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

38 The Template; The Fifth Form At St Dominic’s the schools informed the authors linguistically and how much the authors taught the schools, masters as well as pupils, how to talk schoolese. One suspects the latter must take most of the credit or blame. Certainly the extensive descriptions of cricket matches must have furnished several generations of lads perhaps playing cricket among themselves in local parks, with the arcane lexicon of this convoluted pastime and/or prepared them word-wise were they to find themselves in secondary schools that included cricket on their agenda. To know in which direction smartly to turn when ordered to square leg may have saved many childhood readers from later embarrassment. Tibby Reed widened the Tom Brown trio of East, Arthur and Tom himself and developed, as well as some compelling and much imitated dual friendships, larger combines. These often comprised junior groups, the authors remembering that many of their readers were of quite a young age. The intra-school rivalries, by year or house, were literally played out constantly on the games field – and cricket, as Thomas Hughes had semi-factually realised, was ideal for this purpose. Association Football was fine and filled many an exciting page but, in truth, it was often limited to a page, Simpler, shorter, unequivocal, it was soon done with and lacked the complexity of cricket. The school right back and inside left (reverting to ancient positional usage to avoid anachronism) may have been bosom friends but in the huff and puff of an end-to-end thriller, there was little opportunity to philosophise on such comradeship. The cricket stand shared by two buddies was, conversely, ideal for such celebration. Cricket was more languid and contemplative and, importantly, it became more and more the sport that endorsed the Christian doctrine, that is to say, a Victorian version of the Christian doctrine. For school story writers, anxious to round off their plots and round up their characters, the fact that cricket occupied the last term of the year was undeniably helpful. Many a school story involved a cricket match and many of these came at