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

31 The Template; The Fifth Form At St Dominic’s around the authors of school stories is intriguing, in that, such is the law of unforeseen consequences, their writings were to foster a state schools system erected by their Tory foes. Reed’s eldest brother, Charles Edward, had attended the City of London School, where he had been school captain and the enterprising youth responsible for introducing cricket and football there. He went to Cambridge and then became a distinguished Congregationalist minister and secretary of the British and Foreign Bible Society, the agency that oversaw the pattern of nonconformist elementary schools nationally, as well as initiating missionary work abroad. Tibby Reed followed him at the City of London School which was established in 1834, its foundation deriving from a medieval bequest of misty and uncertain rootage. Like other fee-paying schools of those times, it contrived to offer its services chiefly to well-to-do families, although it did add some modish lustre to the ancient regime, being the first major school of its typology to introduce science into the curriculum. Young Tibby Baines loved it. He enjoyed every minute of his time there from 1864 to 1868. He progressed well academically and gave enthusiastically on the cricket and football field. Some time after leaving there seemed to be a dearth of games at the school. He wrote to the school magazine of ‘the days when the City School was deemed a force, not unworthy to range itself against St Pauls, King’s College, University School or Christ’s Hospital, when..our bats punished the bowling..The credit of the School is at stake’. With his ‘frank, open face, black hair, and lively dark eyes’, he was, reported a fellow-pupil Joseph Sime, ‘a good all-rounder at cricket.’ He joined the family printing business and became renowned for his expertise in typefounding, while, owing to domestic circumstances, he found himself managing director of the firm aged only 29. A lifelong Liberal and deacon of the Congregational church, he was, above all, in both word and deed, the quintessential Muscular Christian. He would have approved of the words