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

70 in 1938 and there are editions as late from my sightings as 1957. It is remarkable that, nearly seventy years on, the double presentation of serial and volume was still viable. Michael Poole was a regular author of school and also adventure stories, including, as if to demonstrate he was an all-rounder, Quinton Kicks Off and Well Bowled, Grantley! The styling and the language is uncannily the same as in the 1880s. Cricket is also sustained. This episode of Michael Poole’s serial begins as follows: ‘If there was one person at Broxton who thoroughly enjoyed himself that afternoon when the school played Cranston, it was James Hankey Sprott. The atmosphere was right; rumours and whisperings had been and still were, thick in the air..’ We learn retrospectively that in the June issue there had been some ‘extraordinary business’ on the playing fields during the cricket match against Cranston School. The school captain had ordered the Remove Form to leave the field. The Upper School felt it was ‘about time they had learned to behave themselves on a cricket field, and not make themselves a nuisance to everybody else.’ The Remove boys had used the occasion to launch a demand for ‘reform, and freedom against the pompous asses of the Sixth and against moth-eaten rules and fossilised customs’. Sprott was the ringleader in what was basically an anti-bullying crusade, but we also meet his Remove colleague Winkworth who had a ‘secret ambition’ to get ‘his first colours as the crack bowler of Broxton’. He had been ‘definitely unlucky’, when ‘last season in a house trial’ he had ‘completely deceived’ three batsmen ‘with fastish rising balls’, leaving two with ‘nasty knocks’ and one with ‘his arm temporarily paralysed’. ‘Winky’ had been branded’ a dangerous bowler’; ‘and the word ‘body-line’ was used about the sort of stuff he sent down.’ He was accordingly overlooked by the cricket hierarchy, another case of malign unfairness. When the Remove parade with unfurled banners in their fight for justice, the cricket banners earn special mention: The Flood (1) Greyfriars For Ever..And Ever