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

63 Chapter Four The Flood (1) Greyfriars For Ever..And Ever Those who think that the hundreds of school books, most of them with a cricketing ingredient, must have created a veritable storm will be staggered to learn that the cascade of ‘comics’ or, more exactly, ‘story books’ or ‘story papers’, made the books look like a passing shower. In more martial terms, while the hundreds of novels may be conceived as a barrage of heavy artillery, it was the intense bombardment of the light artillery of thousands of comics that was probably the more effective in the installation of the ‘boarding school’ pattern on the public mind-set. The comics in question arrived in two overlapping periods that reached until after World War Two, a matter of some eighty years. This chapter will deal with the Magnet/Gem phase and the next chapter will pick up the story in the inter- wars years with the era of the Hotspur and its stablemates from the DC Thomson range. One commentator called it ‘a flood’, a deluge which swamped the reading habits of the majority of boys and also girls. The linking point with the previous chapters is that many of the novels were first serialised in the comics. From Tibby Reed’s The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s in The Boy’s Own Paper to Wodehouse’s Mike in The Captain , publishers and authors had two bites at the retail cherry. This was the adoption for young people of the by now standard treatment of the Victorian family novel. Notably with the bravura example of Charles Dickens, most of the classic Victorian novels were originally published in weekly or monthly parts, sometimes freestanding, sometimes in magazines such as Household Words. The shift from the heavyweight sale of three-decker novels at half a guinea for each volume (55p a volume; £1.65p