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

37 The Template; The Fifth Form At St Dominic’s some foul deed, and, as significant as anything, especially as the century wore on and Athleticism tightened its hearty grip, the games. A very significant factor was the use of a particular form of language, a kind of accepted schoolboy slang of the ‘what rot’ variety. Witness this sentence from ‘Dominic’s’, class- ridden and assured, at the satisfactory conclusion of a fight with some ‘louts’ from the town: ‘a pair of well-trained athletic schoolboys, with a plucky youngster to help them, are a match any day for twice the number of half-tipsy cads’. The overall tone is perfect and the choice of words – well-trained; athletic; plucky; tipsy; cads - both prototypical and telling. From jolly wheezes to dreadful funks, readers were introduced to a new vocabulary and a peculiar patois. Few of the words were neologisms as such. It was more a youthful argot that was gradually adopted, as we shall see, by many state secondary schools, albeit with most establishments adding a few special words of their own coinage. The ‘er’ usage, like ‘fresher’ for ‘freshman’ (first seen in print in 1882) is a key example, especially in games, such as ‘footer’(1863), ‘soccer’ (as from ‘association’, 1885) and rugger (1888) – and onward to ‘Champers at Twickers and Starkers for Brekkers.’ ‘Dominic’s’ and the hundreds of books that were its heritage taught generation after generation of children the jargon of Freemasonic boyhood. One cannot claim ownership of that analogue. In Mrs Gaskell’s already-cited Wives and Daughters , written in the mid-1860s, Squire Hamley, no scholar himself, had bought into the fashion of sending his sons to public school. This leads him to complain to his sons, Osborne and Roger, ‘you see, all you public schoolboys have a kind of Freemasonry of your own, and outsiders are looked on by you much as I look upon rabbits and all that is not game.’ His sons have left school for Oxford but their father recognises that their friendships continue after school, preserving the mannerisms and especially the language of their educational experience. It is difficult to judge at this distance in time how much