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

36 The Template; The Fifth Form At St Dominic’s The literary historian Isabel Quigley concluded that ‘Reed was a better writer than his followers and is diminished by their imitations.’ Although he retained some of his piety with boys doing wrong and seeking redemption, often in the colonies, Tibby Reed was somewhat dismissive of Farrar and the sinful Eric. He saw Farrar’s work as a thinly veiled religious tract. Rather did he seek something more ‘Manly’, more in the Tom Brown tradition. It was this motive which caused him to engage more with sport, not least cricket, in his own stories and his followers, even if with less talent and assurance, paid slavish obeisance to their master and did likewise, with many an exciting last wicket stand on the college field. Jeffrey Richards writes of ‘a flock of formula writers’, copying Reed in elaborate detail, as to character, incident and setting. Among those in the immediate aftermath of Tibby Reed’s efforts were Hylton Cleaver, Harold Avery, Gunby Adath, John Rowe, Kent Carr and Richard Bird, all producing endlessly re-tellings of ‘Dominic’s’ over and again, albeit with scores of differently named fictitious schools. In so far as there was a struggle between the evangelical piousness of Frederic Farrar and the Muscular Christianity of Tibby Reed, and despite the ongoing sales of ‘Eric’, chiefly to the Sunday School coterie , it was the latter and his confederates who really won the hearts and minds of schoolchildren and, indeed, youths who had already left their elementary schools. The respected head teacher – ‘the Doctor’ in ‘Dominic’s’, in the wake of Tom Brown’s Dr Arnold - held in awe; the sarcastic beak or class teacher of uneven temper; the comedic – in a nod to pre-Brexit instincts - French teacher; the bully or wrong’un for whom Flashman endured as the brutish model; the cool and dandified sophisticate; the duffer; the sporting bloods; the handsome and honourable school captain; the ‘stolen exam paper’ sub-plot; the rags; fagging; the midnight feast in the dorm; the tuck shop; sardines on toast in the study; the strict matron (yes, there was, just occasionally, a female), the innocent suspect of