How did Long John Silver Lose his Leg?

by Dennis Butts

  Hilarious as Wodehouse’s story is, it does raise questions for the modern reader about the truthfulness of Hughes’s accounts of the rugby and cricket matches in his book. How reliable is his description of the great match between the School and the M.C.C.?

  First of all, one has to acknowledge that Hughes was a very talented and experienced cricketer himself. He captained the Rugby School Eleven in a memorable match against the M.C.C., not only achieving the improbable but not impossible feat of taking a wicket by his own bowling, but also stumping a man, and making the top score of thirty not out. He later played for Oxford against Cambridge in 1842 – his only first-class match – and, although he scored nought in his first innings, he made top score of fifteen not out and carried his bat throughout the second innings. (Cambridge won the match by 162 runs.)

  Consequently, you might think that Hughes knew what he was talking about, and, despite Wodehouse’s suspicions, the account in part two, chapter 8, of ‘Tom Brown’s Last Match’, is both detailed and convincing. Having won the toss, Tom asks the M.C.C. to bat first – to Wodehouse’s later dismay – and they are dismissed by 12.30 p.m. for 98 runs. The School’s reply is just 4 runs short of that. In their second innings, the M.C.C. bat carelessly, we are told, although no details are given, and by 7.30 p.m. the School need 32 to win with 5 wickets down. But time is now running out. When Arthur is bowled, leaving the School to make 9 runs with only 2 wickets remaining, it is decided to call a halt to the game. The visitors have to catch their train back to London, so the M.C.C. are declared the winners in what today would be called a drawn match, having scored the most runs in their first innings.

  This is all straightforward enough, and Hughes’s account of the match contains no obvious errors. But there are a number of curious features. Despite Wodehouse’s comical suspicions, there is nothing obviously unusual about Tom’s decision to ask the M.C.C. to bat first, and not just because of what Hughes describes as ‘the usual liberality of young hands’. Although the weather is fine, Tom Brown might have thought that his bowlers might have been able to exploit any early morning dew on the wicket; he might have thought that fielding first would help his young side to conquer their nerves; or he might, more realistically, have calculated that if the School batted first and were dismissed cheaply, there would be virtually no match at all. What is disturbing, however, as Wodehouse points out, is Tom’s selection of his friend Arthur for the team. He is a worthy character, of course, and his play is not without skill; he is described as a steady bat. But there were other rivals for his place in the team, and even a sympathetic master says that he is surprised to see Arthur selected. Tom admits that he picked him because ‘it will do him much good, and you can’t think what I owe him.’ He is not referring to any financial bribe, of course, but to Arthur’s moral qualities. However, it is still as if the selectors of the English team were to prefer a steady but pious batsman to someone more likely to win the game.

  Another curious feature of the match is its rather vague organisation. The game seems to start ‘after ten o’clock,’, and stops for ‘a glorious dinner’, which includes speeches and comic songs, at the end of the School’s first innings. Yet somehow they manage to find time to squeeze in the whole of the M.C.C.’s second innings, and most of the School’s second innings, before stumps are drawn after 8 p.m. to allow the M.C.C. to catch their train back to London. Another peculiar detail is that, as we might expect, in preparation for the match the ground is very carefully watered and rolled the night before the game starts. But then we learn that, it still being daylight, ‘someone suggested a dance on the turf . . . ’ Soon a merry country-dance is going on to which everyone flocks, until ‘there were a hundred couples going down the middle and up again.’ What effect this might have on the state of the pitch is never stated, but perhaps Tom Brown was not being quite so generous when he asked the M.C.C. to bat first the next morning!

  ‘The conversation during the match’

  Thomas Hughes’s account of the rugby match also raises some interesting questions. Hughes was at Rugby School from 1833-1842, and eventually became, like ‘Old Brooke’, captain of Bigside, the area of the school close where matches were played. Although the origins of ‘rugby football’ remain extremely obscure, it is clear that in the 1830s when Hughes was playing, the game was significantly different from today’s. Until formal rules were drawn up and generally accepted from about 1848, every school seems to have followed its own practices. However, such works as the Centenary History of the Rugby Football Union by U.A. Titley and Ross McWhirter (Rugby Football Union, 1970) tell us that in the early days the game was quite similar to soccer. The difference was that the object of the game was to ground the ball behind one’s opponent’s goal-line in order to win an attempt to score a goal by kicking the ball over the bar of the lofty goal-posts. Players participated in their ordinary clothes, and there was no agreement about the number of players on each side; Tom’s school House of fifty or so opposed the School’s number of over a hundred! Kicking the ball was the main method used to cross the opponent’s goal-line. Running with the ball and passing by hand were virtually forbidden. Although William Webb Ellis had famously challenged this convention by running with the ball in a game in 1823, his example had not yet become widespread, and Hughes himself deplored the practise of running with the ball. The only exception seems to have been that if a player made a fair catch from a bouncing ball, he was allowed to run a few steps before kicking the ball back. There were no carefully defined playing positions on the field, such as scrum-half or hooker, but only vague positions, such as (goal) keepers, quarters and players ‘in front.’ There were a few rules about off-side and the boundaries of play, but for most spectators at the time matches, one imagines, looked like a fairly anarchical scramble; in Hughes’s words ‘nothing but a struggling mass of boys, and a leather ball’.

  The account of the great football match in chapter 5 of Tom Brown’s Schooldays is thus a fairly accurate description of the game as it was played at Rugby School in Hughes’s own boyhood. Even so there are a few puzzles. What exactly happens after Young Brooke touches down, and scores a try, as we say in the modern game? Old Brooke comes up to take the kick at goal. But he evidently has to kick the ball to another boy, Crab Jones, who then places the ball on the ground for Brooke to attempt to kick the goal. Why does Old Brooke not simply attempt the goal himself, without kicking the ball to Jones and thus risking a possible disaster? Is Hughes in error here, or is he revealing an aspect of the game which is no longer practised?

  Two other incidents are also worth noting. Although the duration of the game is only vaguely indicated – it seems to start after afternoon roll-call and ends at five o’clock – there is a pause for refreshments which are supplied by a local tradesman, and some of the older boys apply ‘innocent-looking ginger-beer bottles to their mouths.’ But, Hughes tells us, ‘It is not ginger-beer though, I fear, and will do you no good.’ Does the Doctor know about this?, we wonder. Finally, when the game ends at five o’clock, School House have won by a single goal to nil. But we were told earlier that the match was to be for the best of three goals. Now we learn that ‘the first day of the School-house match is over’, and hear no more about it. What was the final result of the great match? Hughes never tells us.

  It is also important to note that, as in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, most accounts of football in nineteenth-century children’s books refer to ‘rugby football’, and not the game we know as soccer (i.e. association football). Despite the growing popularity of soccer as a working-class game, with the establishment of clubs such as Sheffield Football Club in 1857 and Nottingham County in 1862, followed by the foundation of the English Football Association and the regulation of its rules in 1863, boys’ school stories tended to be set in middle-class public schools, and to describe rugby matches. It was not until the twentieth century that stories about soccer began to feature more prominently in books about
school life. Herbert Hayens (1861-1944) and Gunby Hadath (1871-1954) might be mentioned among the pioneers here. Hadath’s Fall In! a Public School Story, for example, describes a soccer match between rival houses in a tale of 1916. But the most famous of stories about soccer is still Roy of the Rovers (created by Frank Pepper), which first appeared in The Tiger magazine in 1954, and continued to appear in various forms until 2001. It was a sign of the times that, when the Boys’ Own Paper first appeared in 1879, it opened with a story by Talbot Baines Reed entitled ‘My First Football Match’. It was a rugby match, of course. But when the Boys’ Own Paper folded in 1967, its final cover featured a gloriously coloured picture of George Best, Manchester United and Northern Ireland’s greatest player of soccer.

  3. Was Ballantyne Really Bothered about Cocoa-Nuts?

  R.M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island (1858)

  It is a well-known fact that many of the nineteenth-century’s greatest writers of adventure stories lived remarkable lives themselves before settling down to write. Captain Marryat served as a sailor in the wars against Napoleon. Captain Thomas Mayne Reid (1818-1883), after emigrating from Ireland to America, joined the army in the war against Mexico where he was severely wounded. G.A. Henty (1832-1902) saw service in the Crimean War before travelling all over the world as a war correspondent; and H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925) worked for the Colonial Office in South Africa during times of unrest between the British and the Zulus and Boers, before returning to Britain and writing novels full-time.

  The career of Robert Michael Ballantyne (1825-1894) was very similar. Brought up in Edinburgh, the son of a publisher in financial difficulties, he was sent to Canada at the age of sixteen as an apprentice-clerk for the Hudson Bay Company. Over the next six years, while helping the Company with its trading, he travelled all over the vast and sparsely populated region, often by canoe or sledge, in the harshest weather; but also enjoying hunting, shooting and fishing expeditions. Homesickness eventually drove him back to Britain in 1847.

  While in Canada he had written regularly to his mother, and an elderly family friend offer to pay for the private publication of his letters. Carefully revised by the author, Hudson’s Bay; or Everyday Life in the Wilds of North America appeared in December 1847. It was a modest success, and the Edinburgh publisher William Blackwood produced a second edition in 1848. Encouraged by this, Ballantyne began to think of himself as a professional author, and produced another work of non-fiction including The North Coasts of America, and the Hudson Bay Territories: A Narrative of Discovery and Adventure in 1853. This work was based upon an earlier travel book, P.F. Tytler’s A View of the Progress of Discovery of the Northern Coasts of America (1832), but Ballantyne skillfully rewrote to make it more suitable for juvenile readers. It proved a great success and two new issues were sold before the end of the year.

  Thomas Nelson was so impressed by Ballantyne’s work that he suggested he should submit a fictional story of adventure for boys, possibly based once more on his own experiences in the Arctic wastes. Snowflakes and Sunbeams; or, the Young Fur Traders: A Tale of the Far North followed in 1856, and another similar story, Ungava: A Tale of Esquimaux-Land appeared in 1858. A five-shilling adventure story for boys it sold well, as did Snowflakes and Sunbeams under its revised title of The Young Fur Traders.

  Ballantyne’s success was clearly due to the autobiographical flavour he brought to his works, writing of adventures in the snowy wastes of the Far North in a romantic fashion. However, he realised that he could not continue drawing upon his Canadian experiences indefinitely, and so decided to try his hand at a Robinsonnade; a tale of the adventures of a small band of youthful heroes cast away on an uninhabited tropical island, which he called The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1858). In order to achieve authenticity, Ballantyne drew on a good deal of secondary material, particularly a recently-published adventure story, The Island Home: or, the Young Castaways (1852) by James Bowman. He also made use of Recent Explorations to the Pacific, and the South Seas (1853) by J.S. Jenkins. The exciting and amusing adventures of the three boys, Ralph Rover, Jack Martin and Peterkin Gay, on their almost idyllic desert island, and their encounters with cannibals and pirates, gave Ballantyne his greatest popular success, and Coral Island has remained in print ever since.

  Unfortunately, as Ballantyne tells us in his autobiography, in relying so much upon his secondary sources, he made an error. It concerned his depiction of cocoa-nuts. In chapter 4, Peterkin says that he is thirsty, and Jack directs him to a nearby cocoa-nut tree. Peterkin climbs the tree and brings down a green unripe nut, into which he easily inserts a penknife and releases a delightful liquid – ‘Nectar! Perfect nectar’, in Peterkin’s words.

  Only after the book was published did Ballantyne realise that he had made an error. This is what he says in his autobiographical Personal Reminiscences in Book-Making of 1893:

  Despite the utmost care of which I was capable, while studying up for The Coral Island I fell into a blunder through ignorance with regard to a familiar fruit. I was under the impression that cocoa-nuts grew on their trees in the same form as that in which they are usually presented to us in grocers’ windows – namely about the size of a large fist with three spots, suggestive of a monkey’s face, at one end. Learning from trustworthy books that at a certain stage of development the nut contains a delicious beverage like lemonade, I sent one of my heroes up a tree for a nut, through the shell of which he bored a hole with a penknife and drank the ‘lemonade’! It was not till long after the story was published that my own brother – who had voyaged in Southern seas – wrote to draw my attention to the fact that the cocoa-nut is nearly as large as a man’s head, and its outer husk over an inch thick, so that no ordinary penknife could bore to its interior! Of course I should have known this, and, perhaps, should be ashamed of my ignorance – but, somehow, I’m not!

  Trivial as Ballantyne’s error may seem, he claims that it had a profound and lasting influence upon his future work. As the result of his blunder with his description of the cocoa-nuts he says, ‘I formed the resolution always to visit – when possible – the scenes in which my stories were laid, converse with the people who, under modification, were to form the dramatis personae of the tales, and generally, to obtain information in each case, as far as lay in my power, from the fountain-head.’

  Thus he claimed that he decided that he would thoroughly research every book from then on. Such work was not unknown among adult novelists. Dickens visited Preston to investigate a long-running industrial strike while working on Hard Times, and George Eliot studied surgical operations while preparing to write Middlemarch. But such research among children’s writers was less common. Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) must have had to find out something about mediaeval Norway for her historical romance Feats on the Fiord (1841), but evidence of such work among children’s writers at this time is scanty.

  Ballantyne certainly took his resolution seriously. When he was about to begin his book The Lifeboat: A Tale of Our Coast Heroes (1864), he visited Deal and Ramsgate to explore the coast and beaches, and had long discussions with local coastguards and fishermen. For The Lighthouse being the Story of a Great Fight between Man and the Sea (1865), he spent three weeks on the Bell Rock Lighthouse, twelve miles off the coast of Forfarshire. In preparation for his story Fighting the Flames: A Tale of the London Fire Brigade (1867), he not only inspected the modern fire-fighting equipment at the London Fire Brigade’s Headquarters, but also joined a crew as the horse-drawn engine dashed through the streets of London. To research Deep Down: A Tale of the Cornish Mines (1868), Ballantyne lived in St Just for several months, and descended the ladders of the Botallack to see the miners at their dangerous and exhausting work, an experience which helped produce some of his most memorable writing.

  For other books Ballantyne spent two weeks on a lightship near the Goodwin Sands, and travelled on the footplate of the Edinburgh-London express train. He explored the bed
of the river Thames in a diving-suit, and had to be rapidly pulled to the surface when the suit unexpectedly began to dilate. Almost as uncomfortable were the two weeks he spent on a fishing-boat, researching The Young Trawler: A Story of Life and Death and Rescue on the North Sea (1884), for he was horribly seasick for almost the whole period. It was one of his last expeditions.

  Why then did he endure such discomfort and dangers? Was it entirely, as he said, to find authentic material and to avoid the error of the cocoa-nuts? We may think that Ballantyne’s bold claims are somewhat misleading, for he continued to produce works which were not based upon direct experiences for many more years after The Coral Island. For example, Black Ivory: A Tale of Adventure among the Slavers of East Africa (1873) was clearly based upon secondary sources, and Blown to Bits; or the Lonely Man of Rakata (1889), with its detailed description of the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa, derives from an official Report of the Royal Society, as his Preface tells us. An alternative explanation for his enthusiasm for his investigative expeditions seems likely.