Playing the Game: A Biography of Sir Henry Newbolt

Contemporary Review, Jan, 1998 by Molly Mortimer

No wonder, like Browning and Kipling, Newbolt vanished behind glittering 'macho' dreams, sincerely held. He also descried a national mood and though despised in the anti-war thirties he never lost the respect of his contemporaries like Amis and John Masefield. Unusually, Newbolt was a clear headed, practising lawyer, who edited a major work on Law Digest in 1895, then turned to Froissart's Chronicles and finally wrote the Official Naval Operations of the 1914 war. He also edited the Monthly Review and contributed more to propaganda and naval intelligence than anyone is ever likely to know.

Newbolt, like Dickens, was a mesmeric speaker as the records of his triumphal lecture tours across Canada (supported by the Governor General John Buchan) showed. He continued to serve in one way or another till 1938, yet one could say he died in 1914 but not without faith.

His perceptive biographer, who possibly was born in the wrong generation to appreciate him, points out that the boy in the 'breathless hush of close tonight' could not make the same choice today: to prefer his captain's hand on his shoulder to a season's fame would only make him out as a jerk and a poofter if not worse. This is something that had never entered Newbolt's vision of cricket. So whose are the better values? And who was Henry?

VIKING SONG

When I thy lover first Shook out my canvas free And like a pirate burst Into that dreaming sea The land knew no such thirst As then tormented me

Now when at eve returned I near that shore divine Where once but watch fires burned I see thy beacon shine And I know the land hath learned Desire that welcomes mine.

MOLLY MORTIMER