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

15 The Origin; Tom Brown’s Schooldays he could benefit from his father’s advisory fable. However, authorship gave Thomas Hughes a useful means of adding to his earnings, as well as a conduit for his beliefs; ‘my whole object in writing at all’, he said, ‘was to get the chance of preaching’. TomBrown’s Schooldays is, of course, semi-autobiographical, although it is claimed by some that the model is Thomas’ older brother George, who went to Rugby at the same time as Thomas. It is what would now be called a ‘docudrama’. For example, the bruising fight between Tom Brown and ‘Slogger’ Williams was based on a genuine exercise in pugilism by Augustus Orlebar and Bulkeley Owen Jones; indeed, Gerald Howat believed that it was the former who was the actual original for Tom Brown. Both of those schoolboy boxers became Anglican ministers, Augustus Orlebar as vicar of the Bedfordshire parish of Willington for over 50 years. But thereby lies another tale. Both clergymen represented the hearty creed of Muscular Christianity. Thomas Hughes subscribed to this doctrine and his famous novel is regarded as its early manifesto. In his less well-known sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford (serialised 1859; published in book form 1861) he wrote that it is ‘a good thing to have muscled, strong and well-exercised bodies. The least of Muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief that a man’s body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of righteous causes and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men.’ Fighting was an element in this code. Thomas Hughes wrote, ‘fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man’ Mrs Gaskell had a sly little dig at the Muscular Christians in her fine novel, Wives and Daughters (1864-66). Admiring the slimness of her heroine’s father, Dr Gibson, she writes of him being ‘thin enough to be called ‘a genteel figure’, in those days, before Muscular Christianity had come into vogue.’ From mid-century, rugged toughness in the