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

47 The Outcrop; Walpole; Waugh; Wodehouse Et Al Several books stand out from the fairly uniform flow, in part because they took a slightly different line and in part because of the notability of their authors. One which represented both camps was Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky and Co , published in book form in 1899. The imperial laureate was unconvinced that public schools were producing the right stuff for empire-building, as his oft-quoted stanza infers: Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented your souls; With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals. Kipling, with characteristic individuality, wanted soldiers, brisk, brave and quick-thinking to patrol the colonies. He saw games as a silly distraction from their preparation: ‘the Englishman should have a care for higher responsibilities than’, he wrote, ‘casting a ball at three straight sticks and defending the same with a fourth.’ His trio of protagonists, Arthur Lionel Corkran aka Stalky, ‘Turkey’ M’Turk and Reggie aka ‘Beetle’, occupy Study 5 at the United Service College, which is their depot for a guerrilla war against their hated and unprepossessing masters and prefects and the entire public school ethic. To the horror of their housemaster, Mr Prout, they refuse to attend house matches. They coolly plot antics and stratagems of high complexity and turn their noses up at the Hughes-Reed creed. This unremitting rebelliousness was their training for colonial warfare. All the characters, pupils and teachers, are based on real people. Stalky’s brilliance as a soldier is prefigured by his authentic model, Major-General Lionel Charles Dunsterville, an imperial warrior of due distinction. From the stance of this present text, it is the very mixed reception that ‘Stalky’ received that is interesting. The savants across a range of opinion queued up to condemn it. HG Wells, Somerset Maugham, Henry James; the list was a long one. George Sampson, author of The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature , described it as ‘an unpleasant