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

48 The Outcrop; Walpole; Waugh; Wodehouse Et Al book about unpleasant boys at an unpleasant school,’ The defence of the redoubt of Athleticism and Muscular Christianity, and the place of the game, in particular, the ethically justified game of cricket, withstood this maverick attack with staunch resolve, angered by Kipling’s scorn both of sport and religion. A more convivial welcome was offered to HA Vachell’s The Hill; a Romance of Friendship , hailed as ‘the best book about schoolboys since Tom Brown’, and, like Tom Brown, given a real-life setting. Published in 1905, it traces the time of John Verney, a rather shy youth of scholarly and theological tastes, at Harrow. Vachell himself was an Harrovian who went on to be a prolific author of over fifty works of fiction. The key theme of his most famous book, The Hill, is John’s close friendship with the more ebullient Harry Desmond. It could be Tom Brown and George Arthur. There are the usual stresses and strains, with a major scene set at Lord’s for the Eton and Harrow match. Harry dismisses the captain of Eton. The laurels are his. It is a moment, too, when the two are reconciled after a quarrel. John goes off to Oxford and Harry is killed in the Boer War. The plot includes the conventional ne’er-do-well in the shape of Scaife, ‘the son of a Liverpool merchant, bred in or about the docks’, so lacking in breeding that he loses his temper during the Lord’s encounter. Factually based, Harry is patterned on CB Childe-Pemberton who scored an entertaining 44 against Eton at Lord’s in 1872 and became a victim of the Boer War. The genuine background to The Hill , which proved – 21 editions by 1914 - to be a best-seller, is a useful reminder that by this juncture the major school matches were featured in the establishment broadsheets, adding further in the public mind to the close association of cricket with the great schools. Mention might also be made of Sir Home Gordon (1871- 1956), the long-serving cricketing journalist and writer of several cricket books, who tried his hand at fiction in 1921