Eton vs Harrow may be a snob’s paradise but God save us from a world of dreary uniformity

AS SOON as our eldest son was born in 1985, I put him down for Eton, and I did the same for boy number two when he came along in 1987. Looking back, I can see that I was suffering at best from an extreme form of wishful thinking, at worst from absurd delusions of grandeur.

Even at the time, I realised it was very unlikely that I would ever be able to afford the fees, which now stand at a cool £48,501 per boy per year.

Indeed, back then in the 1980s, when Mrs U and I were permanently on our uppers, the registration fee alone almost broke the Utley bank — and if my memory serves me, this was a mere £15 for each boy (call that about £38 in today’s money).

But then I told myself that anything might happen to change my financial circumstances in the 13 years before the boys would be old enough to start at Eton. Perhaps a long-lost great-uncle would die childless in some far-flung corner of the globe, leaving me his diamond mines. Or — who knows? — I might even write that best- selling novel ( which I still haven’t quite got round to, getting on for 40 years later).

Enough to say that by the time Utley boys numbers three and four entered this world, in 1991 and 1993, I’d come down to earth with a bump. I realised there wasn’t the ghost of a chance that I’d ever be able to send any of our boys to the school, and I saved myself the money it would have cost to register these new arrivals.

Disgraceful

Mind you — and here’s a shameful confession — I always thought the £30 I’d invested in registering the first two was money well spent. This was because for 13 years it gave me bragging rights, enabling me to drawl, whenever people asked me where we planned to send them: ‘Actually, we’re not quite sure yet, but they’re down for Eton.’

Disgraceful, I grant you (though perhaps not as shameless as a former newspaper diarist friend, who habitually wore an Old Etonian tie, despite the fact that he’d never been anywhere near the place).

So why did I pick Eton as my first choice?

Well, I’d like to convince you — to convince myself, if I’m to be perfectly honest — that my main reason was that it is, and always has been, an extremely good school.

I’d been there only twice in my life. Once was for the celebrations on Founder’s Day, June 4, when I was the guest of family friends who had a son at Eton. The other time was for the 21st birthday party of my university friend Robert McCrum, whose father was then the headmaster. The party was held in the fabulous house that went with his dad’s job.

On both occasions I’d loved everything about the place — the history, the traditions, the venerable old buildings, the awe-inspiring facilities, the acres of playing fields on which the iron Duke of Wellington said the battle of Waterloo had been won.

To this day, I remember the lavish picnics that appeared from the boots of Bentleys and Rolls-Royces on June 4. These were not picnics as I’d been used to them, spent squatting uncomfortably on rugs, sticky with spilt Lucozade, swatting away wasps amid the crumbs of sausage rolls and egg sandwiches.

These were veritable banquets of lobster and salmon, succulent beef, strawberries and profiteroles, served on picnic tables with crisp, white, linen tablecloths and washed down with champagne, cooled in silver buckets.

One day, I thought, one day I’ll come here in my own Bentley to see my own sons rowing down the Thames in flowerstrewn boaters, chanting the traditional refrain as they’d face first one bank of the river, then the other: ‘Hats off, Eton! Hats off, Slough!’

But what I liked particularly about the school, formed from my own experience of several Old Etonians, was that it seemed to benefit brainboxes and thickos equally. The academically inclined were offered the best of teaching, while the dunces were imbued with that distinctive Etonian self- confidence — OK, nauseating arrogance, if you prefer — which seemed to keep them happy in their own skin.

Illustrious

Above all, I wanted my boys to be happy — and whether they turned out to be bright or dim, Eton seemed to offer the best guarantee of that.

Or at least that’s what I told myself. But I may as well admit, since I have no secrets from readers (well, not many), that I was also drawn to the sheer social cachet of the place.

True, my own school — Westminster — is also very old, very pricey and very good (it has seldom been out of the top three in the country’s exam league tables, and has often come in at No 1).

Like Eton, it has its illustrious roll-call of famous old boys, from Christopher Wren to Andrew Lloyd Webber, with six Prime Ministers in between. But let’s face it, Westminster is a distinctively middle- class, academic hothouse compared with the much grander Eton, which has an even longer list of famous alumni — including, dammit, no fewer than 20 Prime Ministers.

Yes, I know it’s terribly unfair that some children in this country enjoy huge advantages through no merit of their own, but simply because of the accident of birth that gave them parents rich enough to send them to posh schools. But as I’m far from the first to observe, life is unfair — always has been, always will be.

Indeed, I would go further, and suggest that attempts to make the poor richer by hammering the rich and abolishing privilege have almost always ended up making everyone poorer. Add the fact that I revel in the glories of our history and traditions, and you’ll see that I’m quite out of tune with the egalitarian, Britain-bashing spirit of the age.

Killjoy

All of which brings me to my sadness over the news that the traditional annual cricket match between Eton and Harrow is to be banished from Lord’s, where it has been played since the first fixture in 1805. This took place shortly before the battle of Trafalgar, with the poet Lord Byron appearing for the Harrow team.

In the true spirit of the times, the MCC — never noted in the past for its commitment to egalitarianism — has decided that the match is to be replaced by the finals of boys’ and girls’ Twenty20 competitions, open to all secondary schools. Indeed, this week’s match, which ended in victory for Harrow, may turn out to have been the last ever clash between the two schools at the ground known as the home of cricket. And all in the name of ‘inclusivity’.

Oh, for heavens’ sake, I ask you: What harm did this match ever do? Was anyone seriously offended by it — anyone, that is, apart from a maniacal minority of killjoy class-warriors on Twitter, who thrive on hatred of the rich and privileged (which is the one phobia, apart from contempt for Britain’s history, that’s deemed acceptable in woke society)?

For good measure, the MCC is also banishing the annual Varsity match between Oxford and Cambridge, which has been giving innocent pleasure to thousands at Lord’s since 1827.

I’m with Henry Blofeld, the former Test Match Special commentator — he with the impossibly posh accent and outrageously dreadful dress-sense — when he says: ‘Dropping these two fixtures has been done in an underhand way, without consulting the members. There’s a nasty taste to this.’

What bastion of privilege will be next for the chop? The Henley Regatta? Ladies’ Day at Royal Ascot? The opera at Glyndebourne (where that class-warrior Angela Rayner was spotted sipping champers last week)?

God spare us from a world of dreary uniformity, in which none of us can aspire to even a taste of how the other half lives.