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

68 The Flood (1) Greyfriars For Ever..And Ever people’s journal. All three ‘story books’ carried adventure yarns as well as school tales. Chums is distinguished in that in 1894 it serialised that classic among such stories, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The Religious Tract Society (RTS) was founded in 1799 and, amid its vast catalogue of evangelical works, it had attempted to include specific juvenile texts. Concerned at what an often newly literate market among young people was reading, the Society hit upon the idea of the weekly magazine which, while still promulgating the tenets of the gospel, brought light relief as well. As Julie Andrews was later to advise in the guise of Mary Poppins, ‘a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.’ Its founder-editor, George Andrew Hutchinson, by politics a Liberal and by religion a Baptist, was undoubtedly the chief reason for its success both financially – it was soon making £4000 profit annually – and journalistically. He had edited The Sunday School World and Night and Day, the magazine that was distributed to the boys at Barnardo’s Homes long before Cole Porter chose the phrase for a romantic lyric, so his experience of children and their ‘Manly’ reading needs was probably unexcelled at that time. He was editor for 33 years, a quite amazing record. GA Hutchinson, repulsing the calls of his primmer brethren for greater doctrinal inclusion, was determined to adhere to the sweetened spoon of Mary Poppins rather than laying it on with a moralising Farrar-like trowel. His chosen diet of stories and articles on sport and travel, all with an impregnation of the ethical behaviour expected of the Victorian Christian, was very successful. Whether it was the editor’s good luck or good management that brought Tibby Reed into the fold is hard to assess but Reed’s family had long been involved with the RTS. What is certain is that Hutchinson mentored ‘Tibby’ and urged him to write fiction – and his protege responded with his natural enthusiasm by contributing a continuous stream of articles and stories right from the very first issue.