This exceptional headmaster went to great lengths in attracting boys from the ‘very best families’ of the gentry and aristocracy

Happily, West Downs had forsaken their Eton suit of black trousers and short jacket for a dark, grey one, but Angus still had to wear a shirt with a separate collar attached with a front and back stud; also a pin and clip to keep his tie in place.

He also wore braces, which not only supported his trousers but his underpants too by means of loops. He was unfamiliar with the noises: the sound of a guard’s whistle, porters wheeling trolleys, a newspaper seller’s cry and the chatter of travellers while a voice from the loud-speaker announced strange place names.

People brushed past as he clutched a Gladstone bag (his trunk was sent ahead as Passenger’s Luggage in Advance) and grasped his ticket to show it at the barrier.

A taxi conveyed him across London to Waterloo where he boarded a train for Winchester. To reassure the boys, especially the new ones, the head-master, Kenneth Tindall, accompanied them then.

Tindall’s predecessor was Lionel Helbert, “a most enlightened man. He made a genuine effort to understand his pupils”. On his father’s side, he was of Jewish descent – an ancestor having settled in England at the time of Oliver Cromwell.

Empathy

After attending Winchester College and Oxford University, Helbert became a clerk in the House of Commons, but soon realised that his talents lay elsewhere and in 1897 founded a private school for boys.

The man’s empathy with the young is shown by his approach towards Peter Scott, son of Lady Scott and Captain Scott, the doomed Antarctic explorer.

When Helbert discovered Scott was bullying another boy, instead of punishing him, he asked Peter, already fascinated by natural history, to give a talk on his favourite reptile.

For the first 10 years, West Downs had a superb headmaster. But, as early as 1907 there were signs that Helbert now suffered from nervous strain.

By 1914, when war broke out, his health deteriorated. New boy Antony Knebworth wrote his headmaster “always looks cold and dull and stern”.

Helbert became increasingly unwell, as he learned of the deaths of Old West Downs’ boys. In 1917, whether from exhaustion, depression, or grief, Helbert suffered a mental breakdown and two years later, in November, 1919, he died.

This exceptional headmaster went to great lengths in attracting boys from the “very best families” of the gentry and aristocracy. During the first 10 years of the school, Helbert paid visits to the boys in their own homes to become acquainted with them before they entered his school.

Helbert made no visit to Kintyre (his name is absent from the Largie visitors’ book) to meet Jock before he entered West Downs in 1916.

During the Great War, civilians were subject to travel restrictions. The war years brought other strictures too. Food was in short supply. Duncan Sandys, future colonial secretary and son-in-law of Winston Churchill, wrote on May 23 1919 that he ate sausages and toast for breakfast, the first since the start of the war.

If conditions at West Downs were a bit spartan after the armistice, little had changed when Angus arrived three years later: the dormitories had no carpets or curtains; a box lay by each bed for the boys’ possessions and a stool was supplied for clothes when the occupant went to bed.

Rigorous

Boys also had a wash-hand basin with a jug of water and a foricas under their bed. Borrowed from Winchester College, this word meant a chamber pot.

Young boys learned that West Downs used Latin words not only for objects but for family members like mater (mother), pater (father), soror (sister) and frater (brother).

British preparatory or private schools are the feepaying equivalent of state-sponsored primary (junior) schools. A boy attended his prep school between the ages of seven or eight until he was 12 or 13.

Prep schools were hot-houses for public (secondary) schools, which were anything BUT public, as they charged a lot to attend. To enter a public school, a boy sat an exam (Common Entrance).

Some, like Winchester College, were very rigorous. For anyone wishing to make it to the top in politics, the diplomatic or colonial services, the army, church or in business, it was essential to attend a sound preparatory school and a good public school.

From there, the individual entered university: either Oxford, Cambridge or Trinity College, Dublin. For example, when in the early 19th Century rough diamond John Gladstone, a socially aspiring Liverpool entrepreneur asked his friend, the Tory politician George Canning, how he could best launch his sons’ careers, Canning told him to send them to Eton.

Gladstone followed his friend’s advice. His first son, however, was bullied and abused at the famous school but when his youngest, William Ewart, attended, Eton served him well enabling him to gain a place at Christ Church, Oxford, from which he graduated with a double first.

These institutions’ ritualistic practices helped a boy to enter an arcane, exclusive domain, and it was social suicide not to attend them.

In Angus’s day, these schools, both prep and public, were as keen on character-building (instilling a sense of leadership, self-confidence, inner discipline and a team spirit) as on academic prowess.

Tradition

The custom of educating children away from home stems from classical times. “Plato,” writes Philip Mason in The Men Who Ruled India, “taught that the guardians of state should not know their parents.”

The author concedes “the English did not go as far as that, but when they were eight years old, children from whom rulers were to be chosen, were taken away from home for three-quarters of every year, taught not to mention their mother or their own Christian names and were brought up in the tradition of Sparta, which Plato admired.”

The practise of expelling a child, particularly a boy, from the parental home, in order to raise him as a leader, is not confined to the British.

At nine years of age, former African National Congress leader and first black South African president, Nelson Mandela, was schooled at the home of a local ruler of a neighbouring village.

Mandela was lucky; his host became his guardian, while at West Downs, Angus was one of a crowd, a mere cog in an educational machine.

(More tomorrow.)