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

95 The Flood (2) HK Rodd The Wonder Man other than best-selling novelists with unhappy childhoods, of many who, reading the school-based literature, did genuinely yearn to belong to that world. Simon Sweetman, has been of much help with this chapter, which draws indiscriminately on his excellent article Cricket, Comics and DC Thomson in The Cricket Statistician during autumn of 2009. His descriptor of the new model periodicals in the cultural environs of the time is accurate and concise: ‘All were text-based, printed on newsprint, with a handful of black and white drawings, a coloured front cover, and a range of small ads which always included Charles Atlas, appeals to join the Army or work in the mines, and innumerable offers of postage stamps. The boy’s world of leisure was bounded by Meccano, stamp collecting and DC Thomson.. Bear in mind that there was a single television channel until the mid 1950s, and only two into the 1960s..cricket and television initially seemed made for each other. The BBC first broadcast televised cricket in 1938, and something of all home test matches were shown live on the BBC from 1952 – this from a time when this was the only daytime TV viewing that there was. Apart from Wimbledon and show jumping there was not much other sport on television – live football would be the Cup Final and internationals only.. The comics also gave away free picture cards of cricketers in some seasons : usually there would be two a week in each comic, so you needed to buy all four every week to complete a set. I have a set of County Cricketers from 1957.’ The switch to a more audio-visual culture was beginning. Compared with the school-child in the early days of BOP , when printed matter reigned supreme, the cinema and the ‘wireless’ had become commonplace and television was crossing the horizon – but school-age readership remained a powerful constituent of everyday life. Sweetman profiles several ‘story book’ cricketers in his nostalgic article. The Wizard featured many. Its most famed sportsman, ‘Wilson the Wonder Athlete’ is said to have inspired many British athletes. Born in Yorkshire in 1774,