Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 30

Even letters home with their shaky grammar, erratic spelling and traces of suppressed emotion were censored

Marches and parades replaced sport and a Scout band was established for boys to learn to play the bugle and the drum. They studied flag reading and signalling by semaphore; Scoutmasters taught them to shoot with an air rifle, conduct bicycle drills and route marches. Each boy learned to salute and take the Scout oath.

Critics believed the Scout movement smacked of the armed forces but Helbert felt it instilled independence in the young and many welcomed lessons in tent pitching, fire-making and outdoor cooking.

As a Scout, Angus worked towards gaining a stalker’s badge: instead of shooting a bird or small animal with a gun he shot photographs. Another challenge was the naturalists’ badge, which required a contestant to identify birds, flora and fauna.

Scouting supplied the bedrock for Angus’s eventual career as a soldier; wearing uniform, practicing selfdefence, using his initiative and being of service to the community were all valuable steps towards becoming an army officer.

Resourceful

Favouring the outdoors, Scouting expected the young to be resourceful and part of a team; these activities had a profound effect on the reserved but independent Angus.

Baden-Powell considered that Scouts were descended from medieval knights, gifted with manliness, bravery and heroism.

It would be nice to think that these figures resonated with Angus as he was in line to inherit land once held by Sir Symon Loccard, the Scottish medieval knight. As for Baden-Powell, the hero of Mafeking, he was well aware of another brave soldier from the South African War: Angus’s maternal grandfather, Eyre Macdonell Crabbe.

The West Downs regime forbade boys to read comics or eat sweets. At the start of each term staff vetted the boys’ reading matter: John Buchan, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rider Haggard were permitted but Edgar Wallace and the Saint were not.

Even letters home with their shaky grammar, erratic spelling and traces of suppressed emotion (we “read between the lines”, my mother once told me on receiving my letters from boarding school) were censored. West Downs was not all Latin conjugations, cold dormitories and outdoor walks with each boy carrying a Burberry over his arm.

Good table manners were expected. If anyone transgressed he was sent to the pigs’ table.

Oscillating between rigour and pampering was the practise of instilling moral values in the boys that made them exercise a conscientiousness far beyond their years. The school worked hard under Tindall. He and his staff were expert in helping pupils pass into the public school of their choice.

In 1926 Angus passed successfully into Winchester College. From West Downs on Romsey Road, Angus’s public school was only a few streets away. Hidden behind the cathedral in College Street the college is situated in the oldest part of the city.

Reputation

There Angus was shocked to find himself, not at the top of the school ladder as he was at West Downs but on the bottom rung. The 13-year-old was unable even to rely on the support of Jock who, on leaving Winchester that summer, went up to Magdalen College, Oxford but his older brother’s reputation helped Angus make a smooth entry into his assigned house, Moberly’s (Toye’s in Wykehamical jargon).

Nevertheless, Angus had to handle not only a new regime but also the prospect of fagging, bullying and various initiation rites; if he was very unlucky he might even receive a flogging from his housemaster.

Maybe Jock gave Angus the lowdown and warned him that older boys would impose tests on the school’s arcane vocabulary and other odd customs like eating off a wooden plate, one side for the first course and the other for the second. Mum told me about this but lately I’ve discovered that only scholars did it.

Angus and his brothers entered Winchester College as commoners, which meant their families paid school fees; scholars went for free.

If Jock was sparing on advice, Kenneth Tindall was not. Like Lionel Helbert, he was an old Wykehamist. Both knew what awaited a boy fresh from his prep school.

As a parting gift, West Downs’ headmasters gave each boy a gold cross, inscribed with the letters HBP, which stood for the school motto: Honest. Brave. Pure.

I’ve a photograph of Angus in Winchester College uniform with his family outside Largie. The way Daisy lays a protective hand on his shoulder suggests she’s apprehensive.

The Winchester career of her younger brother Tempest ended in expulsion.

Midway down College Street at the school entrance, stood an ink-stained desk. Winchester College now hawks its antiquity and, as the oldest public school in England, is entitled.

I visited at the behest of Suzanne Foster, Winchester College’s archivist, who led me to a building nearby, up a narrow staircase to the oakpanelled Warden Harmar’s room, now the Fellows’ library and Reading Room for archives, renovated and re-opened in September, 2006 by, appropriately, the bishop of Winchester.

Paramount

The school was founded by William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester in 1382. I ran an eye across the crowded bookshelves, one section dominated by the Oxford English Dictionary, another filled with leather-bound volumes and yet another, which was locked, with medieval manuscripts.

I was quite prepared for a host of schoolmasters like Dumbledore of Hogwarts in J K Rowling’s Harry Potter novels to enter and dust down their cloaks and chalk-grimed mortar-boards, before they adopted their seats.

At Win Coll, pupils are known for their slang and abbreviated words; lavatory (foricas) is ‘fo’, the dons’ common room notice board is ‘do co ro no bo’ and a senior commoner prefect is ‘sen co prae.’

It is as if verbal dexterity, the speed with which a boy expresses himself, is paramount or a form of public school blaséness and the ultimate in cool. Harrow has its songs, Eton its own arcane language but nothing beats the Win Coll argot.

“Here’s The Wykehamist,” Ms Foster said, pointing to a stack of old journals, “which has news on cricket matches, football, steeple-chasing, shooting, rowing, cultural trips abroad, debating, natural history and archaeology. You’re bound to find something about him in those.” More on Monday.