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

14 The Origin; Tom Brown’s Schooldays FD Maurice, no sportsman himself, was amongst others who found Thomas Hughes’ cricket credentials useful and encouraged him to include cricket in his Christian Socialist activities. He introduced cricket to the Working Class Institutes that the movement established and is thought to have played for a Christian Socialist XI against a factory team in 1854. Thomas Hughes was also a radical Liberal MP, representing Lambeth (1865-68) and Frome (1868-74) during the period of the famously reforming Gladstone administration. Interestingly, it was because of his vigorous support of the Liberals’ 1870 Elementary Education Act that he lost the goodwill of the Frome electorate who were suspicious of the drag on the rates this statute would cost. Interesting because, as chapter seven will describe, the construct of the 1870 Act was completely destroyed by the 1902 Education Act. This statute ushered in, cricket and all, the secondary schools system extant today. Thomas Hughes would have been mortified at the collapse of the School Boards set up by the 1870 legislation – but the fault, if fault it be, lay at the feet of Thomas Brown, whose fictitious exploits led inexorably, as we shall later observe, to the 1902 legislation. Thomas Hughes did not live long enough to witness this. He died of heart failure in Brighton in 1896, aged 73. His daughter, Mary, a pioneer woman, Poor Law Guardian and welfare advocate, inherited his sense of Christian social duty; his daughter Lilian offers a more mournful postscript, lost in the Titanic disaster of 1912. Like so many authors for younger readers, Thomas Hughes began his book in 1856 for his eight year old son, Maurice, who was about to go away to school, but his writing was delayed by the death of his daughter. He then showed the half-finished manuscript to a friend with literary connections who exclaimed ‘Tom, this must be published.’ It was, and had an immediate impact, selling 28,000 copies over the next few years, a goodly run for that time. By 1890 it had gone through 50 editions. Child death haunted the Victorians; Maurice died by drowning, aged eleven, before