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

50 The Outcrop; Walpole; Waugh; Wodehouse Et Al Once again cricket serves as emblematic of this comradeship. David and Frank confess to being ‘rather idiots about one another’, as Frank prepares to leave school, but not before they join together in a last wicket partnership that ensures Adam’s House, playing against Tovey’s House, wins the Marchester cock house trophy. Frank Maddox calls it ‘the best of all the days I have had at school’. It was at about the same time that EW Hornung produced Fathers of Men (1912). ‘Willie’ Hornung is recalled as the creator of Raffles, the amateur cracksman, not the last of fiction’s gentlemen criminals, and ‘the finest slow bowler of his decade’ to boot. Hornung was the brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle. Both were MCC members. Conan Doyle took 7 for 61 for MCC versus Cambridgeshire in 1899 and, famously, his sole first-class wicket was that of WG Grace in 1900, an event he celebrated in humorous verse without mentioning that his immortal adversary had scored 110. Hornung was also an MCC member and, given that he suffered from myopia and asthma, he was a most courageous if unreliable wicket keeper. His dismissive Wisden obituary curtly observes ‘he was not in the eleven whilst at Uppingham’. Oh dear. Conan Doyle preferred Fathers of Men to the popular Raffles series, perhaps because he disliked the glorification of a criminal, one who was, in fact, the felonious mirror-image of Sherlock Holmes. The Hornung school book is another that follows the fortunes of two friends, Jan Rutter, captain of the school eleven, and Evan Devereux. Jan is the stable boy with a Mummerset accent who has contrived to find a place in Heriot’s House while Evan is the brilliant miscreant. It is of passing relevance that both Hornung – Raffles and Bunny - and Conan Doyle – Holmes and Watson – utilised in their major work this same ‘sidekick’ device that has become a fixture of crime fiction– Sexton Blake (‘the Office Boy’s Sherlock Holmes’) and Tinker; Poirot and Hastings; Morse and Lewis. It seems that only Miss Marple, an unlikely Boycott analogue, can cope without a seasoned opening partner.