Henry Newbolt’s poem ‘Vitae Lampada’ (‘There’s a breathless hush on the Close tonight…) emphasised the idea of surrendering the needs of the individual to the needs of the team: we are told to ‘play up, play up and play the game’. Interestingly, Newbolt was a boy at Clifton College and the Close is the name still given to the cricket pitch overlooked by the Victorian buildings.
When Ford Madox Ford wrote his novels about his experiences in the war, Parade’s End, he gave Clifton as the school attended by the hero Christopher Tietjens and was particularly sharp about sentimentality and its dangers. The following passage comes from the second novel, No More Parades and is placed in the mouth of Captain Tietjens who is camped near Rouen trying to arrange a draft of soldiers from Canada who are being moved up to the Front:
The curse of the army, as far as the organization is concerned, was our imbecile national belief that the game is more than the player. That was our ruin, mentally, as a nation. We were taught that cricket is more than clearness of mind, so the blasted quartermaster, O.C. Depot Ordnance Stores next door, thought he had taken a wicket if he refused to serve out tin hats to their crowd. That’s the Game! And if any of his, Tietjens’, men were killed, he grinned and said the game was more than the players of the game…And of course if he got his bowling average down low enough he got promotion. There was a quartermaster in Shrewsbury who’d got more D.S.O. s and combatant medals than anyone on active service in France, from the sea to Peronne, or wherever our lines ended. His achievement was to have robbed almost every wretched Tommie in the Western Command of several weeks’ separation allowance…for the good of the taxpayer, of course. The poor bloody Tommies’ kids went without proper food and clothing, and the Tommies themselves had been in a state of exasperation and resentment. And nothing in the world was worse for discipline and the army as a fighting machine. But there that quartermaster sat in his office, playing the romantic game over his A.F.B.s till the broad buff sheets fairly glowed in the light of the incandescent gas. “And,” Tietjens concluded, “for every quarter of a million sterling for which he bowls out the wretched fighting men he gets a new clasp on his fourth D.S.O. ribbon…The game, in short, is more than the players of the game.”
Ian Brinton