Stiff Upper Lip: references, sources and further footnotes

These are in addition to the footnoted material in the book. They appear by page number as in the hardback edition. 

Books referred to are listed in the Bibliography, p. 388. 

Introduction

Page 1: ‘The Public Schools and Citizenship’ from The Public Schools from Within: A Collection of Essays on Public School Education mainly by School Masters. (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1906) p. 283. Accessed though forgottenbooks.com.

2: ‘the million Britons’. This calculation is explained in the footnote to page 361.

2: Reports of abuse at Ashdown House. 26 December 2013 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2529565/Boris-school-centre-probe-sexual-abuse-Two-teachers-accused-subjecting-children-aged-7-13-horrific-attacks-1970s.html

3: Auberon Waugh, ‘Suffer the little children’, Spectator, 30 September 1977.

3: ‘Nearly a quarter of a million children’. Original figures from the NSPCC http://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/news/only-1-8-children-who-are-sexually-abused-are-identified-professionals quoting https://www.ex-.org.uk/services-and-resources/research-and-resources/2013/how-safe-are-our-children-2013/

4: Gordonstoun School. The investigation looked at rapes of twelve-year-old girls and other assaults at Gordonstoun’s junior school, Aberlour House. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/12/child-abuse-at-prince-charles-former-school-scotland.

7: ‘around seven or eight years old’, A 1966 study (Royston Lambert Chance of a Lifetime, p. 34.)of a sample of 2,794 sixth formers in ‘public and independent’ boarding schools (i.e. not ‘progressive’ or state ones) found that a majority boarded before eleven and more than a third before eight. At the time 1.7% of British schoolchildren boarded (Newsome report, 1968) http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/psc1/newsom1968-1.html.

8: Cultural traditions of cruelty to children. There’s much literature of ethnography and anthropology that addresses these issues. Jill E. Korbin (ed) Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-cultural Perspectives (UCP, 1981) is unusual in that it also looks at boarding school.

Part One – Leaving Home

13: Pilkington was a prep school headmaster – he becomes the model for the villainous Captain Hook. Andrew Birkin, J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (1986), p. 79.

15: 43,000: Newsome report, page 31- 36, and for Scottish figures page 200. Accessed here. http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/psc1/newsom1968-1.html

16: Bear Grylls, Mud Sweat and Tears (Transworld, 2012).

17: Auberon Waugh, Will This Do? (Arrow Books, 1991).

18: Rupert Everett, Red Carpets and other Banana Skins (Little, Brown, 2006), pp. 21–22.

19: W. M. Thackeray ‘On Two Children in Black’, Roundabout Papers, first published in Cornhill Magazine, 1860.

20: Thackeray’s letters. Quoted in Vyvyen Brendon, Children of the Raj, p. 2.

24: Reebkomp: John Chandos, Boys Together: English Public Schools 1800–1864 (Hutchinson, 1984), p.34.

25: Prep for naval academy. J. A. Mangan (ed), Benefits Bestowed: Education and British Imperialism, p. 65.

26: 570 prep schools in 1981. That is, members of the Independent Association of Prep Schools.

27: Latin at five years old in 1817. Chandos, op. cit. p. 48.

27-28 Winston Churchill, My Early Life (Thornton Butterworth 1930) pp.10, 11.

28, Sneyd-Kynnersley details from Vyvyen Brendon, Prep School Children: A Class Apart over Two Centuries (Continuum, 2009)

29: death of Sneyd-Kynnersley. A former pupil (the far-from-reliable Sir Edmund Backhouse) claimed that when Sneyd-Kynnersley died, the boys inserted the cane into the corpse’s shroud before burial, ‘like the ancient Egyptians’ did with favourite possessions of the deceased.

30: Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, Daydream Believer (Pan Macmillan, 2001).

30: Evill. http://www.ashdownhouse.co.uk/history-of-the-school

31: Desmond FitzGerald, Many Parts: the Life and Travels of a Soldier, Engineer and Arbitrator in Africa and Beyond (The Radcliffe Press, 2007).

31: Anthony Blond, Jew Made in England (Timewell Press, 2004) p. 71.

33: Sandra Ross quote. Channel 4, Cutting Edge: ‘Leaving Home at 8’, April 2010.

35: William Boyd quote, from his novel, Sweet Caress (2016); ‘Penal servitude’: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2272134/Prince-Charles-Gordonstoun-Punched-slept-friends-tortured-pliers-wonder-called-Colditz-kilts.html

36: Bella Bathurst. Interview with AR.

36: Ministry of Defence spend on private education, 2015, benefiting 5,250 children: http://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/private-schooling-of-forces-kids-costs-taxpayer-80m/story-29707221-detail/story.html

42: Womens’ superior morality. Christina Hardyment, Dream Babies (Harper & Row, 1983) p. 155.

43: The Queen. Full title: The Queen, The Lady’s Newspaper and Court Chronicle.

43: IML’s letter. Quoted in Ian Gibson, The English Vice: Beating, Sex and Shame in Victorian England and After (Duckworth, 1978) p. 210.

43: In his book The English Vice the historian Ian Gibson argues that much of the copious correspondence on corporal punishment in The Queen and other late Victorian household journals is hoax material written and submitted by male, ex-public school flagellomaniacs for their entertainment. So popular was such correspondence, with details of the mechanics of punitive beatings and the victims’ reaction often laid out in ghastly detail, that some magazines, including the Family Herald, cashed in, publishing special supplements or pamphlets of the ‘best’ material.

43: Claudia Nelson, Invisible Men: Fatherhood in Victorian Periodicals, 1850–1910 (University of Georgia Press, 2010).

44: Charlotte Guest. Quoted in Brendon. Op.cit.

45: Masefield’s polemical novel The Street Today (1911), quoted by Hardyment.

45: female genital mutilation. Points made by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and others.

47: description of child attachment principles. Edited from Nick Duffell and Thurstine Basset, Trauma, Abandonment and Privilege (Routledge 2016) pp. 24, 25.

48: disorganised attachment quote. Robin Balbernie, ‘Foundation years and the UK Government’s life chances strategy’, submission to government as Clinical Director of PIP UK. http://www.pipuk.org.uk/sites/default/files/Foundation%20Years%20enquiry.PIP%20UK%20Submission.pdf

48, 49: damage to brain and poor attachment. Heledd Hart and Katya Rubia, Neuroimaging of child abuse: a critical review Front. Hum. Neurosci., 19 March 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00052.

50: Children with a secure attachment style will be more able to survive abuse – see for example the work of Daniel Stern.

52: attachment and mid-childhood. Zuzana Kucerova (from her rationale for a thesis): ‘There is not much empirical evidence supporting Duffell’s and Schaverien’s beliefs about the adverse impact of early boarding on one’s development, however, their views are based on their clients/ex-boarders’ concerning accounts, and Brendon (2009) and Lambert & Millham (1974) also present many disturbing first-hand narratives given by boarding children.’

50: William Meredith-Owen. Interviewed by AR.

53: George Orwell, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, Partisan Review, magazine (1952). For fear of libelling the headmistress of St Cyprian’s, Orwell’s essay was not published in the UK until 1967. For a cogent analysis of Orwell’s exaggeration and probable invention in the essay, see Sam Leith, ‘George Orwell’s schooldays’, The Guardian, 8 Feb 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/08/george-orwell-such-such-schooldays

54: ill effect of happy childhoods. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2098472/Why-happy-childhood-make-unhappy-adult.html

55: Churchill. In My Early Life.

55: honesty and obedience. See C. Lantagne, ‘What Qualities Do Parents Value in Their Children? A Revision of Earlier Findings’, http://digitalcommons.ric.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1025&context=honors_projects

56: ‘A reconstruction of childhood…’: William F. Cornell (1988), quoted in William F. Cornell, Anne de Graaf, Trudi Newton, Moniek Thunnissen (eds) Into TA: a comprehensive textbook on transactional analysis (Karnac Books, 2016).

56: Valerie Sinason, Introduction in V. Sinason (ed.), Memory in Dispute (Karnac Books, 1998).

57: Harvard Grant Study. Vaillant, GE, Adaptation to Life, (Little, Brown, 1977). See also reporting of the study by Joshua Wolf Schenk in The Atlantic magazine. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/06/what-makes-us-happy/307439/

Part Two – Settling in at Prep School

66: C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955, HarperCollins edition, 2002), p. 57.

66-70: Royston Lambert and Spencer Millham, The Hothouse Society (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), p. 57 and on.

70: Lambert career. David Limond, ‘From a position of prominence to one of almost total obscurity: Royston James Lambert and Dartington Hall’, Journal of Historical Biography, vol. 12, Autumn 2012. http://www.ufv.ca/jhb/archives.html

75: Le Carré: New York Times Magazine, 23 September 1977. Quoted in Sisman, Adam. John le Carré: the biography (Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 32.

75: a puppy: E. L. Browne, of Stirling Court and St Andrews’ Eastbourne. Quoted in Brendon, Prep School Children (Kindle edition). She also mentions that when parents asked how their children were doing, he gave their cricket scores.

77: ‘If I had been asked . . .’ Piers Partridge in The Making of Them (BBC TV/Mosaic Films 1994).

80: disclosure statistics. NSPCC website, accessed February 2016. Also, the average delay before a child reports sexual abuse is 7.8 years https://www.nspcc.org.uk/globalassets/documents/research-reports/how-safe-children-2015-report.pdf

81: ‘Erewhonians’. Referring to the inhabitants of Samuel Butler’s imaginary alternative society, described in his novel Erewhon (1872).

83: Roald Dahl’s letter. Boy: Tales of Childhood (Random House, 2012), p. 100.

84: Victor Lytton, The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton (Macmillan, 1913).

85: Daphne Rae, A World Apart (Lutterworth Press, 1983), p. 176.

87-88: Gibbs’s death. Letter to The Times, 13 July 1877, from Andrew A. W. Drew, Incumbent of St Antholin’s, Nunhead.

89: Suicide in children. The Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention at Griffith University cites various studies to conclude that child suicide is not rare but in fact ‘a leading cause of death’ for under-fifteen-year-olds worldwide. In their study of twenty years of reported child suicides in Queensland, they conclude ‘work/school problems’ are the second most common reason given after ‘family conflicts’; https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/428806/child-suicide_iasp_F.pdf.

89: Daphne Rae, op cit., p.28.

89: Suicides of Ashdown House ex-pupils – my correspondence.

89: Roald Dahl, Boy.

90-91: C. S. Lewis, op cit.

93: An old boy of Sedburgh School and former Indian Civil Service official, Philip Mason initially published his two-volume history under the pseudonym Philip Woodruff. The quote is from Volume 2, first published by Jonathan Cape.

93: Original sin: Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy in his grand history of the public schools, published in 1975: ‘Behind all forms of education [until 1890] the basic view was the Christian/Pauline one: people, but particularly children, were innately wicked owing to original sin . . . Children were not naturally good but must be taught to be so and that the method was a superior adult discipline and training.’ The thinking, he continues, is ‘still very powerful today’. The Public School Phenomenon (Hodder & Stoughton 1977 and Faber Finds 2014 (e-book)

94: ‘The early Public Schools…’. The ex-schoolmaster T. C. Worsley in a polemical book, Barbarians and Philistines: Democracy and the Public Schools (Robert Hale, 1940).

95: Salisbury ‘learnt nothing’ at school. Andrew Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (Weidenfeld, 1999).

95: Salisbury spat on at Eton. A. N. Wilson The Victorians (Random House, 2002).

95: Lord Robert Cecil. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy op.cit.

95: Charles Darwin’s school. Charles Darwin, Autobiography.

95: Willy Darwin. Letters to his cousin, who educated his children at home. Quoted in Brendon.

96: cruelty. As several academic historians have observed . . .

96: Herbert Asquith Moments of Memory, (Hutchinson, 1938).

96: Eddie Izzard. Simon Garfield, ‘Frock Tactics’, The Guardian 27 May 2001 https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2001/may/27/features.magazine27

98: Vice Versa is published under the pseudonym F. Anstey.

99: film parodies of boarding school life. See, for example, Michael Palin’s brilliant short film Tomkinson’s Schooldays.

101: Plato, The Republic Book 5.

101: Bicknell. Quoted in Claudia Nelson, Invisible Men: Fatherhood in Victorian Periodicals, 1850–1910 (University of Georgia Press, 2010).

101: Nathaniel Woodard: the Woodard Corporation today runs 21 Anglican schools, most of them with full or partial boarding. The quote is from Gathorne-Hardy

102: Woodard girls’ school: Now called Abbots Bromley School.

102: ‘Effeminate bookworms’. Quoted in Jeffrey Richards, Happiest Days: The Public Schools in English Fiction (MUP, 1988), p 121.

103: EL Browne’s poem, published in the school magazine in 1900, goes on for another five verses, ending with a eyebrow-raising declaration of Browne’s ‘love’ for ‘a lad who is eager and chubby’.

103: Mumsnet thread. Commenter ‘Willsoonbesummer’ in New at Boarding Prep School, Mumsnet.com talk thread, 4 February 2016, http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/education/2560315-New-At-boarding-prep-school?pg=

104: Joy Schaverien, Boarding School Syndrome, p. 141. Her case studies are fascinating.

107: making light of bullying and violence. Lots of material on this can be found in the work of Arthur Marshall, a boarding school teacher turned comic journalist who published two anthologies of boarding school memories in the 1980s. Whimpering in the Rhododendrons (for boys) and Giggling in the Shrubbery (girls) paint pretty much all experiences as, at best, golden and hilarious or, at worst, useful. There is no mention of sex in either book. A favourite line: ‘Those who imagine that there has never been a lighter side to corporal punishment are wrong, as this merry incident shows…’ Whimpering in the Rhododendrons: the splendours and miseries of the English prep school (Collins, 1982) p. 131.

107: Harry Thompson, Peter Cook: a Biography (Hachette UK, 2011).

108-109. Jeremy Lewis, Cyril Connolly: A Life (Random House, 2012).

110: sympathy for Russians. Unnamed ex-boarder quoted in Arthur Marshall, Whimpering in the Rhododendrons, p. 43.

110: Evelyn Waugh, A Little Learning. He goes on to say, ‘When I read the accounts of my contemporaries of the enormities enacted at their preparatory schools by both masters and boys, I admit that Heath Mount had ‘a good tone’.’

111: Edward Benson chastising a liar. A writer in the Times in the 1890s, quoted in W. E. Bowen, Edward Bowen, a memoir (1902).

112: ‘lying is almost universal…’, Studies quoted in Po Bronson and Ashley Merriman, Nurture Shock (Ebury Press, 2009), p. 71 onwards.

115: homesickness: Schaverien, p. 127.

115: nostalgia. Julie Beck ‘When Nostalgia was a Disease’, The Atlantic, August 2008 http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/08/when-nostalgia-was-a-disease/278648/.

117: Lambert, p. 57.

118: Orwell called his younger self ‘an odious little snob’. See more on Orwell and class in The Unknown Orwell and Orwell, the Transformation Peter Stansky, William Miller Abrahams, Stanford University Press, 1994.

119: Orwell, the snobbery catechism. ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ op. cit.

119: Early critic. J. R. De S. Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe: the Development of the Public School in the Nineteenth Century (Millington, 1977), p. 208

124: Andrew Motion has written about the misery of his schooling in the early 1960s ‘Dickensian’ Maidwell Hall (one of the two schools featured in Colin Luke’s The Making of Them) and its celebrated sadist of a headmaster, Oliver Wyatt. This is from his memoir, In the Blood:

He beat us if we did badly at work, if we were cheeky, if we walked with our hands in our pockets, if we left the middle button on our jackets undone, if we walked on the grass by the statue standing on one leg, if we slammed doors, if we barged ahead of masters, if we swore, if we made a mess in our lockers, if we didn’t have our towels, if we had fights, if we damaged the flowers, if we hid our food . . .

This prompted more reminiscence from old boys, including Earl Spencer, brother of Princess Diana. More details of beatings and other cruelties were spelt out. Simple fear of the cold and unpleasant place, which, Spencer said, made him sleepless for six months before he even arrived. Other accounts describe Maidwell Hall in the seventies as ‘a concentration camp for unwanted children masquerading as a school’.

Then, as is usual, the reaction came. The Daily Mail published an article by William Sitwell, the editor of a supermarket magazine, which made the cruelties sound as threatening as an Ealing comedy, and praised the school for encouraging ‘independence’.

Sitwell’s protestations might have been more convincing if not for the preceding paragraphs in which he tells of gang warfare and the torture of younger children by older, and the admission that for ten years after he left the school he ‘was always nervous come tea-time’ because that was when the headmaster would take him to be caned for his laziness and stupidity.

It is sad and familiar stuff, an apparent reworking of history that enables the victim to live at peace with his memories. But such normalisation is dangerous too, another facet of an attitude that – at its worst – permitted some brutal and incompetent schoolmasters in the twentieth century to dodge regulation and inspection and thus, as we will see, harbour criminal sadists and sexual predators. Sitwell’s article can be accessed here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2898177/Daily-thrashings-teacher-called-Uncle-Adolf-s-call-education-Earl-Spencer-says-prep-school-hell-fellow-pupil-begs-differ.html 

125: ‘a… nastier boy’. Waugh, A Little Learning.

125: Subsequently in Wee Willie Winkie and Other Child Stories by Rudyard Kipling, published by A.H. Wheeler & Co., Allahabad, in March 1889

Part Three: Growing Up at Public School

 129: ‘Wellington taught me no learning . . .’ Quoted in Honey, p. 220.

129: Gladstone quotes. Said to C. L. R. Fletcher and published in his Mr Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 (Smith, Elder 1908).

Mints for coining empire builders: Edward C Mack, American historian writing in 1938. He was being ironic.

130: recruitment for the Colonial Office. Kathryn Tidrick, Empire and the English Character (I. B. Tauris, 1992), p. 215.

133: ‘15:13:1’. David Turner, The Old Boys, p118, see Bibliography..

133: misuse of charitable bequests. Sir William Fettes founded Fettes College with a bequest of £14 million (in today’s money) for the ‘maintenance, education and outfit’ of orphans and to help people ‘who from innocent misfortune during their lives, are unable to give suitable education to their children’. In 2012 only 5 of 750 children enrolled were paying no fees. The school has been severely criticised by the Scottish Charity Regulator. When Eton was set up in 1442, its founder, King Henry VI, instructed that ‘noone having a yearly income of more than five marks’ was eligible to send their children to it. A similar restriction was applied at Winchester in the fifteenth century. (Five marks was not a tiny sum – it was the salary of the Winchester headmaster’s assistant – but it did exclude the merchant class.) As some historians – and not just those on the left – have pointed out, the reforms legitimised a grand theft. Most of the ‘great nine’ had, like Eton, been set up as schools for the poor. The misuse of the ancient endowments, usually by headmasters and governing bodies to enrich themselves, was one of the reasons for the setting up of the 1861 Clarendon Commission. With the 1868 Act, it was now effectively established that the schools were for the benefit of the middle and upper classes.

This process continued as dozens of former foundation and grammar schools rewrote their original principles and became ‘public’ – in the sense that they would admit the paying public in addition to the scholars. This made economic sense: some schools where the original endowments had been exhausted, or stolen, needed to take fees to survive. Sometimes the initial endowment for the education of the poor was inadequate: London’s St Paul’s appears to have taken in fee-paying, non-scholar boarders within twenty years of its founding in 1509. By the nineteenth century, it was common for schoolmasters at Rugby and Eton to take in ‘commoners’ who paid fees in order to supplement their incomes. But in some of the new public schools the charitable intentions of founders were brazenly flouted. Fettes College in Edinburgh was founded in 1870, in flagrant contradiction of the intentions of Sir William Fettes, a wealthy Edinburgh merchant.

The trustees appointed by Fettes’ executors sat on his bequest (£166,000 in 1836 – £14 million in today’s money) for twenty-five years, letting interest accrue until they had the funds to put up one of Edinburgh’s most comically grandiose buildings (often cited as J. K. Rowling’s model for Hogwarts). It seems unlikely that its architects ever had serving the needs of poor scholars at heart. By 1875, the scholars made up 20 per cent of the school roll of 200, and Fettes quickly garnered the name ‘Eton of the north’. Fettes’ scholarships today are awarded for academic excellence, not because of parental poverty.

134: A. N. Wilson, The Victorians, p. 283.

134: number of ‘public’ schools. Honey, p144.

135: Clarendon Commission on girls’ schools: Quoted in Derek Gillard, Education in England (2011) http://www.educationengland.org.uk/history/chapter03.html

135: Queen Victoria. Gathorne-Hardy, p. 487.

135: 50,000 governesses. Alice Renton, Tyrant or victim? A History of the British Governess (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991).

136: 1910 girls’ schools. Gathorne-Hardy, p. 487.

136: 1944 school numbers. Fleming Report, 1944: The figures given for boys are 29,000 and 9,000 – these are secondary schools.

136: 1960s. In January 1967, out of 273 HMC-recognised public schools in England and Wales, there were 130 boys’ schools, 140 girls’ schools and 3 mixed; of these, 103 of the boys schools and 86 of the girls’ were ‘mainly boarding’. Newsom Report, p31.

137: detesting Latin grammar. Maurice Jacks of Mill Hill, writing in a collection of essays titled The Headmaster Speaks, quoted in Barbarians and Philistines, op. cit. p. 157.

Leonard Woolf, Sowing: an autobiography of the years, 1880–1904 p 74. (Hogarth Press, 1960).

138: Leonard Woolf, Sowing: an autobiography of the years, 1880–1904 (Hogarth Press, 1960), p, 74.

138: Papillon. The Public Schools from Within, op. cit., p. 281.

139: George Osborne. Mark Peel, The New Meritocracy: A History of UK Independent Schools 1979–2014 (Elliott & Thompson 2015), p. 147.

139: Samuel Beckett. When he quit his hated post-university job at Campbell College in Northern Ireland, the headmaster protested, ‘But, Mr Beckett, don’t you realise you’re teaching the cream of Ulster?’ Beckett replied: ‘Yes, rich and thick.’ Gathorne-Hardy, p. 523.

139: Charles Moore. Daily Telegraph, 2011, quoted in Mark Peel, The New Meritocracy.

140: ‘too incestuous’. David Turner, The Old Boys – the Decline and Rise of the Public Schools (2015).

140: girls schools ‘disadvantageous’: Clarendon Commission report (1864), vol. 1, p. 42, quoted in Turner, op. cit. p. 120.

140: 1942 Committee on Public Schools, under the chairmanship of Lord Fleming; ‘The Public Schools and the General Educational System’ published 1944..

140: ‘acute unhappiness’ of working class boys. Fleming report, 1944, para 141.

141: 70 per cent of masters. Newsom Report (1968), p. 55. Accessed via http://www.educationengland.org.uk

144: Harold Nicolson, ‘Pity the Pedagogue’ in Graham Greene (ed.), The Old School (Jonathan Cape, 1934), p. 105.

144: E. L. Browne, headmaster of St Andrew’s, Eastbourne from 1899 to 1933. He was author of the poem decrying ‘that monster – the feminine boy’, quoted in Chapter 2.

144: Calder-Marshall. His essay ‘More Frank than Buchman’, is in The Old School, op. cit., p 64.

145: ‘foreigners’ inability to understand the mad Englishman…’. A. J. C. Dowding of St Ninian’s, Moffatt (in Scotland, not England). Quoted in J. A. Mangan (ed.), Benefits Bestowed, p. 81.

15: Army performance in WWI. See Corelli Barnett, for example

145: died in such numbers. The casualty rate among junior officers was nearly twice that of ordinary soldiers.

146: frogs beaten to death. John Horne, Alan Tomlinson, Gary Whannel Understanding Sport: An Introduction to the Sociological and Cultural Analysis of Sport (Taylor and Francis, 1999) p. 1.

146: Pulling Out game. See Tod, A. Hay. Charterhouse. 1900. Reprint. London: Forgotten Books, 2013. 80–1. There are differing accounts of how the game, ‘as old as the school’ worked. It may have been a form of running the gauntlet. But on Good Friday 1824 a small boy called Howard, a younger son of the Earl of Suffolk, was ‘dragged along the ground for some distance, with a mass of boys upon him, and received injuries from which he died soon after’.

146: Karl Heinz Abshagen, Konig, Lords Und Gentlemen, Union Deutsche VA, (Stuttgart, 1938). Introduction, p 16. The full title in English is ‘King, Lords and Gentlemen: the upper-class on the threshold of yesterday and tomorrow’. An English version (trans. E. W. Dickes) published 1939 by William Heinemann.

147: ibid, p17.

147: ‘It is only fair to Herr Abshagen…’ T. C. Worsley, Barbarians and Philistines, op. cit.

148: Karl Heinz Abshagen King, Lords and Gentlemen: Influence and power of the English upper classes (Heinemann, 1939), p.144–5.

148: ‘the ritual symbolisation…’. John Wakeford, The Cloistered Elite: A Sociological Analysis of the English Public Boarding School (Macmillan, 1969).

149: sport stats. ‘Top 10 Facts’, http://www.hmc.org.uk.

150: E. Arnot Robertson’s essay in The Old School, op. cit.

153: mildly critical novels. E.g. Horace Vachell’s The Hill in 1905 and then EM Forster’s The Longest Journey (1907).

153: Montagu Butler quoted in Jeffrey Richards Happiest Days, p. 122.

154: Horne Understanding Sport, op. cit., p. 15.

156: Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape, 2015).

156: Orwell, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ op.cit.

157: Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape, 2015).

158: politics of an Etonian sixth form. Gathorne-Hardy, quoting Anthony Sampson.

158: ‘total societies’. See Erving Goffman, Asylums.

159: Jonathan Aitken: After his release seven months later he told The Times that it was odd to have been an inmate after having been minister in charge of funding prisons: he wished he’d been more generous.

159: Stephen Fry, Moab is My Washpot (Arrow Books, 2004), p. 413.

159: psychological motors: see for instance Ronald Hyam’s work, discussed in Richards, Happiest Days, p. 168.

160: sausage mill. In the Graham Greene-edited essays, The Old School.

160: Noel Annan. Quote from Our Age, quoted in Duffell, Wounded Leaders, p. 224.

161: Powell on ‘non-Aryans’. The essay goes on to say that ‘happily’ this was drawing to a close in his time at the school (1919–23), leaving it deliberately vague, you suppose, whether he meant the high proportion of non-Aryans was ending, or the objections to them. Anthony Powell ‘The Watr’y Glade’, Graham Greene (ed.), The Old School (Jonathan Cape, 1934) p. 150.

161: Disraeli. His father converted the whole family to Christianity when he was a teenager.

161: Nehru. http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/mar/10/publicschools.raceineducation.

162: Anthony Blond, Jew Made in England (Timewell Press, 2004) p. 71. He reports this exchange: ‘Sir, why do people dislike the Jews?’ ‘Because, Blond, they killed Christ.’ p. 73.

164: regional accents. Discussed in Raymond Chapman, Forms of Speech in Victorian Fiction (Routledge, 2014) pp. 14–16.

164: Scottish accents banned. Henry Cockburn, Journal 1831–1854 (Edinburgh, Edmonston and Douglas, 1874) pp. 87–89. (Via David Turner). James Renton, my great-grandfather was educated there fifty years later and spoke with a strong Edinburgh accent to the end of his life.

164: Initiation tests and threats. E.g. the ‘pressure bath’ threat at Wycombe Abbey in the 1970s and 80s.

165: ‘Public school English…’. King, Lords and Gentlemen, p. 175.

166: JF Roxburgh, Debretts. Quoted in Gathorne-Hardy.

166: Rossall and Malvern. David Turner, The Old Boys: Decline and Rise of the Public School (Yale, 2015) p. 118.

167: Vaughan and class. Chandos, p 306.

167: William Sewell. Quoted in Honey, p 229.

168: Powell in The Old School, p 152.

171: Simon Raven, The Old School (Hamish Hamilton, 1985) pp. 133–4.

172: John Julius Norwich added, ‘Many years later I asked him if he could confirm the story; he unhesitatingly did.’ Ormsby-Gore was born in 1918, which puts the date of the anecdote in the mid-1930s.

173: Lord Uxbridge’s amputation. He ‘neither uttered groan or complaint nor gave any sign of impatience or uneasiness’ through the operation, the surgeon reported, remarking only that the knife seemed a little blunt. He lived until he was 85 as Marquess of Anglesey, a title he was awarded after the battle; the leg, buried near the battlefield, has its own memorial stone. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11682406/The-Battle-of-Waterloo-is-this-the-most-British-conversation-ever-to-be-held-on-a-battlefield.html/.

173: Pythons at boarding school. Michael Palin, John Cleese, Eric Idle and Ian MacNaughton, director/producer of the TV series and their first feature film.

174: Simon Raven, The Old School, op .cit. p. 118.

174: Horace Vachell, The Hill (John Murray, 1905) chapter 4.

175: LP Hartley’s essay in Graham Greene, ed. The Old School, op. cit. pp. 97–8. Hartley goes on to contradict himself – the familiar public school equivocation, nervous of disloyalty – saying, ‘But I do not remember any cases of inward mortification at Harrow.’

176: etiquette. Cecil B Hartley, The Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness, Being a Complete Guide for a Gentleman’s Conduct in all his Relations Towards Society, first published 1860.

177: Churchill cries. Harold Nicolson, Good Behaviour. Quoted in Richards, Happiest Days.

Part Four – The Uses of Violence

185: Auberon Waugh. Told in his son Alexander Waugh’s Fathers and Sons (Hachette, 2016).

187: Swinburne’s ‘The Flogging-Block’. The manuscript, long kept secret, is held by the British Museum.

187: John Delaware Lewis. Quoted in Gibson, Ian The English Vice: Beating, Sex and Shame in Victorian England and After (Duckworth, 1978), p. 103.

188: Richards. Quoted in Ian Gibson, p. 102.

190: Edward Lockwood, Early Days of Marlborough College (1893) quoted in Daphne Rae, p. 13.

190: Gibson. It should be said that, on an over-crowded shelf of salacious pseudo-histories of flagellation and sadism, Ian Gibson is the celebrated biographer of Lorca and a serious writer.

191: General Coote. He was acquitted of any crime after donating £1,000 to the school. But he was stripped of his rank and honours and lost his Parliamentary seat at the next election. A Plain Statement of Facts, relative to Sir Eyre Coote, London, 1816. Quoted in Rictor Norton, Homosexuality in Eighteenth Century England, a source book

192: decline of beating. See Daphne Rae, op. cit.

194: Lawrence’s floggings. R. Bosworth Smith, Life of Lord Lawrence (1883), In ‘Early Life’, section 16.

194: William Sewell. Quoted in Honey, p. 192.

195: historians. E.g. Ian Gibson.

195: sadists. See e.g. Honey, p 202.

195: Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. Quoted in Gibson. The Goncourts were fascinated by Frederick Hankey (1830?–82) an ex-Guards officer who spent much of his life in Paris working as a procurer and pornographer to English aristocrats who delighted in his resemblance to the Marquis de Sade, whom he admired. He was said to have attended an execution in Paris with a friend and two girls, so they could all have sex while watching the death. His brother Thomson Hankey was an MP and Governor of the Bank of England.

196: flagellant porn. Deborah Lutz, Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism (W. W. Norton 2011) interviewed here: http://www.salon.com/2011/02/20/victorians_2/.

196: poets and the Fortune Press. See Richard Bradford, The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (Biteback Publishing, 2012).

196: Spender. His essay in ed. Graham Greene, The Old School, p. 189.

197: Fry and Sneyd-Kynnersley. See Vyvyen Brendon, loc 955.

197: ‘Chasten thy son’. See, e.g., a pro-flogging letter to the Morning Post, 19 November 1856, quoted undated by Gibson (p.111). He speculates that the letter, which mentions the author’s ‘immortal Keate’, is a joke, with its talk of ‘the very seat of honour’ and flogging as ‘the only fundamental principle upon which our large schools can properly be conducted’. Swinburne, says Ian Gibson, liked that gag and may have written the letter.

198: ‘sparing the rod’ translations. From the King James Bible and from God’s Word, a translation used by US evangelicals. Compared translations sourced here: http://biblehub.com/proverbs/13-24.htm. New English Testament: ‘He who withholds his rod hates his son, But he who loves him disciplines him diligently.’

198: ‘conscientious floggers’. T. C. Worsley, Barbarians and Philistines, p 156.

198, 199: Dahl quotes. Both from an early draft of Boy, quoted in Donald Sturrock, ‘Roald Dahl’s Schooldays’, Daily Telegraph, 8 Aug 2010. There is a possibility that Dahl had confused Fisher with another headmaster. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/biographyandmemoirreviews/7932061/Roald-Dahls-schooldays.html.

200: Whack-O! For pedants (like me) – the title was simplified for the seventies TV version to Whacko!

200: 1967, schools that used corporal punishment. Report quoted in Gibson, p 92.

202: Spartan boys to the temple. From the British historian Helene Adeline Guerber’s The Story of the Greeks, published in 1896 in the US and UK.

202: ‘Survival of the fittest’. Honey, p. 219.

203: Orwell, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’.

[1] 203: Stephen Spender, World Within World (Hamish Hamilton, 1951) p. 325. Spender was at Gresham’s 1917–19.

[1] 203: W.H. Auden, ‘Honour’, ed. Graham Greene, The Old School, p. 16.

[1] 205: Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Terms and Conditions: life in British girls’ boarding schools (Slightly Foxed, 2016).

206: E Arnot Robertson, ‘Potting Shed’, ed. Graham Greene, The Old School, p 178.

207: anonymous teacher, ‘Not unnaturally . . . ’. The Assistant Master Speaks (Kegan Paul, 1938), a companion to The Headmaster Speaks, op. cit., published in 1936.

208: Worsley, p. 156.

208: 1952 survey, quoted in Gibson.

208-209: Poland abolished the beating of children in schools two hundred years ago; controls or bans came in Holland in 1850, 1887 in France, 1890 in Finland, 1917 in Russia, 1935 in Norway, 1928 in Sweden, and 1968 in Denmark. Sweden made corporal punishment in the home illegal in 1979.

209: 1994 article on beating. Peter Victor ‘Corporal punishment: Where to send your children to school if you want them beaten’ Independent, 30 April 1994 (incorrectly dated in newspaper’s archive), http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/corporal-punishment-where-to-send-your-children-to-school-if-you-want-them-beaten-1433029.html.

 210: schools challenging law on caning. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1361220/Forty-private-schools-ask-judges-to-back-caning.html.

210: parents desire for corporal punishment. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/parents-back-corporal-punishment-in-schools-2355544.html.

210: harm done by corporal punishment. Elizabeth T, Gershoff, Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, ‘Spanking and Child Outcomes: Old Controversies and New Meta-Analyses’, Journal of Family Psychology, June 2016.

211: punishment inspiring bullying. See Daphne Rae, A World Apart.

 211: LP Hartley’s essay, The Old School, pp 95–6.

 212: Lambert, The Hothouse Society, op. cit, pp 183–5.

212: ‘sent to Coventry’. This popular school ritual is said to remember the English Civil War of the 1640s. Coventry was a Parliament-supporting town: Royalist troops captured in battle and dispatched there were shunned by the populace.

212: ‘Left-wing critics’, e.g. Graham Greene and his co-essayists in The Old School, and T. C. Worsley in his three books.

213: Shaw quote, In the preface to his play Misalliance, about the hypocrisies of modern marriage.

213: Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe, p. 221.

Part Five – Sex and Some Love

217: Arnold’s sermon. Published in 1832. Often misrepresented with this quote, the great reforming headmaster was in fact using the words of the moral crusader John Bowdler to say that schoolboys did have a choice whether to indulge in vice or not: it wasn’t ‘unavoidable’. The mid-Victorians used ‘vice’ or ‘evil’ for sins from rebelliousness to gambling. ‘Immorality’ could mean masturbation, or more. In 1896 Winston Churchill successfully sued for libel over an allegation that he had committed ‘acts of gross immorality of the Oscar Wilde type’ while a cadet at Sandhurst. ‘Public schools are nurseries of all vice and immorality’ was first voiced by Henry Fielding (an Old Etonian) in 1742. He puts it in the mouth of a disgruntled Eton tutor in his novel Joseph Andrews.

217: Betjeman, quoted in J Gathorne-Hardy, p. 166, without reference. Betjeman was at the Dragon School and then Marlborough College, during and after the First World War. He writes of some of the friends and loves of his school and university days – including my great uncle, Michael Dugdale – in his autobiographical poem, ‘Summoned by Bells’.

]218: Teen pregnancies, UK. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2794234/uk-highest-rate-teen-pregnancies-western-europe-despite-25-fall-decade.html.

218: John Ruskin. Until he went to Oxford aged seventeen, Ruskin was largely taught at home, but his tutors were ex-boarding school clergymen (such as Osborne Gordon).

219: Tim Card, Eton Renewed: a History from 1860 to the Present Day (John Murray, 1994), p. 66.

219: ‘ravenous glances’: Gathorne-Hardy, his phrase, I think.

220: swimming costumes. Daphne Rae, op cit.

220: J. M. Wilson, Morality in Public Schools and Its Relation to Religion (Macmillan 1882), pp 7–10.

222: ‘Olim Etoniensis’. Letter in Journal of Education, March 1882. Quoted in Honey, pp. 178–9.

223: ‘Beautiful outside . . . ’ Quoted by J G-H, without reference. He thinks it was Cyril Norwood, the Anthony Seldon of his era, who went on to be headmaster of Harrow.

223: ‘Our Headmistress encouraged…’. Quoted by Arthur Marshall, anonymously.

223: Maxtone Graham, Terms & Conditions, op.cit.

224: calico tent-tunics. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Solid Bluestone Foundations and Other Memories of a Melbourne Girlhood, 1908–1928 (Macmillan, 1983).

224: women not troubled by sex. William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, 1862 edition. Acton goes on to say: ‘As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband’s embraces, but principally to gratify him; and, were it not for the desire of maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions.’

225: Wycombe Abbey. My sources.

225: Gender separation in Harrow. Royston Lambert.

227: Acton. A pretty typical text, much reprinted.

227: virus. Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise, p. 34.

226: Arthur Calder-Marshall’s essay in ed. Graham Greene, The Old School, p. 67.

226: measles. T. C. Worsley, Flannelled Fool

227: convent school: My interview.

229: David Hare, The Blue Touch Paper (Faber, 2015).

229: J. A. Hadfield, Childhood and Adolescence, pp. 168–9.

229: masturbation a ‘solace’. E.g. Peter Steele, Over the Hills (Smashwords, 2015).

230: Brian Johnston, A Further Slice of Johnners (Random House, 2011).

230: ‘Two frogs in a tank…’: Terms and Conditions, op. cit.

231: Theodora Benson’s essay in Graham Greene (ed.), The Old School.

231: ‘a nice new book’. Terms and Conditions, op. cit.

232: ‘a man shouldn’t listen’. Flannelled Fool, p. 47.

233: Hickson, London’s Piccadilly Circus. It was, until the late twentieth century, a site of male and female street prostitution; Alisdare Hickson, The Poisoned Bowl: Sex and the Public School (Duckworth).

233: insecure chidren. Robin Balbernie, PIP-UK, op.cit.

234: Using ‘love’. More on this in Honey, p.189 onward

234: pashes. Giggling in the Rhododendrons, p 164.

235: ‘Cherub’ is Fettes. ‘Stigg’ is a Radley and Repton term, ‘T-boy’ is from Shrewsbury

236: JA Symonds is quoted in Chandos, pp. 307–8. Chandos says that he is the first to have quoted these passages – which also have some graphic descriptions of sexual bullying and the vicious humiliation of a schoolboy prostitute. A 1964 biography of Symonds by Phyllis Grosskurth left them out.

236: prostitution. See for example, John Rae, The Public School Revolution (Faber, 1981), p. 127.

236: bedwarmer. Dr Dukes, headmaster of Rugby. Quoted in Honey.

237: T. C. Worsley, Barbarians and Philistines, p 107.

237: Tom Brown’s School Days, p 473. Nicholas Nickleby (1839 in book form) took twenty-five years to sell over 100,000, while TBS sold 28,000 in the five years to 1862. See Thesing, Brantlinger (eds.), A Companion to the Victorian Novel (John Wiley & Sons, 2008) and Kathryn Hughes, ‘Back to School’, Guardian 20 Sept 2008. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/sep/20/booksforchildrenandteenagers.

237, 238. William Sewell. A. K. Boyd The History of Radley College, 1847–1947 (Blackwell, 1948). The odd grammar appears to be Boyd’s.

238: ‘giggles’. Hickson, pp 169–70.

239: Connolly’s slow sexual development. According to Richards, citing biographic material, p. 169 op. cit.

241: ‘Large numbers of boys’. 1,084 were interviewed, and nearly 12,000 answered questionnaires or wrote diaries; 25 of the schools were ‘public’, 15 ‘maintained’ – which means state-run or aided, 18 independent and 7 ‘progressive’. Lambert, The Hothouse Society, op.cit. p. 5.

242-243: Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir (Atlantic Books, 2011).

244: trading sexual favours. Many sources, including this one.

244: Peregrine Worsthorne. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2005/oct/12/publicschools.schools.

244: drowning Worsthorne. http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/i-might-well-have-been-gay-but-there-was-such-pressure-to-be-non-gay-6450841.html.

245: George Monbiot on his prep school. http://www.monbiot.com/1998/03/26/acceptable-cruelty/.

245: male rape. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11587324/Why-doesnt-society-care-about-male-rape.html.

245: Montagu on rape at Eton. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3299149/Aristocrat-tells-stopped-boy-raped-Eton-killing-himself.html.

246: John Peel, Margrave of the Marshes.

246: Mass expulsion, Harrow. Lord Rothschild, Memoirs of a Broomstick (Collins 1977).

247: expulsions from Eton in the 1930s, Richards op. cit.

247: homosexuality not compulsory. Unnamed, quoted in Worsley, Barbarians and Philistines.

248: John Rae, The Public School Revolution, p. 129.

249: ‘cattle markets’. Bella Bathurst, interviewed AR.

249: co-education at Marlborough. John Dancy, headmaster from 1961–72. Quoted in John Rae, The Public School Revolution, p 132.

251: Worsthorne. http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/i-might-well-have-been-gay-but-there-was-such-pressure-to-be-non-gay-6450841.html.

252: C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy.

253: Joan Smith, ‘Protecting children from paedophiles means sacrificing their innocence’, Guardian, 10 March 2016.

Part Six – Captain Grimes and Captain Hook

259: the Llanabba Castle headmaster explains Grimes’s crime to Waugh’s alter ego, Paul Pennyfeather. ‘Your colleague, Captain Grimes, has been convicted before me on evidence that leaves no possibility of his innocence – of a crime (I might almost call it a course of action) which I can neither understand nor excuse. I dare say I need not particularise…’ In later editions Waugh made the pederasty more explicit. But in an essay published in A Little Order, he writes: ‘But had I written anything like a full account of his iniquities, my publisher and I would have been in police court.’ p.77.

259: W. R. B. ‘Dick’ Young died in 1971. He was never arrested, as far as I can make out, even though he had sex with boys in many places – in a railway station waiting room, for example – much less safe than boarding schools. Waugh says he was expelled from his school; the 1948 register of old boys of Wellington College lists both Young and a twin brother as having attended it from 1908. WRB Young left two years early. He served the whole of the 1914-18 war with the Royal Welch Fusiliers and was a schoolmaster from 1920 to 1928 – until three years after Waugh and he were there together. Young became a solicitor and by 1948 was settled in Maidstone. He published his own novel ‘The Preparatory School Murder’ in 1934. According to one literary investigator[1], the novel contains a revenge: there’s a Waugh-like character whose turn it is to be the pederast. Young died in poverty in 1971.

Some of this information is from Duncan MacLaren, whose excellent blog is at www.evelynwaugh.org.uk.

259: ‘a garage boy’. From letters of Evelyn Waugh, quoted in Philip Eade, Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016).

260: ‘Expelled from Wellington…’. Evelyn Waugh diaries, quoted in Eade, op.cit. Waugh liked to tease and provoke and he was not above embellishing his stories. Philip Eade, his newest biographer, warns that since the ‘emission on Mount Snowdon’ story appears only in the autobiography but not in the diaries, it may have been an ‘imaginative flourish’.

263: ‘Even now…’. Auberon Waugh, Will This Do? (Random Century, 1991).

264: Auberon Waugh ‘Suffer the Little Children’, Spectator, 30 September 1977.

265: ‘Haversack Ruse’. Meinertzhagen’s trick was successful: it may have won the Allies their campaign against the Ottomans in the Middle East in 1917. More famously it was used again in the Second World War to mislead Nazi Germany about the Allies’ plans for invading continental Europe.

269: Francis Grier. Lecture at Society of Analytical Psychoanalysis, London, Nov 2015.

270: ‘detached…’. Brendon, Prep School Children, and Schaverien, op. cit. p 140.

271: cold-blooded murders. In his book The Meinertzhagen Mystery – the Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud (Potomac Books, 2007), the novelist Brian Garfield paints a picture of a entrancing fabulist, utterly immoral, so addicted to falsehood that he will invent everything from his meetings with Hitler to thousands of records of bird spotting and the seventy volumes of diaries. (Garfield has in turn had his research questioned.)

272: Meinertzhagen doesn’t seem to have been keen on Lawrence, either. They might perhaps been friends, after working in the Middle East in 1917 and rooming together at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. Both were there to give their views on the future of the Middle East, where Meinertzhagen had spent part of the war in military intelligence. (Meinertzhagen became a fervent supporter of Zionism, and after the war worked to aid the campaign for a Jewish homeland in Israel.)

272: ‘Meinertzhagen knew no half measures…’. T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, chapter 69. Lawrence gives no further explanation of the German brain-spattering anecdote and there’s no other confirmation of it. The strangely chosen word may be echoing Lord Byron’s sarcasm-laden attack on the Duke of Wellington, victor at Waterloo, in Don Juan, canto 9: ‘War’s a brain-spattering, wind-pipe-slitting art, / Unless her cause by right be sanctified . . .’

274: Curry, reported in Gathorne-Hardy.

275: ‘Jane’, interview with AR, November 2015.

276: Nick Duffell, The Making of Them, pp. 180–1.

276: Lambert and Millham, p 273. I have not been able to find where their research files are stored.

276: ‘Catholic children’. A. W. Richard Sipe, ‘Secret sex in the Catholic system’ National Catholic Reporter, 28 March 2010 accessed here: http://ncronline.org/blogs/examining-crisis/secret-sex-celibate-system. The 2004 John Jay report, which looked at fifty years of records, found over 10,000 individuals had made complaints of abuse, from which 6,700 unique accusations against 4,392 named clergy could be identified. Only 252 have since been convicted, and 100 jailed.

277: Vyvyen Brendon, Prep School Children: A Class Apart Over Two Centuries op. cit.

277: David Turner, The Old Boys – the Decline and Rise of the Public Schools (2015). As the title tells you, it is something of a hagiography; the first edition’s cover sports praise from Sir Anthony Seldon, former headmaster of Wellington College and the private education industry’s best-known defender. Even so, it is a shock to find that Turner, in an era of revelations about sexual abuse at schools, is so blasé.

278: Auberon Waugh, Will This Do? (QPD/Random Century, 1991) p.61.

280: Tim Card, Eton Renewed: a History from 1860 to the Present Day (John Murray, 1994).

281: William Johnson. Later known as William Johnson Cory, after he left Eton. He finally married, aged fifty-five, to a girl who ‘looked like one of his boy favourites’.

281: ‘tableaux’. Eton Renewed, p.65. One boy, Reginald Brett, recorded these orgies in his diary: he later became a well-known Liberal politician.

281: Sir David Hunter-Blair, In Victorian Days (Longman’s, 1939). Blair – who went on to become Abbot of Dunfermline – does not elaborate. The Abbot was not particularly prudish: when he went on to Oxford he became a close and life-long friend of Oscar Wilde.

282: Padraig Pearse. Colm Tóibín, ‘After I am hanged my portrait will be interesting’, London Review of Books, 31 March 2016.

282: Hare, The Blue Touch Paper (Faber, 2015).

283: ‘mignon’. Hare translates this as ‘darling’.

283: Hare, ‘very powerful sense of guilt’. Gaby Wood, interview ‘David Hare: ‘a sense of guilt drove my life for so long’’, Daily Telegraph, 28 August 2015.

285: MCC and Garrick. The MCC is the ancient and grand Marylebone Cricket Club; the Garrick, London’s almost-as-exclusive artists’, actors’ and writers’ club. Founded in 1831, it still won’t allow women to be members.

286: Sheridan Morley, in a review of Noël Coward: A Biography by Philip Hoare, Independent on Sunday, 12 November 1995.

289: Stephen Robertson, ‘Age of Consent Laws,’ in Children and Youth in History, Item #230, https://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/case-studies/230 (accessed 17 November 2015).

289: Judith Trowell, ‘The emotional impact of abusive experiences in childhood, particularly sexual abuse’, in Eileen McGinley and Arturo Varchevker (eds,), Enduring Trauma Through The Life Cycle (Karnac, 2013).

291: European traditions of pederasty. See, for example, Dusan I. Bjelic, Galileo’s Pendulum: Science, Sexuality, and the Body-Instrument Link (SUNY Press, 2012), p. 45. A psychotherapist friend remembers the eminent psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft (1914–98) mentioning this notion in an academic discussion of analysts abusing their trainee analysands.

292: Female same-sex love superior. The thought is expressed in some of the twentieth-century literature, including in Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt (1952).

294: Uranian definitions. Or ‘a female psyche in a male body’. The man who coined the term, the sexual theorist and activist Karl-Heinz Ulrichs published it first in Research into the Riddle of Man-Male Love (1864-5). From the beginning it was seen as a liberation movement, embraced by the homosexual Victorians, but Friedrich Engels among others refused overtures for a political alliance. Engels denounced ‘the abominable practice of sodomy’.

294: death penalty. Matt Cook et al, A Gay History of Britain (Greenwood, 2007), p. 109. Cook says that between 1806 and 1861 nearly 9,000 men were prosecuted in Britain for the offence; 404 were sentenced to death and 56 executed, the last two, discovered having sex in a private room, in 1835.

294: Ladslove is a folk name for an aromatic herb.

294: At Last! – quoted in full in Gathorne-Hardy.

295: Elton John’s Tukes. http://www.westernmorningnews.co.uk/Sir-Elton-bid-latest-Tuke-painting/story-12754152-detail/story.html.

296: Gathorne-Hardy interviewed one of Tuke’s models, who was taken to the painter as a school-boy by his own housemaster, who wanted to seduce him. ‘Tuke used to use bits of boys – here a calf, there a buttock, somewhere else a head – and create ‘perfect’ boys. His own lover was then aged forty, but he’d kept his figure and quite a lot of him could still be used.’

296-297: Worsley. In Flannelled Fool, op. cit.

297: tolerance of homosexuality in the Army. See Simon Raven and Peregrine Worsthorne. The supposed homosexuality of two of the twentieth century’s most famous generals, Montgomery and Kitchener.

297: unmarried headmistresses. Gathorne-Hardy.

297: governesses. Tyrant or Victim, Alice Renton. op. cit.

298: literature of homosexuality. For examples, see The Poisoned Bowl.

298: motivating force of paedophile. Interview with Donald Findlater.

305: Andrew Norfolk’s list of schools with abuse allegations or convictions http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article3980201.ece.

311: birching made illegal. In prisons. But it appears to have continued into the 1960s at some schools, including Eton.

315: Andrew Birkin, JM Barrie and the Lost Boys (1986). Barrie makes it clear that Pilkington, a ghoulish child catcher rubbing his hands with glee as he reads the birth announcements of boy children in the newspaper, is Hook. But the child-hating pirate captain evolved a more attractive persona in successive stage productions, not least because glamorous male leads like Sir Gerald du Maurier played him. Barrie adapted his view of him, too. In a lecture, Captain Hook at Eton, given more than twenty years after Peter Pan became famous as play and then novel, Hook is more like the Disney version we know today. He is a graduate of Balliol, Oxford and Eton College and dresses like a Royalist cavalier from the seventeenth century. James Hook, said Barrie in the lecture, was ‘not wholly unheroic’ and ‘the handsomest man I have ever seen, though, at the same time, perhaps slightly disgusting’.

319: William Vahey and Southbank International. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/20/southbank-international-school-london-where-teacher-abused-at-least-54-boys-threatened-with-sanctions.

322: Addrison, Wright and Caldicott. AR interviews and Caldicott investigation. http://truevisiontv.com/uploads/websites/39/wysiwyg/Caldicott_pages_6__7.pdf

325: Chenevix-Trench. He was dead by 1994, when this was published in the Independent. Benedictus was reacting to Tim Card’s history of Eton, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/dear-anthony-chenevix-trench-the-old-etonian-novelist-addresses-the-man-who-was-headmaster-from-1963-1373138.html.

Part Seven – Meeting the Vampires

327: 225,000 sexually abused. http://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/news/only-1-8-children-who-are-sexually-abused-are-identified-professionals. The figure is actually an extrapolation from the 25,000 recorded cases per annum between 2012–14.

327: child pornography users. 50,000–60,000. Donald Findlater, my interview. The police figure has been questioned, e.g by John Carr in ‘Child pornography the unbelievable truth’, Huffington Post (2012).

328: Emotional neglect law. Serious Crime Act – fully explained here https://www.actionforchildren.org.uk/how-you-can-help/campaign/our-campaign-successes/neglect-law/.

328: minimum definition: see https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/child-abuse-and-neglect/child-sexual-abuse/.

329: Wolvercote Clinic. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2161518.stm.

330: Donald Findlater has since left the Lucy Faithfull Foundation.

330: one in five children: A 2014 Council of Europe report and campaign http://www.coe.int/t/dg3/children/1in5/default_en.asp. For a round-up of statistics – ‘Preventing child sexual abuse: towards a national strategy’ J Brown, NSPCC (2015). ‘The most recent NSPCC study on the prevalence of child sexual abuse (Radford et al, 2011) found that 11–17-year-olds reported that 16.5 per cent of them had experienced sexual abuse, of which 4.8 per cent had experienced contact child sexual abuse. These figures rose to 24 per cent and 11.3 per cent when 18–24-year-olds were asked if they had experienced sexual abuse as children. Lampe (2002) looked at the prevalence of child sexual abuse across Europe and found overall prevalence rates of 6–36 per cent in girls and 1–15 per cent in boys under 16. The Council of Europe states that ‘available data suggest that 1 in 5 children in Europe are victims of some form of sexual violence’ (Council of Europe, 2014).’

330: one in nine cases. The NSPCC uses 85 per cent, but the 1 in 9 figure is quite commonly used across Western Europe. See previous footnote.

Jeremy Forrest was found guilty in 2015 of abduction and having sex with a minor. He was sentenced to five and a half years. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/jeremy-forrest-first-picture-disgraced-6051243.

337: Kirsty Hudson. Interview with AR.

337: Smallbone is an eminent Australian criminal psychologist. See for example his and Richard Wortley’s ‘Child Sexual Abuse: Offender Characteristics and Modus Operandi’, in Trends & Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, Australian Institute of Criminology http://www.aic.gov.au February 2001.

356: Maurice says he was treated by the Thames Valley Sex Offenders Group Programme, which ‘helps offenders develop understanding of how and why they have committed sexual offences. The programme also increases awareness of victim harm. The main focus is to help the offender develop meaningful life goals and practice new thinking and behavioural skills that will lead him away from offending.’ (From the Justice Department website, accessed March 2016 – https://www.justice.gov.uk/offenders/before-after-release/obp).

Part Eight – The Product

361: General Sir Herbert Plumer. Later Field-Marshal and Viscount. Quoted in Honey, p229.

361: Rough estimates on boarder numbers.

The calculation is based on figures from the 1944 Fleming report, the 1968 Newsom report, the 1970 Dennison report, the Independent Schools Council annual census from 1983 to 2016 and other sources.

In 1967 1.9% of children in England and Wales went to boarding school (Newsom para 60)

In 2014 4,300 boarders at 29 of the 35 state boarding schools http://stateboarding.org.uk/parent-research-results

The 9000 Public School boarding places available per annum, cited by the 1944 Fleming report (see also footnote p137), but excluding other schools with boarding (by 1967, 59% of boarding places were non-public school). Fleming gives boarding population of 52,500. At public schools and secondary state boarding schools.

In 1967 there are 151,269 secondary school boarders (1968 Newsom report , para 60) in schools in England and Wales in 1967, 35,000 of whom were partially or wholly state funded (according to the 1970 Donnison report), and a further 12,000 in Scotland including projected hostel places (Newsom report, para 510, accessed at educationengland.org).

So I assume 27,000 leavers per year at that time, because secondary schools started for children between 11-13, I assume 1/6th of the population leaves each year. 1983 the ISC figures for 75% of schools indicate 82,000 secondary boarders, so I a add another 25,000 for non ISC schools, state and grant-maintained. ISC 1990: 82,000 (qdd 15,000), 1995 73,000 (add 15,000). In 1998 the ISC claimed to represent 80% of all children at independent schools, and 75,000 children boarding. In the same year the Dept of Health said there were 100,000 boarders in 772 boarding schools, but I have not checked the source for this ( probably here – http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471984752.html).

Since 2000, when ISC says the overall numbers of boarders stabilised at around 70,000, there have been between 57-59,000 in secondary – so I assume 9,000 leavers per annum from their members, plus a further 1,000 from non-members and state boarding schools

(NB – 1968 Newsom , para 60, 17% of them were from parents who lived abroad). Today (2014) there are a further 5000 boarding places in state boarding schools http://stateboarding.org.uk/parent-research-results

Between 1982 and 1998 boarders declined from 27.7% of the population of ISC schools to 16.5%.

So my assumption is based on underestimates – 9,000 leavers each year (50% death toll). 1945-1960. 27,000 leavers 1960-1975. 17,000 leavers 1975-1990, 14,000 leavers 1990-2000,. 10,000 leavers 2000-2016. Total 1,111,000 1945-2016

But in 1967 (Newsom para 60,) 59% of boarders were in non-public schools., so could be higher, though of course more of that era will no longer be alive

Which equals 1,111,000.

Note – The independent survey by Research Stories for the State Boarding Schools Association (SBSA), contacted over 1,500 parents of 4,300 boarders at 29 of the UK’s 35 state boarding schools. The survey was carried out between April and June 2014.

(NB – 1968 Newsom , para 60, 17% of them were from parents who lived abroad). Today (2014) there are a further 5000 boarding places in state boarding schools

The independent survey by Research Stories for the State Boarding Schools Association (SBSA), contacted over 1,500 parents of 4,300 boarders at 29 of the UK’s 35 state boarding schools. The survey was carried out between April and June 2014. http://stateboarding.org.uk/parent-research-results

361: Half the parents have had the same sort of education. Independent Schools Council/Boarding Schools Association. Given that 30 per cent of today’s boarders are from abroad, this is high.

362: 80% real British. AR interview, August 2016, anonymity requested.

363: £1 billion. My calculation – 30,000+ children at £30,500 p.a.

363: happiest days. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/24/school-days-happiest-life-nightmare.

373: Lord Salisbury. See Andrew Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999). Though a brilliant wit, Salisbury was a lifelong depressive and misanthrope because – says Roberts – of his Eton experience. He was certain too that ‘human nature was essentially evil’.

376: ‘buttoned-up schoolboy’. Interviewee (Rupert Morris) quoted in Brendon, Prep School Children.

377: Schaverien in The Times. ‘Does boarding school harm you for life?’ 2 September 2015 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/education/schools/article4544566.ece.

380: BBC report on sexual offences in school. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-34138287

383: Press release on HMC report – ‘First data on mental health trends’, published October 2015. http://www.hmc.org.uk/blog/first-data-mental-health-trends-indepen

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