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

24 The Origin; Tom Brown’s Schooldays I have termed ‘Christianity at the crease’. On the other hand, it was brought in-house. Before these great reforms, so-called sports at such schools had been pupil-led, often leading to scandal and mischief. The first recorded inter- school game – Charterhouse and Westminster in 1794 – was a clandestine affair that caused much trouble, unofficial as to the nuisance to the civilian populace thereabouts, official as to the severe punishments meted out to the marauding players. The famed Eton and Harrow fixture started during the 1820s and, as the atmosphere cleared and cricket gained its new reputation for sobriety, it soon became one of the ‘go-to’ events of the London season. A significant aspect of this reclamation of control by the teachers was their total assumption of authority for games as an indispensable element in the curriculum. Earlier enterprises, like cross country harriers and paper chases, had proved to be hazardous and the causes of disturbance, as the boys skylarked freely abroad. More seriously, there was recorded in 1825 the death of a public schoolboy as a consequence of an arranged fight, with seconds and so forth but pupil-managed, that had lasted one and a half hours. The cautious decision to outlaw all pupil-run activities favoured games like football and cricket that required proper equipment and, most importantly, a prepared terrain, usually within the school boundaries. It is pretty much agreed that the particular cleansing of cricket within the general purifying of the public schools played a primary role in the construct of Victorian, indeed 20 th century, cricket. In many respects it became unrecognisable in its new and holy guise as opposed to its older, more abrasive dispensation. Cricket’s diaspora throughout the country and across the Empire was mediated by the teachers, clergymen, soldiers and public, inclusive of colonial, servants, all of them polished products of the reformed public school regime. So thus to the cricket match in Tom Brown’s Schooldays . Apart from a slightly uneasy afterword about Dr Arnold’s death, it comes at the end of the book, setting the seal on the