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

92 The Flood (2) HK Rodd The Wonder Man penmanship of Gilbert Lawford Dalton (1903-1963), aka WFK Webb, who zealously wrote practically all the stories in the four Thomson comics, a feat reminiscent of Charles Hamilton aka Frank Richards et al. Each story paper was a concoction of stories based on imperial adventures, detection and sport, with World War II adding zest and range to the tales. Although less wedded to the school-based story than the Gem/Magnet brand, there was usually such an element, mainly of the boarding school type – and cricket remained, with football, one of the principal games featured. Each publication had its own selection of heroes, sporting and otherwise and each upheld the Victoria ethos of fair-minded virility. While each story book had its keen adherents, exchanges were rife and regular. In the period from the mid 1920s to the early 1950s it has been calculated that 75% of secondary age boys were reading at least one of these periodicals and, given the swapping rage, most of them were reading two or more a week. This group of publications concluded what, by 1950, had been a seventy years epoch in which the younger generations had been treated to a steady stream of cheap prose-heavy reading with boarding schools and cricket substantially represented. However, in studying cricket in schoolboy literature one must to some extent at this stage distinguish between school and cricket. Certainly up to the First World War practically the only books or comics for boys and girls which provided a modicum of cricket were school-based. With the more commercially-minded Thomson ‘story paper’ on rapid and heavy sale, there were autonomous cricket tales as well, commonly at county and Test level, for the reader’s enjoyment. Thomson periodicals featured sports stories that were not involved with school. The previous range of stories had been so dominated by the school motif that it would have been difficult to separate the two elements, but there was another highly significant factor. Thomas Hughes and Tibby Reed very definitely and Charles Hamilton very probably were