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

51 The Outcrop; Walpole; Waugh; Wodehouse Et Al Hornung’s Rutter and Devereux pit themselves against the Old Boys. The latter’s heroics are almost too strong even for the blood of the most impressionable reader. He scythes through the Old Boy’s batting, taking 9 for 26 and then, alongside Jan in a thrilling late order stand, complete with a near run out at the climax, he flails away to a winning century. Fathers of Men went through several editions, one at least with a schoolboy batsman at the wicket as the cover picture, and was re-printed as late as 2010. The often close identification of school and author reached its peak in 1917 with the publication of Alec Waugh’s The Loom of Youth . Older brother of the novelist Evelyn, he wrote the book in fifty intemperate days, leaving his publisher father, Arthur Waugh, to correct the errors. Aged but a precocious seventeen years, he had just departed Sherborne School. He had thoroughly enjoyed his schooldays yet had fumed at some its practices and habits and had left under the flimsy strands of a small cloud. The tone is tough love. It is not so much oppositional as affectionately concerned that a wonderful institution is flawed. It created a sensation, not least an unpleasant one in the staff common room at Sherborne. It sold out eight times during a twelve month period, continued to sell and was last reprinted as late as 1984. It also led to several immediate imitations by young men moulding their school memoirs into a novel, all the while swelling the glut of school-based fiction. On the strictly sporting front, cricket plays an important role in ‘the Loom’ which is mapped out over four books, each corresponding to a year in the life at Fernhurst School of Gordon Carruthers aka Alec Waugh. His delight in school is ‘inexpressible’. Meredith, the conventionally god-like captain of games, is his idol and he wins his colts’ cap for cricket. At first he defends games, saying that ‘the English race is the finest in the whole world and has been bred on footer and cricket’. The novel grows more deprecative, partly because Gordon is equally drawn to poetry and learning in general and partly because he becomes critical of some aspects of the games culture. Indeed, the main