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

27 The Origin; Tom Brown’s Schooldays drinker. HappilyGeorgeCotton foundmarital solacewithone Sophia Ann Tomkinson, also the daughter of a clergyman, but apparently one whose views on strong liquors were not as stringent as those of Rugby’s headmaster! The question might be asked; where was Thomas Arnold while all this excitement was being enjoyed? The answer is that he already left the school for his summer holidays, retreating to the solitude of Fox How, his Lake District home where he found respite and the chance to refresh himself after the strenuous rigours of his tiring work. He had given the various permissions for the match to take place but this was still the staging-point; the school had been knocked into disciplinary shape – but the boys continued to arrange any sport. This had one advantage. We know this from the evidence of AP Stanley, one of Arnold’s most loved pupils and an accomplished scholar who became Dean of Westminster and wrote Arnold’s biography. He played no sport at all but nobody harassed or jeered him because of this. The boys who fancied sport just got on with it and left everyone else alone. The cult of Athleticism had not yet become embedded to the point where the swot or bookworm might be harassed and jeered by the teachers as well as the pupils. Sport did not figure on Thomas Arnold’s agenda, any more than Thomas Hughes’ socialistic principles appeared on that of the reforming headmasters and their staff. Neither the Erastian Christianity of the one nor the Christian Socialism of the other figured much in their plans. They cherry-picked the Muscular Christianity so admirably portrayed in Tom Brown’s Schooldays . Thomas Hughes’ early biographers were adamant that the book was used more or less as a policy handbook by the public schools during the second half of the 19 th century and that ‘it deeply influenced the structure and philosophy of the English public schools’, more so by implication than Thomas Arnold himself. As we have seen, of the two Thomases, it was Brown, not Hughes, who made the running – and this is of some significance in the history of cricket.