The Jacker’s style is individualistic, wacky and imbued with the public school ethos of the time.

The serial: Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 31

The archivist added: “And since he was keen on rowing I’ve set aside these.” She handed me the boat club log books bound in black. “Perhaps your best bet is to look at his housemaster, H. A. Jackson’s reports.” I glanced to my left and saw a few sheets of paper in neat hand-writing.

“He was known as The Jacker,” she explained. “Strangely,” she added handing me a copy of an extract from the War Service Record and Roll of Honour, in which Angus’s obituary appears, “we sometimes get to know more about the dead than the living”.

Indeed, the Win Coll obituary revealed more about Angus than their records on Jock and Simon. I was thrilled. At last, I was on Angus’s trail.

Daisy may have destroyed his school letters, those cursory missives in which he scrawled requests for cash, intimations that he had won at Fives, or complaints about his housemaster. Although West Downs had closed down and with it many of its records, Winchester had come up trumps.

Principled men

I turned to The Jacker and like an artist who reveals more of himself than his sitter, the character of Angus’s housemaster in his reports is communicated as clearly as his subject. The man’s style is individualistic, wacky and imbued with the public school ethos of the time.

Lionel Helbert, Kenneth Tindall and The Jacker were dedicated, principled men with first class minds, in effect, ersatz fathers to the Macdonald boys and played a vital role in their young lives. These schoolmasters’ main job, then, was to produce men who would serve the empire.

Most Win Coll housemasters had wives but some were unmarried. Out of 19 housemasters during this period, only five were bachelors; The Jacker was one. In Jackson’s time, housemasters had more autonomy than his counterpart today.

Each man encouraged his boys to be fiercely competitive with those from other houses. While absolute loyalty was expected, The Jacker rewarded a boy’s allegiance by showing a firm, if not total, commitment to him.

Jackson was concerned with the instruction of “new men”, as the 13 and 14-year-olds were termed.

House photographs from 1929 to 1932 show him seated among his 38 charges outside Moberly’s. Wearing a bushy moustache, he looks alert and avuncular. On a rug at his feet is a line of silver trophies that house members have won during the school year. You can detect how pleased he is; the greater volume of pots, the wider the grin.

When it came to the schoolboys’ reports, Jackson held in equal importance academic work, sport (in this, Jock was especially gifted), health and the boy’s attitude towards the house community.

The housemaster expected boys to behave in a way that demonstrated a nascent manliness, in which pluck, energy, perseverance, good temper, selfcontrol, discipline, cooperation and esprit de corps were present. Being referred to as “an excellent type” 15-year-old Simon evidently passed muster.

The Jacker, therefore, prized Simon’s character as much, even more possibly, than his sporting talent or scholarly abilities (in this he struggled more than his brothers). While Angus was “quiet and sensible,” his brothers were “excellent and capital.” When Jock and Simon departed Moberly’s, The Jacker was “very sad” to see them go but at Angus’s exit he wrote that he “will be very welcome here”.

Enthusiasm

A clue to his less fervent enthusiasm is in Angus’s health record. During the spring term of his second year he “went off to an operation,” a cause for concern for Jackson. Would Angus be able to row or swim during the following half (term)?

A few years later the adolescent boy faced a more serious physical problem, a “strained heart”. Fortunately, the doctors found “nothing much wrong” and the following summer as Angus prepared to leave Winchester, The Jacker noted he was “delightful after last summer’s scare”.

Out of the three brothers, Angus fared the best academically. Undoubtedly he benefited from A. T. P. Williams’ regime. On this man’s appointment as headmaster in 1924 he updated the school curriculum, so that modern languages and history enjoyed parity with Latin and Greek.

From the early 1900s, history at Winchester began to replace the classics. This trend accelerated under Williams’ watch. History was Angus’s subject and, as he matured, The Jacker hoped that he would do well in it, if the subject continued to interest him.

Angus’s extreme height (he was 6ft 3in) was a disadvantage. Schoolmasters quickly blamed him for lack of judgement and for acting immaturely. They had to remind themselves that the boy was “a year younger than he looked.” Nevertheless, my uncle became a competent house prefect but he never displayed the casual brilliance of Jock, nor the convivial charm of Simon.

The writer of Angus’s Win Coll obituary alleges Angus was “reserved and not easy to know.” Angus received none of the cachet awarded Jock. Nor was he able to relax and “play the fool” like Simon.

Win Coll was not overtly sporty and Angus not outstanding in any case. He still was expected to chase a ball over a muddy field and row down the Itchen. Not even Winchester escaped the prevailing games cult, where Angus could gain courage, endurance, assertion and self-control.

Public school sportsmanship also helped a boy to develop high moral qualities and be willing to sacrifice himself for others.

Influences

Jackson makes no mention of Angus in the school cadet force. Winchester wasn’t military. Even in 1914, when patriotic fervour was at its height, Montague Rendall, the headmaster announced: “I am not at all afraid of any spirit of militarism at Winchester College; other influences are too strong.”

These were implied in Eleanor Fort es cue Brick dale’ s 1926 triptych, a commemoration to the headmaster, now hanging in the school Chantry, depicting a mounted knight accompanied by his squire. The words beneath the image are didactic and exhortatory, if not archaic and romantic: “Look unto the rock whence thou art hewn. Serve as thy brethren served and in peace or in war, bear thyself ever as Christ’s soldier, gentle in all things, valiant in action, steadfast in adversity.”

It’s doubtful if Angus took these words seriously and whether, on entering Win Coll, he knew he wanted to become a soldier. The best he could do was join the school cadets.