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

146 Conclusion The Runs Don’t Count It is now approaching eighty years since I took the short walk up the ‘brew’ and across the bridge over the railway and canal to buy The Rover , the first step into an intensive round of reading school and cricket stories, not least those of the Rover’s very own Rob Higson of Highshire and England and his tales of ‘It’s Runs that Count’. Eighty years on and the runs don’t seem to count for as much as they did then. In the 1940s, of course, the long era of boarding school yarns flavoured by thrilling cricket matches had only a dozen or years to run as a mainstream course. Although The Hotspur and its stable-mates retained the school element, they did not allow it to monopolise their copy as it had previous story books like Gem and Magnet . The fact that Rob Higson was a professional county cricketer was another indication that the mould, if not broken, had been a trifle fractured. As for the novels, the older ones were still being re-printed and some new ones were being written, although the genre began to fade from about the 1960s. The last major publishing success in this lengthy line was probably the ‘Jennings’ novels of Anthony Buckeridge. There were 24 in all, the first published in 1950, recounting the exploits of JCT Jennings at Limbury Court. Most of the rest had been published by 1977, with a couple very much later in the 1990s. There is some cricket. The thirdof the series, Jennings’ Little Hut , features a house match with a memorable last wicket stand. The Jennings books proved to be enormously popular although it should be noted that, unlike most of his famous fictitious predecessors, Jennings was a preparatory school boy, much younger than the Tom Browns and Harry Whartons of yesteryear. Perhaps the appeal was more to the