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

17 The Origin; Tom Brown’s Schooldays seized on and interpreted as a rollicking hymn to the joys of football, cross country running, fighting, of a good clean nature, fists only, no under the belt punches, and cricket. That was to be its chief heritage. Tom Brown did, of course, like his progenitor, revere the aloof figure of Dr Arnold. But ambiguities also arise in any analysis of the great headmaster himself. Firstly, the origins of Arnold’s Rugby might be interpreted as a distortion of Christian precepts, difficult to square with Thomas Hughes’s more egalitarian gloss. The dictum of Robin Hood, who as the mischievous Anglo-Saxon irritant of the powerful Norman overlords, gained much in primacy in the ‘Muscular Christian’ schoolchild reading of the day, was reversed. Thomas Arnold colluded in robbing the poor and giving to the rich. Rugby had been founded as a school for local boys in 1567 by a prosperous grocer, Lawrence Sheriff. Gradually, it became almost completely an expensive boarding establishment with the boys of the neighbourhood excluded, much to the chagrin of their parents. This practice occurred nationwide. Harrow, for example, had been founded by John Lyon in 1571 for the poor boys of the vicinity, while Charterhouse and Christ’s Hospital were intended, in general terms, for the needy gentry. There were wriggles through legal loopholes for these and like establishments to become what the Victorians called ‘Great Schools’, while the arrival of railways certainly eased the distances over which pupils might be recruited. Another feature was the delay of entry, for the most part, to the age of thirteen; the original foundations had taken boys from the age of seven or eight and the slack of the younger group was largely taken up by the redevelopment of the preparatory school movement. In the second half of the 19 th century, 160 new ‘prep’ schools were built where youngsters might ready themselves for public schooling. These were also mainly boarding establishments, many of them in coastal or rural areas. The counterfactual term ‘public school’ stems from these beginnings, as does their enduring charitable status of which the system’s critics