Play up and play the game: the rhetoric of cohesion, identity, patriotism and morality

At the Harrow speech day of roov Dr Wood, the headmaster, ended a self-congratulatory eulogy on the public schools with the statement that their motto was 'Run straight and play the game".' This and similar expressions, 'Keep a straight bat' and 'It's not cricket', were common catch phrases of the public school culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And they were part of a wider vocabulary which drew on the games field for analogy, experience and truth.