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

30 The Template; The Fifth Form At St Dominic’s original ideology, then Reed was the Lenin who put the idea into effective practice. He borrowed from Thomas Hughes – the distant headmaster; the Flashman type bully; the climatic cricket match – but his was an entirely fictional scene. A strength of Tom Brown’s Schooldays is its actuality. The school and its head master are real, as are other aspects and people. But that does have its limitations, for one cannot stretch the imagination too far and, for instance, alter Arnold’s true disposition. Then again, the book lacks somewhat in compactness as a school story. Using my own edition as an instance, the first 56 pages, out of 220 all told, roughly a quarter of the text, cover events before Tom even arrives at Rugby. Using the freedom of the wholly imagined school, Reed was able to construct a much tighter and coordinated template in the several stories he wrote. Especially with his signature novel, The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s, he contrived to be the draughtsman of the formula that scores of writers would utilise. He became for the authors of schoolboy stories what Agatha Christie was for crime writers. Reed was familiarly known as ‘Tibby’, as in a constricted pronunciation of TeeBee. He was a Londoner, born in Hackney in 1852, the son of Charles Reed, a wealthy London printer and Liberal MP who, of interest to the later argument in this text on the topic of school administration, was Chairman of the very influential and large London School Board. He was later knighted. Tibby Reed’s grandfather was a Congregational minister and hymnist, representing a strong and combative nonconformist tradition stretching back to the family’s ancestor John Reed, a colonel in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. Tibby Reed’s mother was Margaret Baines, a member of the well-known Baines clan of Leeds. The Baines family – from which, of course, Tibby took his second forename – were also active Liberal politicians. Margaret’s father, Edward Baines was proprietor and editor of the then influential radical newspaper the Leeds Mercury , for which Tibby Baines was later to write a weekly column. The prominence of Liberal politics in and