Sunday, February 25, 2018

School of hard knocks / The dark underside to boarding school books

REREADING

School of hard knocks: the dark underside to boarding school books

Violence, cruelty and sexual confusion are as much a part of boarding school literature as japes and cricket. Alex Renton surveys a troubled genre from Kipling to Rowling

Alex Renton
Saturday 8 April 2017 12.00 BST

“M

ichael was ordered to take down his trousers and kneel on the headmaster’s sofa with the top half of his body hanging over one end of the sofa. The great man then gave him one terrific crack. After that there was a pause. The cane was put down and the headmaster began filling his pipe from a tin of tobacco. He also started to lecture the kneeling boy about sin and wrongdoing. Soon, the cane was picked up again and a second tremendous crack was administered upon the trembling buttocks. Then the pipe-filling business and the lecture went on for maybe 30 seconds. Then came the third crack of the cane ... At the end of it all, a basin, a sponge and a small clean towel were produced by the headmaster, and the victim was told to wash away the blood before pulling up his trousers.”

The writer is Roald Dahl, on his school, Repton, in the early 1930s. Apart from one fact, it isn’t remarkable: it echoes accounts of boarding school stories in the 19th and 20th century that tell quite blithely of extraordinary violence and psychological cruelty. These appear to have been as traditional an element of the curriculum for the privileged child as were fagging, rugby, chapel and Latin. The notable detail Dahl provides is that the “great man” was a clergyman named Geoffrey Fisher, later to become the archbishop of Canterbury.

Savage discipline, along with sexual confusion and formalised bullying, are so common in the schooldays memoirs of the British elite in the 19th and 20th centuries that you have to conclude that parents wanted and paid for their children to experience these things. To most of the class that used them, the private schools were factories that would reliably produce men and women who would run Britain, its politics, business and culture. Boarding school was a proven good investment. So thousands of men and women who had suffered awfully, by their own admission, sent their children off for just the same.

At St George’s school, Ascot, the eight-year-old Winston Churchill was whipped hard for damaging the headmaster’s hat and for taking sugar from a pantry. “Flogging with the birch in accordance with the Eton fashion was a great feature of the curriculum,” he wrote in My Early Life. Churchill’s headmaster was another clergyman, the Rev Henry Sneyd-Kynnersley. Another St George’s old boy, the artist Roger Fry, wrote in his private diaries of these “solemn rituals”, which sometimes resulted in not just blood but excrement splashed around the caning block; Virginia Woolf, Fry’s first biographer, censored this information, along with details of both Fry’s and Sneyd-Kynnersley’s sexual arousal during the ceremony.

What all the published memoirs, from Churchill’s to Christopher Hitchens’s and a host of others, share most obviously is their tone: wry, tolerant and rather proud. It didn’t do to make a fuss or – more important – betray the caste. There are few men or women who went through the boarding school system who were prepared to wholly deny the benefits of the experience, at least before the later 20th century. George Orwell and his schoolmate Cyril Connolly had a go, using – and in Orwell’s case, fictionalising – the baroque horrors of their south coast prep school, St Cyprian’s.

‘Lifeless prunes and spiritual vampires’ … WH Auden was scathing about his teachers at Gresham’s.
Photograph by Jane Bown

Among the intellectual left in the 30s, a perception grew that Britain’s social divides, and the peculiar psychology of its ruling class, might just owe something to the uniquely bizarre education the elite underwent. In a 1934 volume of reminiscences, The Old School, edited by Graham Greene, writers including WH Auden, the diarist Harold Nicolson and the novelist Eileen Arnot Robertsoncompared the bulldozing of children into conformity at their schools to fascism. Auden dubs the teachers at Gresham’s in Norfolk “lifeless prunes and spiritual vampires”. Robertson’s essay about Sherborne School for Girls – “The Potting Shed of the English Rose” – sums up the ethos: “Run about, girls, like boys, and then you won’t have to think of them.” It is a portrait of a prison-factory designed to machine the girls into spiritual clones – reliable spouses for rulers.

There are few negative accounts of the traditional boarding schools by women. That may be in part because physical violence was less common, though the emotional abuse and neglect they encountered could be just as damaging. These institutions were founded later – there were only five “public” schools for girls by the end of the 19th century, all of them quite deliberately aping the boys’ ones. But in the late 1960s, 150,000 British children were boarding, about a third of them female. By then, the girls’ schools had their own literature: the addictive, unambivalent stories of japes, hockey and simple social quandaries turned out by Angela Braziland Enid Blyton. Like JK Rowling, Blyton did not board and Brazil only did in her late teens. The only anti-boarding school novel by a woman in the first half of the 20th century is Frost in May, Antonia White’s fictionalised account of her rigid Catholic convent school, Woldingham. There, sexuality was so feared that the girls were not permitted to see their own bodies: baths were taken in tents made of calico.

Novelists were telling of the dark and brutal times to be had at boarding school much earlier than the essay-writers. Dickens sent Nicholas Nickleby to Dotheboys Hall and Charlotte Brontë put the orphan Jane Eyre into Lowood Institute: at both of them hypocritical, grasping adults set out to break the children, physically and spiritually. In 1888, Rudyard Kipling published a heart-rending short story about little children dispatched – as he was, at five years old – from the colonies into the hands of uncaring adults back in Britain. Ten years later, he invented a school fiction subgenre with the rebellious schoolchild as hero, battling dictatorial and stupid adult teachers: Stalky and Co leads to Just William, to Molesworth and Down With Skool and finally to Harry Potter. The anti-authoritarian pranks of Stalky and his friends reappear again and again in subsequent English fiction – not least in the post-second world war tales of British officers in PoW camps, fooling dim German guards.

Having set The Longest Journey (1907) around his snobbish, militaristic school Tonbridge – called Sawston in the novel – EM Forster delivered the harshest of all one-liners about the products of the British public school. They go out into the world, he wrote in 1927, “with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts”. But by the 1920s, more of them were opening. To most Britons, possession of limited knowledge and not too much emotional intelligence must have seemed a sensible preparation for joining the club that ran the world. “They say that Eton taught us nothing,” crowed the first world war general Sir Herbert Plumer at a dinner of the school’s old boys’ society in 1916. “But I must say they taught it very well.”

The cricket field triumphs and the practical jokes, the floggings and the bullies of the traditional boarding school were by the 1890s the staples of a literary genre with an audience far beyond the class that used them, or even that aspired to them. The simple cast of brave, true sportsmen, of swots and of cowards, cads and bullies invented by Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown’s School Days marched on through hundreds of comics and novels for children; if you read accounts of British foreign policy before and after the second world war, it seems as though the playground precepts and stock characters of the schooldays novel have peopled the world. School and sport provided metaphors for proper Britishness. “Play up! and play the game!” – the refrain of Sir Henry Newbolt’s immensely popular poem “Vitaï Lampada” – was a guiding motto for everything from war to marriage.

It was clear that a stiff upper lip, loyalty to the team and a smile at adversity were the attributes most useful in life – and you obtained these at the right schools. By the 1920s, no crime, no brutality of those establishments was too much for their customers, or the wider public. Evelyn Waugh portrayed a shambolic prep school in his first novel, modelled on one at which he had taught. Decline and Fall features fiction’s first account of another traditional cast member of the boarding school drama, the predatory Captain Grimes. His actual crime is only hinted at in the novel; the BBC’s current rollicking TV adaptation is much more open about the “peg-legged pederast”. But the sophisticated reader would have had no problem understanding what Grimes did – and had been sacked from the army and many boarding schools for doing. Grimes is acclaimed as one of the century’s greatest comic creations. In his diaries, Waugh writes with loving admiration of Grimes’s original, the disgraced former army officer WRB “Dick” Young. A serial molester, certainly, but also, according to Waugh, a resourceful and witty man of “shining candour”, and they remained friends until Decline and Fall was published. Later, by way of revenge, Young wrote a school novel in which Waugh was the paedophile teacher.

And so to Hogwarts. With all its gothic filigree, this most exclusive college looks very like the 19th century Fettes College. The series has the archetypes – sinister teachers and over-friendly ones, sporty heroes and school bullies. While the books don’t have any flogging in them, they do have other key elements, including the arcane ritualistic training to join an elite.

Harry and his friends may well have been the best advert for private boarding schools since the Duke of Wellington boasted that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. It could be coincidence, but the 30-year decline in numbers came to an end in 2000, just as the third Harry Potter novel was published. Since then, though average full-boarding fees are now around £35,000 per annum, the pupil count has been stable at 70,000, a third of them the children of wealthy foreigners. Later this month, when the Easter holidays end, more than 4,000 children under 10 years old will say goodbye to their families, shipped off to where there is the promise of adventure, but not love. Some of them – as one mother, “forced” by her daughter to allow her to board, told me – will pack Harry Potter wands too. Your heart breaks for them still.

• Alex Renton’s Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Classis published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

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