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

56 The Outcrop; Walpole; Waugh; Wodehouse Et Al the Donat version, an ancient Mr Chips is shown watching a school cricket match and gently fading into sleep, perhaps unconsciousness, his eyes misting over dreamily as fond memories tumble. Cricket again as Valete . And Mr Chips still stays in the public memory as the best-remembered fictional school teacher of them all. Similarly in a film almost in recollection of Hornung’s Jan Rutter, we watched Richard Attenborough in The Guinea Pig (1948), based on the 1945 play of the same title by Warren Chetham-Strode, which itself could be a marvellous name for a fictitious head master. As far as names go, the relevant school, Saintbury, might, on the other hand, have passed for a bustling supermarket. The film was motivated by the disappointing and vainly optimistic Fleming Report of 1944 which vaguely talked of children from less than wealthy homes having public school places. Jack Reed is such a one, by no means from the gutter but the son of a respectable shopkeeper. I remember that we had a headmasterly address on the film in assembly on one 1948 morning. Jack fights against the Saintbury heritage and protocol – and loses, that is, he becomes institutionalised. And how is his final acquiescence illustrated? Yes, he is padding up in the first eleven nets, chatting to his teacher in a cut-glass accent and with varsity his next stop. Amid all this round-up of school-based novels and their re- prints and their adaptations, many using cricket as both metaphor and dramatic action, one book stands out as the quintessential successor to ‘the great-souled’ Hughes’ Tom Brown and Reed’s ‘Dominic’s’. This was PG Wodehouse’s simply titled Mike , first published in book form in 1909, the finest of several still very readable Wodehousian school tales, such as The White Feather, The Gold Bat, The Head of Kay’s and A Prefect’s Uncle . Indeed, much of ‘Plum’ Wodehouse’s schoolboy fiction is available in print form today. PGWodehouse revelled in his schooldays at Dulwich College, the setting for Mike’s Wrykyn School, and was disappointed