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

71 ‘We Want Bowlers’; ‘No Favouritism in the First Eleven’; ‘Play the Game’; ‘Body-line Banned at Broxton’; ‘Wanted; a Strong Captain’; ‘Mostyn Must Go’; ‘Hallam! He’s the Man’. All further proof that you can’t take the politics out of sport. But this is BOP . There are several black and white illustrations of this breathless yarn but on one page there is a centre piece which is patently a regular feature – ‘the Padre’s Talk’. It is a homily in the Muscular Christian tradition with the text ‘why he didn’t do it’ and the final instruction, ‘if there is anything you really ought to do – just do it!’, counsel drawn from the testimony of Mr Weeks, a Congo missionary. I should explain that, in pursuit of educational research during the 1990s, I attempted to arm myself with a copy of each of the ‘story paper’ comics reviewed in this chapter. It was only when turning again to these treasures but from a cricketing perspective that I spotted the heartening coincidence that my single copy of Chums also features Michael Poole as its main contributor. My Chums is a forlorn and ragged specimen, a weekly dated June 1932, priced twopence, and, like BOP , has ten outside pages numerated in Roman style and a dozen inside pages which are part of a running total, 797 to 808, making up a magazine of closely packed print and illustrations of over twenty pages. It also aped BOP with a bound monthly version. The front cover picture is of a schoolboy batsman lofting a ball mightily. We learn inside that ‘it landed on the pavilion roof with a bang’. It heralds Michael Poole’s ‘finest public school story’ entitled ‘the Great Smith Mystery’. Barton, captain of the Upper Fifth at Wintergate School is having trouble fielding a decent side to play the Science Sixth and insists, on an intuitive whim, that JC Smith who has shown no aptitude for nor interest in cricket, should participate. He proceeds to hit 102 not out out of 141 for 3 declared and then take 8 for 3, reducing his opponents to 15 all out in what might be described as a convincing victory. It transpires that this J.C.Smith is the famous actor Trevor Dane, whose nephew, the genuine pupil, had been offered a prominent The Flood (1) Greyfriars For Ever..And Ever