Rivalries & rituals / Schooldays recalled in a 1906 memoir
St. Paul's Rector Never Played Sports. He Had Cricket Rules.
A 1906 memoir remembers Henry Coit, the nineteenth-century head of St. Paul's School in Concord, who had no muscle at all. He had opinions about vests.
James Conover, a former pupil, wrote in his 1906 memoir that he saw Dr. Henry Coit, rector of St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, on the playing field exactly once. It was a Saturday afternoon. A crowd of boys was cheering at what looked like horseplay, the Doctor sailed across the lawn, the boys fell back, and in the middle stood a tipsy man. Coit took him firmly by the collar, marched him at arm's length into the road, turned him around, gave him a gentle push and said: "Go home at once!"
The boys spent years afterward inventing tales of the Doctor's prodigious strength. In truth, Conover admitted, he had no muscle at all. Coit had told him he never felt equal to games as a boy, and he agreed with the Psalmist that "The Lord delighteth not in any man's legs."
I have quoted this at every family hike since I read it. It has not once gotten me out of the hike.
What Coit lacked in legs he made up for in rules. One noon, from the schoolroom window, he watched a boy preparing to bowl on the old clay cricket crease, removing his linen shirt, tying a handkerchief around his head and taking off his suspenders to use as a belt, which was the approved fair-weather costume. The boy looked, the Doctor observed, as if he were going to undress completely, and Coit sent a boy to tell him "he must put on his hat and shirt and vest."
Coit never could see why a fellow had to undress to play. On one cool day he announced that everyone must wear coats except the batters and bowlers, pronouncing bowler, Conover noted, with the "bow" of a ship.
He also never forbade baseball. Conover was clear about that, and so was Coit, who once told the schoolroom that he had never forbidden, and never would forbid, any manly game. Baseball nevertheless managed only a spasmodic life in late fall and early spring, and somehow any boy who played it felt like a culprit. Cricket flourished. Conover, who loved baseball, took up cricket because the Doctor favored it, and ended up preferring it to every other game.
And while the boys played, Conover recalled, the Doctor was usually somewhere else: visiting the sick in the countryside, or in a bookshop in town.
St. Paul's still has a Cricket Holiday, a surprise day off. At the 2022 convocation, the rector pointed students to the prayer for it in the chapel prayer book, adding, in capitals in the published text, "WHICH IS NOT TODAY!"
I now announce, at least once each summer, a Family Holiday. Then, in the same breath: which is not today. The youngest has started asking which day it is. I tell her I'll know it when I see it, from the window, and I'll be wearing a vest.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- James P. Conover: Memories of a Great Schoolmaster, Chapter VI anglicanhistory.org
- St. Paul’s: Fall Convocation 2022 sps.edu
- St. Paul’s School: Cricket Holiday 2024, official video description vimeo.com
- Alumni Horae: Not Just Filling the Gap spshorae.com
- St. Paul’s: A Stellar Start sps.edu