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

143 of its methodology. There may have been pleasure in the games and other features but it was an extremely cabined academic regimen. Many, including those who quite enjoyed the experience, have commented, validly, on the mindless irrelevance of the actual substance. Apart from the ethical indecency of so cursory a cull of the wheat from the chaff either by scholarship or fee-paying before or eleven-plus after 1944, we know now that this summary ‘eugenic’ testing had a 10% error rate either way and in one major national study a 25% dysfunction; that the number of places on offer varied wildly from area to area; and that there were, proportionately, many more places for boys than girls. Factoring in the additional effect of social circumstances, the educational historian Brian Simon was able to calculate during the 1960s that the chances of the son of a Carmarthen solicitor enjoying higher education were 180 times that of the daughter of a West Ham docker. It has been wisely opined that we educate our children as if they are going to become our grandparents. The conservationist motif in schooling is extremely powerful. As teachers and parents apropos school, we make the Friends of the Earth look wastefully profligate. The learning of French which was such an excellent idea when the Cobden- Chevalier free trade treaty was agreed in 1860, still ensures its premier teaching in schools today in spite of changes in the linguistic requirements of the nation’s children and adults. Cricket again was a beneficiary. Once cricket was fixed in the curriculum, once the ground had been laid out, once the equipment had been purchased and once the traditions had been recognised, it would take some shifting. And so for 50 or 60 years it proved. Once again the historical chicken and egg comes into mind and the historian’s parlour game of ‘What ifferey’ might be played. Contemplate for a moment the counterfactual or alternative notion of Thomas Hughes writing Tom Brown, Midshipman . It is not altogether fantastical. Captain Fredrick Marryat enjoyed much success with Mr Midshipman Easy , first published in 1836 but still popular in the 20 th century, The Educational Effect