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

13 The Origin; Tom Brown’s Schooldays was little chance for players who had not been at Eton, Harrow or Winchester’. Thomas Hughes rowed no 2 in a highly combative Oriel boat; this was a time when Oriel had a distinctive sporting mien, including a very strong football team. Gerald Howat reckons that three-quarters of its fifty undergraduates at that time were active sportsmen. The stalwart oarsman and batsman, Thomas Hughes, was called to the bar in 1848, became a QC in 1869 and a county circuit judge in 1882. Apart from his influential authorship, the details of Thomas Hughes’ subsequent career are possibly less well-known to cricket-lovers. In 1848 he became a Christian Socialist, joining the group that gathered around the person and teachings of Fredrick Denison Maurice (1805-72) and other notables such as John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, author of The Water Babies , among other novels and FJ Furnival, founder of the Oxford English Dictionary . An Anglican divine and academic, FD Maurice believed that civic regeneration and social reconstruction were only possible under the aegis of Christian principles of co-operation – and Thomas Hughes devoted himself to this precept his whole life long. With FD Maurice he helped found the Working Men’s College in Central London, an establishment aimed at offering a liberal education to artisans. He was Principal of that institution from1872 to 1883. Unusually for one of his class, Thomas Hughes offered support to the Chartist movement which aimed at wide-scale Parliamentary reform. He lobbied successfully in the passage of the legislation that created the Industrial and Provident Societies; he campaigned hard to restrict laws that constrained trade union activity, and he was a bustling figure in the co-operative movement, presiding over the first national co-operative congress in 1869. His Wimbledon home was built by the London Working Builders’ Association, a Christian Socialist body. In the communitarian spirit of Robert Owen, he conjured up the idea of a utopian colony called Rugby Tennessee for England’s ‘second sons’, those who had no land or title to inherit nor professions to adorn.