Be Too Careful , finds its protagonist Edward Albert Tewler a pupil at such a school and involved in a school cricket match. As for Arthur Kipps, eponymous anti-hero of the 1905 novel, he reluctantly underwent tuition at the Cavendish Academy for Young Gentlemen in Hastings. He was a boarder there, with Mr Woodrow the patently unqualified headmaster, until he was fourteen. A conversation piece from Kipps brightly illustrates the graded classification of schools then. Kipps is on the defensive: ‘I went to a middle class school, you know. You mustn’t fancy I’m one of these here board- school chaps – but you know it reely weren’t a first-class affair… If you didn’t want to learn you needn’t – I don’t believe it was much better than one of these here national schools..we wore mortar boards o’ course.’ These all added to the motley and provided models when secondary education was regularised in the state system, so that, alongside the grammar schools, as new and separate ‘senior’ or ‘central’ schools were opened, playing fields suitable for cricket were adjoined or made available. Even so, in many urban areas the ‘all-through school’ remained in vogue, sometimes with a three storey building of infant, junior and senior floors. Nonetheless, for most boys, the first proper chance of playing formal cricket was at school at the age of eleven. This meant that many boys had a chance to play cricket, in fact in most cases were forced to do so. While, therefore, not everyone had this opportunity, it was certainly enjoyed by a much higher number of boys than in the decades prior to the 1902 Education Act. The Educational Effect