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

144 during which, for some fourteen years after 1950, CS Forester completed his twelve-book ‘Hornblower’ cycle. The navy, like the army and the Empire in general, were all worthwhile and profitable subjects for publication and ones in which the lessons of Muscular Christianity could be taught. Tibby Reed and then Charles Hamilton and all the rest of them might have followed suit and there would have been a dearth of school-based stories written, strangely enough, largely for those who didn’t attend such schools having already, for the most part, left the very different type of school they had patronised. The flood of school stories created its own air of normalcy but, on reflection, it took a stupendous leap in imagination in mid 19 th century to believe that so endurable and widespread a literary genre could be fashioned by what was so exclusive and remote an agency as the boarding school. It might never have happened. Cricket is rarely to be found in seafaring and imperial yarns. Would the reverse cause and effect have occurred? Would the absence of school tales, hence an absence of cricket, have had the converse effect? Generations of youngsters would have lost a meaningful source of knowledge about the method and ethos of the game, indeed, the mechanics and ethics of the boarding school as well. The popular concept of what a secondary school might look like and offer might have been sufficiently different. Under the eye of the oppositional Liberal Party, the strict terms of the 1902 Act and the 1904 Memorandum of Regulations may have been altered or replaced by the progressive Liberal ministry elected in 1906. There might not have been a new breed of 2000 grammar schools by 1939 and, in consequence, there might have been a lessened expectation that every secondary school should have cricket as a compulsory feature of its existence. That tentative thought is the measure of the weighting of the influence of school-based fiction on authentic schools and, by token of that, on the role of cricket in schools. Formal cricket is an expensive game. For those of us who The Educational Effect