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

44 The Outcrop; Walpole; Waugh; Wodehouse Et Al from 1877 to 1948 and thus grew up in the first flush of the ‘Dominic’s’ phase. He went, like Tibby Reed himself as well as other ‘boarding school’ writers, to a day school, namely, the Archbishop Holgate Grammar School, Barnsley. Unlike Reed, he made writing his full-time occupation, beginning in surprising earnest at seventeen years of age with a serial in The Boy’s Friend magazine. Evenmore surprisingwas his prolific output, for all the books listed above are by him. It may not be a complete roster; these titles are the result of an afternoon’s trawl through the second-hand books for sale on line. Although this chapter will dwell on more familiar authors’ names, the efforts of RAH Goodyear, most of them published in the inter-war period, typify how saturated was the young people’s market by school-associated novels, with sport, including cricket, in some quantity. It also shows how many writers were able to make a credible living with serials and books, with often the former, as with ‘Dominic’s’, transmuted into the latter, two income streams for the same work, plus short stories in the anthologies and annuals which dominated Christmas book sales. My copy of The Hope of His House is yet another Sunday School prize, presented in 1938 to Harry Quick ‘for regular attendance’ at theGrovesendEnglishCongregational School’, the emphasis on ‘English’ supporting the speculation that Harry hailed from Grovesend, Swansea. Harry Quick’s prize begins rather than ends with cricket. The first 36 pages of the novel are devoted to the match between Deepquay and St Sepulchre’s. Here is a taste of the encounter, instructive as to the vocabulary range of the fluent author, the somewhat cabalistic ‘lingo’, referred to in the previous chapter, of the schoolboys and the deployment of quite erudite cricketing techniques, included with a confidence that boys and maybe girls everywhere would comprehend them. Deepquay need thirteen to win with only ‘Drift’ Marriner, a chief protagonist of the novel, and ‘Pop’ Cornan, an out-