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

67 The Flood (1) Greyfriars For Ever..And Ever which included a number of tales under such titles, still at a penny a time, as Boys of England, Boys’ Leisure Hour and Boys’ Standard. The American dime novel was also re- made for the British market, with heroes like Buffalo Bill and Deadwood Dick starring. During the 1860s the Arthur Harmsworth firm made some pretence of remedying the situation with a paler mode for a half-penny but this soon degenerated into something similar in comics like Marvel, The Union Jack and Pluck. One long term survivor from what AA Milne called the ‘half-penny dreadfuls’ was Sexton Blake; he detected from 1893 to the 1970s, by which point he had some 4000 stories to his investigative name. Such material was all a far cry from the silken greensward of Marchester or Wrykyn and the telltale rap of cork on willow but evangelical help was at hand. In 1879 the Religious Tract Society launched The Boy’s Own Paper ( BOP ) – and it holds the record for the longest juvenile periodical ever. It was expressly created for those who wanted their children to read something – that favoured Victorian adjective – ‘Manly’. By the 1890s its print run was a weekly 665,000, with an estimated readership of 2 million. This was its peak. It still sold a very healthy 400,000 copies in the pre-1914 years but thereafter seemed to become more of a magazine for middle class boys rather than its previous broader appeal. In its heyday it reinforced the effect by producing first a bound monthly and then a bound annual set. Apparently this went down with readers of reasonable means whose weekly copy had become tatty with much swapping and borrowing and who wished to squirrel away a decent set for re-reading. BOP soon faced competition from like-minded but commercial rivals. Cassells began publishing Chums in 1892 while Newnes launched The Captain in 1899. BOP was forced to go monthly in 1913 but continued in print until 1967. I can piously testify to its being handed round by teachers at Sunday School in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Chums endured until 1941 while The Captain lasted until 1924, both showing reasonable longevity for a young