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

53 The Outcrop; Walpole; Waugh; Wodehouse Et Al played many times for the famous Invalids travelling team raised by the ‘Georgian’ poet JC Squire. The name was inspired by their captain’s visit to a World War One military hospital, their colours correspondingly being hospital blue and orange and their badge two crutches. This and other ‘authors’ elevens are worth a mention in that, especially in the inter-war years, this association of cricket and ‘Englishry’ was very intimate. Many of the literati viewed cricket as part of a lost England of rural charm. Clifford Bax, captain of Old Broughtonians, spoke in his poem Cricket Days of the time ‘when summer had burst the poppy and skies were brazen’. To the caustic despair of Evelyn Waugh and other cynical detractors, these writers honoured the game in print and play, adding a literary gloss to the Victorian concept of cricket as a noble sport and, crucially, helping to keep cricket to the forefront of the cultural discourse. The Invalids were gently joshed by AG Macdonell, who had played at Winchester, in his endlessly anthologised excerpt on cricket in England, their England , published in 1933. He is ‘Donald’, the bewildered Scot in the piece and the captain Mr Hodge is JC Squire. We are able to identify the players from Alec Waugh’s own account. As he said, the piece ‘was not a caricature’ and Alec Waugh himself is Robert Southcott, described at length as ‘a singular young man.. he wore perfectly creased white flannels, white silk socks, a pale pink shirt and white cap..holding his bat as delicately as if it was a flute or a fan.’ He was the hero of ‘a mob of screaming urchins’, as they recovered the ball he effortlessly deposited in trout stream, hayfield and tavern bar. Inwordandaction, infiction and fact, AlecWaugh epitomised the schoolboy’s cricketing hero. Sir Henry Newbolt made his own sally into school novel writing, The Twynings; a Tale of Youth (1911) in which Percival, his protagonist, is a keen cricketer. As might be expected of the poet, his celebration of school cricket and school cricketers is no matter-of-fact affair. It is suffused with a mystic aspect, leaning towards