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

54 The Outcrop; Walpole; Waugh; Wodehouse Et Al the religiosity of Thomas Hughes and Tibby Reed. Behind the ‘mere beauty of the white figures shining so coolly in the slant evening sunshine’, Percival observes the discipline and order they represent and will shortly, at home and throughout the Empire, uphold. It should not escape notice that this multitude of books about schoolboys and their cricketing prowess were read by fathers as well as sons. It must have been in that knowledge that publishers, especially under the later phase of the period under review, encouraged the production of school books with more of a grown-up perspective – and these, of course, also attracted some readership among older youngsters. These were novels and plays in which the leading part was the teacher but, even within these, the emphasis remained on the boarding school system, with its sports mania rarely forgotten. An earlier sample was Hugh Walpole’s Mr Perrin and Mr Traill (1911). HughWalpole was a cricketer with the ‘authors’ elevens but he had been an unhappy schoolboy at Marlow and a dejected master at Epsom College. This shows rather in the acerbic nature of a text in which the older, pedantic Perrin and the younger, easy-going Traill create a rivalry against the vinegary, arid background of minor boarding school existence. EM Forster, who had suffered agonies at Tonbridge, replayed his woes brilliantly in what was his favourite of his novels, the sometimes under-rated The Longest Journey (1905), in which the semi-autobiographical Ricky Elliot is trapped as a reluctant teacher in the narrow confines of Sawston School. A later and absorbing drama of pedagogic failure was to be The Browning Version by Terence Rattigan, an Harrovian with some rather cheerless memories of a repressed boyhood. Andrew Crocker-Harris, played by Eric Portman in the 1948 play and Michael Redgrave in the slightly more buoyant 1951 film, declines from enthused animateur to despotic tyrant. Among his many misfortunes he is upstaged by Mr Fletcher, the sports master who has played