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

20 The Origin; Tom Brown’s Schooldays In justice, it must be asserted that the cities in question built fine museums, libraries, art galleries and concert halls in a profusion that would hardly be contemplated today, but, like many another socially mobile group before them, their wealthy citizens yearned to assimilate themselves within the higher ranks of society. Richard Cobden accused his fellow ‘shopocrats’ of ‘glorying in being the toadies of a clodpole aristocracy.’ He was horrified when the Manchester Corporation, established in 1838, opted to adopt the robes, chains and other mummery of the ancient City of London. New money sought old traditions. This included buying into the rustic joy of an estate and sending your sons to Eton or Harrow. A cricketing example of the breed would be AN Hornby, the Lancashire and England opening bat. The son of a rising Blackburn cotton family, he went to Harrow and invested in Parkfield, a country estate near Nantwich among the lush dairy pastures of the Cheshire plain. Parkfield boasted all the requisite accoutrements of the country house, inclusive of a string of sprightly hunters and a cricket ground. Neville Cardus fittingly called him ‘the Squire of Lancashire’. The emerging industrial middle class were keen to embrace the conventions of the old aristocracy yet, whilst they may have been egregiously vain, they were not stupid. They wanted value for the brass they were laying out – and this had an enormous effect on the public schools and how they organised themselves internally and presented themselves externally. Given their narrow curriculum and raucous unruliness, several of these schools found their dwindling pupillage economically testing. Thomas Arnold’s moment had come. The Augean Stables of the existing schools required a cleanser of Thomas Arnold’s Herculean energy. It is difficult to satirise let alone believe the facts of their deplorable state. It has been said that ‘teaching and flogging were interchangeable terms.’ Fifteen year old Reginald Chancellor suffered from ‘water on the brain’, but his teacher, Mr Hopley, who kept a school in Eastbourne ‘for the persons of