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

147 The Runs Don’t Count younger, pre-teen-age reader. From about the late 1950s, however, there was a decline in school-based literature, as described at the end of chapter five. There was also a decline in cricket in schools and in public interest in first-class cricket. In all three cases, decline did not mean fall. A modicum remained. Few vehicles of social history vanish completely. Television assailed the cinema but there are still cinemas. Nevertheless, their importance has been diminished. During the 1940s 1.5 billion cinema tickets were sold a year at over 5000 venues and most people saw fifty feature films a year. Now there is a rump of some thousand cinemas and only one in ten people visit the cinemas as much as once a month. So, similarly, while there is still a certain amount of school cricket being played, it is significantly lower than in the immediate past, especially in the state sector. Of the 400 or schools registered with the English Schools Cricket Association (ESCA), all but 83 are members of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) of fee-paying schools. Most of the 83 are selective or otherwise purportedly prestigious schools. There are 3300 state secondary schools in the United Kingdom. Of course some of them will be playing cricket without recourse to the ESCA but not asmany now are offering cricket as a serious let alone solitary summer option on a large or formal scale. There are now usually seven or eight players in any England Test XI who have been educated in the fee-paying sector, a reversal of the old-style three or four ‘Gentlemen’ and seven or eight ‘Players’ of the earlier dispensation. Pessimistic critics have prophesied that an all fee-paying school educated England team is in the offing, something the ‘Gentlemen’ never managed in olden times. There are reasons bad and good why state schools are playing less cricket than in the halcyon decades of the first half of the 20 th century. The bad reason is the attrition of school playing fields, much of it for profit-related building development. The good reason lies in the broader panorama of sports being made available to pupils today. It