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

69 The Flood (1) Greyfriars For Ever..And Ever FJ Harvey Darton in his 1932 book Children’s Books In England said that G.A.Hutchinson had ‘a stronger indirect influence on English boyhood than any man of his time’. Given that the ghost of Thomas Hughes still lingered and the voice of Reed was aloud in the land, that is a strongly expressed sentiment, but the penetration of BOP must never be under-estimated. In that he commissioned stories about boarding schools and articles about sport on an industrial scale, and given that the stories often included cricket matches and the sporting articles were regularly about cricket, then cricket-lovers have much to thank the long-serving editor for in regard to that consistency with which their beloved game was set before the junior reading public over several generations. I have an issue of BOP dated July 1937 and sold at the exorbitant cost of sixpence. Intriguingly, it has 24 pages of advertisements, news and letters, twelve at each end of the periodical, all marked off in Roman numerals, with a centre- spread of stories and articles, picking up the pagination on a month-on-month basis, as from 433 to 480. That is, in sum, 71 pages in all, so it’s not a bad sixpenn’orth. It includes a cricket poem parodying the old World War I ballad ‘There’s a long, long trail a-winding into the land of my dreams’, a song which, courtesy of my grandmother’s careful tuition, I would be prepared to sing should so dire an emergency arise. The spoof lyric begins: There’s a long long trail before us from the pavilion to the crease There’s a clap and cheer in chorus which we ofttimes wish would cease And ends Anxiously the bowler’s waiting, on his face a joyous grin ‘Easy stuff – just ripe for slating – Steady on! Go in and win’ The main story is in chapters four, five and six of Michael Poole’s Broxton’s Silver Spur. A school story running from June to September of 1937, it was published in book form