The Willoughby Captains

by Talbot Baines Reed

Chapter Twenty.

Is Willoughby Mad?

Things did not mend all at once at Willoughby. No one expected they would. And within a few days after the “debate in Parliament” it seemed as if the school had finally abandoned all ideas of order and discipline.

The reader will remember that more than once mention had been made of an approaching election for the free and enlightened borough of Shellport, which was occupying the attention not only of the town, and of the doctor and his ladies, but also of the boys themselves. And the cheers with which Morrison’s notice of motion, mentioned in the last chapter, was received, showed plainly enough how things were going.

By long tradition Willoughby had been a Whig school. Fellows did not exactly know what Whig meant, but they knew it was the opposite of Tory on one side and Radical on the other, and they went accordingly. On the present occasion, moreover, they had a sort of personal interest in the event, for the Whig candidate, Sir George Pony, had been discovered to be a sort of second uncle a few times removed of Pringle, one of the Parrett’s fags, whereas the Radical, Mr Cheeseman, was a nobody!

For all these reasons Willoughby felt it had a great stake in the contest, and tacitly determined to make its voice heard.

Small election meetings were held by the more enthusiastic politicians of the school, for the purpose of giving vent to their anti-radical sympathies. At these one boy was usually compelled to represent the Whig and another to figure as the unpopular Radical. And the cheering of the one and the hooting of the other was an immense consolation to the young patriots; and when, as usually happened, the meeting proceeded to poll for the candidates, and it was announced that the Whig had got 15,999 votes (there were just 16,000 inhabitants in Shellport), and the Radical only one (polled by himself), the applause would become simply deafening.

Even the seniors, in a more dignified way, took up the Whig cause, and wore the Whig colours; and woe betide the rash boy who sported the opposition badge!

The juniors were hardly the boys to let an occasion like this slip, and many and glorious were the demonstrations in which they engaged. They broke out into a blaze of yellow, and insisted on wearing their colours even in bed. Pringle was a regular hero, and cheered whenever he showed his face; whereas Brown, the town boy, whose father was suspected of being a Radical, was daily and almost hourly mobbed till his life became a burden to him. All other distinctions and quarrels were forgotten in this enthusiastic and glorious outburst of patriotic feeling.

Two days before the election a mass meeting of juniors and Limpets of all houses and ages, summoned by proclamation, was held in a corner of the playground, “to hear addresses by the candidates, and elect a member for Shellport.” Pringle, of course, was to figure as his distant uncle, and upon the unhappy Bosher had fallen the lot of assuming the unpopular rôle of Mr Cheeseman. The meeting, though only professing to be a juniors’ assembly, attracted a good many seniors also, whose curiosity and sense of humour were by no means disappointed at the proceedings.