Public School Life: Boys, Parents, Masters

by Alec Waugh

That particular innings marked, I suppose, the height of Hedges's career from the point of view of press publicity and popular esteem; the height had been reached, that is to say, before his qualities had been placed on the open market and tested by the stress of three days' cricket and the accuracy of professional bowling. We do not hear much of Hedges nowadays. He has played useful cricket for Oxford and for Kent; but he has done nothing sensational. And yet, when I saw him last summer make a 50 against Middlesex at Lords, I could not help feeling that he is a better bat to-day than he was in 1919, and that that 50 in an important match, against confident bowling, and while Woolley was scratching uncomfortably at the over end, was in every way a finer performance than his 163 of two years earlier. He drove Haig and Durston through the covers as easily as in 1919 he had plastered the ring with boundaries. And yet the pressmen remained calm.

It is vain and it is unfair to attempt to form a judgment of a person whose wares are not upon the open market. No one can tell who is, and who is not, going to prove a test match cricketer. Equally it is impossible to tell from public school form which boys are potential cricketers. Who, for example, who saw in 1910 F. H. Knott and D. J. Knight batting in the Public School's match at Lords realised that Knight was going to develop into an incomparably greater batsman than Knott. And yet sportsmen continue to write about boy cricketers with the seriousness that they devote to Hobbs. They draw the most ridiculous comparisons. I discovered last summer in one of the most influential daily papers the following passage in the account of the Public School's match at Lords: 'There is probably no cricketer, with the exception of R. H. Spooner, who sees the ball more quickly than J. L. Guise.' Now anything much more ridiculous I can hardly imagine. It is like the literary critic, who shall be nameless, who described the work of a minor poet, who shall be also nameless, as having given him more pleasure than anything since the first flights of Swinburne. It is preposterous to speak of Guise, who is an extremely promising cricketer, as seeing the ball more quickly than any batsman except Spooner. It all depends on what manner of ball he is seeing. In the Eton match he, no doubt, saw Allen's deliveries with considerable speed. Spooner, however, was in the habit of seeing in this manner the deliveries of Cotter, Tarrant, and Schwarz. Speed of eye is relative to the quality of the bowling. I should hesitate to call myself a batsman, but there is a type of ball that I can see with incredible rapidity. It is bowled to me, alas, too occasionally, in village matches. It is medium paced, it pitches on the middle stump, a little more than half-way down the pitch, and it turns away ever so slightly towards the leg. Any one can look a good bat who is opposed to bad bowling. And I maintain that it is no sort of sense indulging in wild panegyrics about schoolboys who have never been tested by first-class bowling.

If a boy seems promising the county authorities should give him a trial, and, if he does well, then let the pressmen get busy. Every one is so terrified lest a good man may be overlooked. But how unlikely that is if the county authorities are at all keen. Trial matches can be arranged. Visits can be paid to schools. There is no need for this hectic discovery of twenty Spooners every season. The school figures of players like Stevens and Chapman and Hubert Ashton would have been quite sufficient to ensure a proper trial for them. And the fact remains that in spite of this press work amateur cricket is at a lower ebb now than it has ever been before. The Gentlemen and Players match has become too one-sided to stimulate interest in anything save individual performances. Very few amateurs are good enough to play for England. Douglas is; and he was not one of the marked men of cricket articles. His entrance was as untheatrical as his batting. D. J. Knight, is on his form of 1919, the second best batsman in the country; Stevens, at his best, is a great match-winning factor; Tennyson and Fender are useful players. But it is impossible to maintain that there are to-day any amateur batsmen comparable with Maclaren, Spooner, Fry, Stoddart, and Jackson, than the cricketers, that is to say, who passed unheralded on their merits into first-class cricket. The low standard of amateur cricket cannot be argued away. And this trumpeting of the press could only be excused, could it be proved to further the interests of amateur sport in England. Instead of furthering those interests, it works against them. It makes games at a Public School too much of a business and too little of a sport. It introduces professionalism. And I am prepared to wonder how far one really enjoys one's games at school.

One is frightfully excited about them; one is very pleased when one does well and depressed if one does badly. One works oneself into a state of nervous misery before a match, and one of hysterical excitement after it. Victory and defeat mean a great deal. And it was with a real surprise that I realised a few months ago at the end of a very pleasant season that, although I should continue to play football for another ten years, and cricket, I hope, for another forty, I should never again really care whether the side for which I am playing wins or loses—care, that is to say, as I cared at school about a house match. In club cricket and football one asks for a good game in pleasant company, and victory is incidental. While one is playing, of course, one is keen, but one will not brood afterwards over one's mistakes,—not as one does after a school match. There is, I suppose, no public school man under the sun who does not now and again on some winter evening drop his paper on his knees and curse himself because, fifteen years ago, he missed a catch at an important crisis—that is one of the things one never ceases to regret. That awful moment when one picks up the ball with tingling fingers and tosses it back to the bowler; it is for all time a vivid memory. One does not feel like that about an ordinary catch in an ordinary club game. One is annoyed with oneself; one is sorry for the bowler; one apologises to the captain, but one remembers that one is out, after all, to enjoy oneself.

That is the difference between school and club cricket. At school one is not out to enjoy oneself. It is a business, this getting of runs and taking of wickets. There are cups for house matches, and there are cups for batting and bowling averages, and it is a sin to miss a catch. There are few worse things than the anxiety attendant on those who play on the fringe of a school side. Not only is one worried about one's own performances, but about one's rivals. If one has made a duck oneself one cannot, in spite of one's patriotism, be anxious for a particular rival to retrieve the fortunes of the side with a century. A first eleven cap is valued far too highly for such unselfishness. It is equally little fun to be a member of a bad fifteen. One is subjected to a series of complaints and recriminations. One grows sick of the whole business. And I can remember during the first winter of the war the relief with which we learnt that the Tonbridge match had been scratched. We had a poor side. We knew that we should be thoroughly trounced, and that, for the next week, the lives of those who had not distinguished themselves would be made wretched. We never for a moment questioned the justice of this tyranny. The Lord our God was a jealous God. We had to serve him. But we were not sorry that an occasion for his wrath should be removed. I very much doubt whether the actual playing of games was as pleasant at school as it is outside it.

The intensity and rapture are irrecoverable. There is nothing to compare with the elation that follows a victory over a stronger side. But in the long run I find cricket more enjoyable to-day than I did six years ago. It is less complicated. One takes a day off from one's work and spends it in agreeable company. One can field out all day and never take a wicket, miss a couple of catches, and then crown everything by making a duck, and yet thoroughly enjoy oneself. At school that would have been a rotten day, and one would have spent the evening in deep despondency. Yet everything is in favour of one enjoying one's game at school. It is so simple. One strolls down after lunch in a leisurely fashion to the field. One changes one's boots in the pavilion. A hot bath is waiting for one afterwards. But, in order to play football after one has left, one has to rush off to catch impossible trains from impossible stations. One has no time for lunch. The train always seems to start at 1.18. There is as likely as not a long walk from the station. One changes in a converted army hut; one is more than a little tired before the game starts. There are no proper baths afterwards, and one has to hurry, or one will miss the only train to town: for it is amazing the number of football fields which are on loop lines with trains at hourly intervals. And yet, personally, I enjoy my football now a great deal more than I ever did at school.

It would not be just, however, to lay the blame of this professionalism to the account of the sporting press. Journalists are rarely responsible for anything. They do not lead public opinion. They follow it or, if they are clever, they anticipate it. Had not the worship of athleticism been already firmly established in the schools themselves it would never have occurred to them to run it as a stunt. The journalist spends most of his time searching for a town of blind men over which he, with his one eye, may rule. And the journalist discovered that the Public School had enthroned an unofficial king who had not received his due of public recognition. The journalist decided to officialise his position. To this king was paid extensive homage; and, as there is no more pleasant reading for ladies-in-waiting than court gossip, he commenced a column of court news. But he did not set up the court, or crown the king. He is only a herald. And we must regard these tiresome articles as a proof, but not a cause of this peculiar ritual. The trumpeting of the herald adds certainly to the glamour of the court, but his absence would not start a revolution. If not another article appeared on public school sport, the cult of athleticism would still continue; it would continue because as things are at present there is no other focus for the enthusiasm and partisanship of a boy of seventeen. There is really little else about which a schoolboy could reasonably become excited.

Indeed it is hard to see what other results could have been expected from such a combination of circumstances. Four hundred boys are divided into ten houses. They are encouraged to feel an intense loyalty for their house and for their school. They are told that it is up to them to make their house the best house in the school, and their school the best school in the country. They set out in all good faith to accomplish their task. In what, they ask themselves, does the goodness of a house consist. It is not much sense to speak to them of the moral tone of a house or school. They desire a tangible manifestation of virtue, 'an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.' And the only available outward and visible sign is the row of silver challenge cups on the dining-hall mantelpiece. It is natural to assume that the house which has the most cups is the best house; a school can only prove its superiority over another school by victory on the football field. Scholarships are an indirect form of competition. For the best boys from one school may not come into touch with the best boys of another. But a victory by 30 points is a direct statement of a fact. The victorious school is superior to the defeated school. It is in athletic contests alone that a house or school can express a united will, can become indeed one person. The loyalty of a boy for his house or school is a fine thing, but it renders athletic worship almost inevitable. Were there not this intense house and school feeling individual boys would cultivate their individual tastes; forty boys would be grouped together for convenience of boarding—that is all a house would be. But as soon as a boy comes to regard himself as a member of a fine community, he feels a natural pride and loyalty in its performances and in its welfare. There is no other focus for partisanship: form work is uninteresting. Boxing, fives, the corps, and the gymnasium are side shows. Cricket and football are what count. A boy must have a religion of sorts. He must have some ideal to which the demands of his own temperament may become subservient.

On this worship of games is based the scale of social values. The ethics of cribbing, for example, are based entirely on the assumption that a success in form is of inconsiderable importance; it is permissible for a boy to crib in order to save his energies for worthier causes. The blood system is built on an intense admiration for those who are upholding the honour of the house, and is an expression of the small boy's longing to reach such a position himself. The attitude to morality on the part of masters is intimately connected with athletics, and on the boy's part, the belief that a member of a school side is, ipso facto, an invaluable asset to the school, allows the blood to do very much what he likes; as long, in fact, as a boy can satisfy his companions and himself that he is exerting all his power on the football field, he can amuse himself in other ways as he thinks fit.