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

55 The Outcrop; Walpole; Waugh; Wodehouse Et Al cricket for England and who is loved as much as Crocker- Harris is hated. In 1957 John Gielgud played the role on the radio, another media outlet for school stories such as Tom Brown and ‘Dominic’s’. Thus some versions of boarding school life were portrayed as irredeemably awful. I once had the privilege of sitting next to Beryl Bainbridge at a dinner. A good childhood, she insisted, left you with little interesting material, a view that both Sir Hugh Walpole and EM Forster possibly shared. However, from the stance of parading the boarding school in the eyes of the reading public, bad publicity was better than no publicity – and there were many more authors ready to enter the lists in a more cheerfully nostalgic mood. By far the most celebrated was James Hilton with his Goodbye, Mr Chips (1933), the memoir of an ageing retired teacher who lives opposite Brookfield, the school where his entire career has been spent, and from which he still ambles forth to watch the school cricket matches. The son of a very successful state school head master, James Hilton won a scholarship to the Leys School, Cambridge, where he was extremely happy. Ian Hay’s The Housemaster (1936) is a similar story with Charles Donkin at Marbledown the equivalent of Mr Chipping at Brookfield as the long-time defender of the old-fashioned faith of the character-building school. Much later, in 1972, RF Delderfield published his To Serve Them All My Days , the tale of a miner’s son, David Powlett-Jones, who becomes a history master at Bamfylde School in North Devon and, after many vicissitudes, is elevated, like Mr Chips, to the headship. RF Delderfield bears positive witness to the continuing magnetism of the school boy or schoolmaster saga. Theatre and cinema and television played a part; John Duttine was David in the 1980/81 adaptation of To Serve Them All My Days . The 1938 filming of The Housemaster was undistinguished but the two screen versions of Mr Chips’ vocation both prove worthwhile; Robert Donat in 1939 and Peter O’Toole in 1969 doing the honours in the title role. In