Boy's Own Editor

In the bookshop on the Charing Cross Road I spotted half a shelf of individual unbound issues of the Boy’s Own Magazine. A bloke was sitting on a stool by the books and blocking my way. Eventually by dint of standing very close to him, he moved. I flicked through the convenient contents list of the magazine issues from the 1850s and 1860s. The word cricket jumped out at me from the yellow front cover of the August 1857 issue, price twopence. It said ‘Our cricket match, and how we lost it’, pages 240-246. I started and almost finished the story on my tube journey from Piccadilly Circus to Paddington. The match took place in Liverpool between Custom House elevens, one that could be described as whippersnappers versus seniors. The narrator is a whippersnapper looking back on the days of his youth:
‘They were very happy days those; and I like to look back upon them, and think of them with a cordiality which awakens generous remembrances regarding those whose hands I have shaken, but may never grasp more’. This tinge of sadness resonated with me. I fear I have played my last game of cricket. As for ‘Our cricket match, and how we lost it’, it ended with a whiff of sharp practice. A player described as ‘long-bodied, short-legged, bullet-headed, long-armed...of some three or four and twenty...face round, and with that livid hue about the chin incidental to close-shaven coal black whiskers’ (page 242/243) was the perpetrator. Who was he? The demon Spofforth? It can't have been. He could hardly been born then. Referred to as Blue Beard in the story. he was the turning point. Through some kind of administrative mix up, he played for both sides and upped his game to snatch victory from the whippersnappers, demonstrating behaviour that now may have elicited chants of ‘cheat, cheat, cheat’. Things were different then as the two teams caroused and carolled ‘their way homewards under the light of the lovely moon’ (page 246).… (meer)