ATHLETICISM
By this time the new boy may be truly said to have reached the inner
circle of a public school philosophy. He knows to what gods he must bow
the knee. And he serves dutifully before the altar of the god of sport.
The cult of athleticism has been for a long while the target at which
the enemies of the Public School have launched their abuse. And until
this cult is understood, it is impossible to understand the standards
and the scale of values of a Public School. Every community must have a
religion of sorts, a faith to which all faiths are subservient, a
service which makes the first demands. A man, when called to decide
between two claims, must be able to know which way his duty lies. He may
not follow the claim of duty, but he should be able to distinguish which
it is. In some communities it is the observance of social custom, in
another the making of money is all important, in one the honour of the
regiment, in a second the teaching of the Scriptures. At a Public School
it is athletic prominence.
The position of a school is decided by its performances on the field. If
two men in a club are discussing the merits of a certain school, the
first consideration will be athletics. 'Oh, yes,' they will say.
'Fernhurst stands very well just now. It beat Tonford and Merton last
season, and it's got two fellows in the Varsity eleven.' The social
status of a school is judged, not by the number of Balliol scholars it
has produced, but by the quality of the schools it plays. 'Oh, Marestone
can't be much of a place,' you will hear said. 'They only play a few
grammar schools.'
This fact the new boy realises at once. His father's friends are
impressed when he can tell them that his school has beaten Haileybury.
They display a mild interest at his casual reference to Bennett's
scholarship. The new boy reads in the daily papers enthusiastic articles
on the performances of the school eleven, and he learns that Haslett is
being watched by the county authorities. There is an air of publicity
about every school match. There will be reports in the newspapers. The
new boy feels himself to be participating in a function of considerable
general interest. All over the country people will be wondering what
will chance in this particular encounter. He is on the spot. The Press
accentuates his keenness. How could he, in the face of such a testimony,
doubt the supreme importance of athletics. We believe in the goods that
are most widely advertised. Who ever read an article on the prospects of
the various competitors for a certain exam. Who has read in the _Times_
that 'enormous interest is being taken in the approaching scholarship
examinations. Clifton has several promising scholars. Marston may be
poor at unseen, but he is very deft in his handling of Latin prose, and
he has a good ear for hexameters. Haileybury, on the other hand, place
their faith in Johnson, a steady, industrious worker who can be trusted
to perform consistently in all subjects....' Yet, two or three times a
week, we can read in the _Sportsman_ that Fernhurst has a vastly
improved side and that with Evans back again in the three-quarter line,
is hopeful of emerging triumphantly from the approaching contest with
Tonford.
Public School sport is awarded at the present moment a preposterous
amount of publicity. It is bad for the schools; it is bad for the boys
themselves, and, as far as one can gather, it has not helped English
sport to any appreciable degree. It encourages in schools the belief
that games matter more than anything else. Very often it makes boys
swelled-headed, certainly it makes them think they are bigger than they
are, and is preparing for them a big disappointment. It is so easy to
appear a giant among pigmies. In my own short experience I can remember
more than one player who was described while at school as being an
England batsman in the making, and who now experiences a difficulty in
getting into the county side. Every summer we know by name a whole host
of public school cricketers that are never heard of afterwards. They
have averages of sixty during their last term; their exploits are
described in fervid journalese. They go up to Oxford, fail to reach
double figures in the Freshmen's match, and are quickly submerged in
college cricket. Others go up with enormous reputations, making
centuries in the trial match, and then find that there is a difference
between club and county cricket. They just get their blue with a batting
average of twenty-five; they play for the county during August and do
nothing exceptional. They are just average cricketers, useful members of
a side and nothing more. In the meanwhile the journalists are shrieking
of the natural offbreak of a sixteen-year-old Rugbeian. This particular
type of writer resembles the literary critic who hails every new poet as
a 'second Keats,' and every new novelist as 'a second Hardy,' but loses
interest in his discoveries after the appearance of their fourth book.
There is no need to dive back into past history. We can find enough
examples in post-war cricket. N. E. Partridge in 1919 had a batting
average of 43, and took 71 wickets for under 12 runs each. He had a
magnificent press. Next to Stevens, and perhaps Hedges, he was the most
discussed boy cricketer of the year. On the strength of this boosting he
very nearly received an invitation to play for the Gentlemen at Lords.
As a matter of fact, I am not certain that he did not actually receive
an invitation, and that his head master refused to let him go--but on
that point I am not certain. At any rate his claims were seriously
advanced by a great many reputable judges of the game, among whom I
think Sydney Pardon has to be included. He went up to Cambridge with a
tremendous reputation; he did only moderately. At one time, indeed, it
seemed improbable that he would get his blue. Last season he did nothing
exceptional for Warwickshire. I may, of course, be misjudging a
cricketer whom I have never seen play, but everything would seem to
suggest that Partridge will develop into nothing more exciting than the
average county cricketer.[4]
We could also take the example of L. P. Hedges. I spent the summer of
1918 in a German prison camp; but even to that distant city came news of
the brilliant Tonbridge batsman who was greater even than Hutchings.
During the summer of 1919 the assiduous student of the _Sportsman_ heard
much of him. Every week appeared the score of some fresh triumph, and,
to crown it all, came that brilliant 163 at Lords. It was a gorgeous
show. I was thankful not to be fielding at coverpoint. But, let it be
whispered gently, the bowling did not look particularly difficult, and,
though Hedges's innings was dazzling, a quite ordinary batsman should,
off the same bowling, have been able to help himself to a generous
allowance of fours.
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.
There is no other criterion for a boy's worthiness, or unworthiness, as
a member of a house, and the half-bloods consider that a very big
responsibility has descended on them. They have to keep the house up to
the mark. The big men cannot bother themselves about individuals. But
the half-bloods who are, as it were, emissaries between heaven and
earth, can investigate closely the behaviour of the coming generation.
They can notice who is showing signs of slackness. They individually
give themselves enormous airs. They form a sort of improvement society.
I remember that, in the course of one term, our house lost every
challenge cup that it had possessed. This was considered a disgrace. And
several of us decided that it was for us to reform the house. We did not
consider ourselves to stand in any need of improvement. But we used to
wander round the studies between tea and hall inquisitioning fags and
scholars, asking them what use they thought they were to house or
school, and informing them that they would be well advised to make more
strenuous efforts. It was, I suppose, a form of bullying; or rather
perhaps an aid to vanity. What we really needed was for some one to kick
us hard. No one did, however. It seemed to occur to no one else, any
more than it did to us, that there were objects of a public school
education other than the acquiring of caps and cups. You might as well
expect an Indian priest to doubt the omnipotence of Buddha.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] The proofs of this book were corrected in April. Should anything
unforeseen change during the cricket season, before its appearance, I
can only plead the fallibility of the prophet.