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

32 The Template; The Fifth Form At St Dominic’s of, David Newsome, author of Godliness and Good Learning . Published in 1961, it defined Muscular Christianity by way of its fears; ‘the expulsion of all that is effeminate, un- English and excessively intellectual.’ Joseph Sime wrote, ‘Reed was a true follower of Christ, but without any cant or feeble sentimentality in his religion..the simple, cheerful Puritanism in which he had been brought up was eminently suited to his simple, manly character and disposition.’ It was an uncanny combine of heritage, physique and outlook. Like his idol Thomas Hughes and almost in Hughes’ chosen words, Tibby Reed laid down the tenets of his co-operative aspirations; ‘the strong fellows should look after the weak, the active must look after the lazy, the merry must cheer up the dull, the sharp must lend a helping hand to the duffer. Pull together learning, playing and praying.’ He threw himself unceasingly into all he did but his vivacious flame was dimmed and extinguished at the early age of 41 in 1893. Rather like Thomas Arnold, it seems his remorseless work-load gradually enfeebled him, leaving him prey to consumption. His longtime friend Joseph Sime wrote, ‘the boys of the English-speaking world have lost one of their best friends’ and elsewhere that he was ‘the very ideal of the chivalrous English gentleman.’ The literary descendant and heir of Thomas Hughes, and consciously so, Tibby Reed’s experience was different in some regards. Reed was very much the Londoner, having had none of his predecessor’s rural childhood, while, the one the lawyer, the other the businessman, their professional lives differed. Above all, he neither went to boarding school nor university. When he came to write his school stories, he depended heavily on the input of two friends who had been schooled at Radley School, in Oxfordshire, founded in 1847 as one of the group of new fee-paying establishments that manifestly increased the strength of the reformed public school movement. It was perhaps this freedom from the chains of realism that allowed Tibby Reed license to construct a formula of boarding school life which served him well and provided