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

23 The Origin; Tom Brown’s Schooldays of St Paul were plentifully preached in the chapels of the reformed public schools. Behaviour took precedence over faith. This was all of a piece with the later Victorian concern with public andprivatehealth, a timewhen thephrase ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ somehow suggested that the two attributes were equal in valuation. The microbiologist Bo Drasar has argued that the boarding school matron’s check on bowel movements – and the practice seems to have been even more pronounced in girls’ schools – contributed to the British obsession with constipation, a complaint from which, he gently adds, no one has ever died. As the century wore on and the findings of Charles Darwin were promulgated, there was a crude distortion of evolutionary theory, strongly contested against by TH Huxley, Darwin’s ‘bulldog’ advocate, called ‘Social Darwinism’. This saw survival of the fittest, not by species, but more individually. Its chief proponent, Herbert Spencer, was a keen supporter of schools sports, with the cricket pitch and the football field appropriate venues for gilded youth to exhibit its fitness to survive. ‘Fortitude, self-rule and public spirit’ was the motto. It borderedontheanti-intellectual. In1872oneheadmasterwas quoted as saying that the main aim was to avoid producing ‘effeminate, enfeebled bookworms.’ Correlli Barnett wrote that ‘by the 1880s the playing field had become what the parade ground is for the army – a powerful instrument for inculcating common responses, values and outlook. The purpose of this ritual elaboration of ballgames was a debased version of Arnold’s ideal of Christian education’. From the viewpoint of cricket’s trajectory towards being, even for a time, the major, English sport, this rather sudden change of emphasis as the public schools became more stabilisedwas tobe crucial. On theonehand, itwas laundered. That is, there was a complete reversal from Hanoverian cricket, bucolic, corrupt, roughshod, plagued by gambling, to a sport that had the blessings of the church, such was its perceived saintly and moral virtues, what, elsewhere,