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

81 Similarly with the serialised school stories which followed the seasons faithfully, an enormous boon for cricket coverage which had no rival as a summer game. Just as the young but acute Charles Dickens had appositely included ice skating and cricket at Dingley Dell in, respectively, winter and summer episodes of his serial novel Pickwick Papers, so did Harry Wharton and his pals, all fine cricketers, enjoy umpteen summer outings with bat and ball in the summer editions of Magnet ; likewise all the dozens of other fictionalised schools. Cricket had never had it so good. It is true that Charles Hamilton, although keen, was not the most accurate of cricket chroniclers. He confessed to this although asserting he always looked up the scores every morning in the newspapers. The man who was an expert and was called in to smooth over the infelicities was JN Pentelow. He was, without doubt, the most expert cricket scribe among the scores of school story authors, and worthy of recollection because of that. Born in Huntingdonshire in 1872, he was rather piously inclined to a Farrar-like approach, much to the disdain of Charles Hamilton who found Pentelow’s work insipid and sentimental. Like several of this band of authors, he was an early developer, writing for The Captain and Pluck from the age of fifteen and also contributing to the cricketing press. Just prior to the outbreak of World War One, he acquired the fading The World of Cricket magazine but made the fatal choice of forming a partnership with Archie MacLaren. Archie MacLaren’s combine of majestic, lordly batsmanship with chaotic business and financial incapacity dishes with one vivid stroke the hypothesis that cricketing style is illustrative of personal character, and so it proved. Pentelow was not helped by the onset of war and the jingoistic attitude of Lieutenant MacLaren, now a recruiting officer, who used the failing pages of the periodical to assail – ‘the hog in armour’ – the Kaiser. JN Pentlow lost heavily on the gamble and until his death in 1931 never recovered real financial stability. While Archie MacLaren harangued the nation’s youth, he, from 1916, took on the editorship of The Flood (1) Greyfriars For Ever..And Ever