The public school conundrum

Britain is getting less meritocratic – but no-one can agree what to do about it

SAD LITTLE MEN by Richard Beard

288pp, Harvill Secker,

T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

Though Roald Dahl said Repton was like a “private lunatic asylum” and C S Lewis compared Wynyard, with questionable taste, to “Belsen,” private schools, which once “offered boys from wealthy families as much beating and as little food as they could stand,” to this day still guarantee pupils a “highly disproportionate share” of the top jobs, as Richard Beard writes in Sad Little Men. At this very moment, the Master of the Rolls, the chief medical officer, the chairman of the BBC, the head of MI6 and the Army’s chief of the general staff were educated at fee-paying establishments. The Archbishop of Canterbury and a batch of favourite actors (Damian Lewis, Hugh Laurie, Dominic West, Eddie Redmayne), let alone the

Prime Minister, all happen to be Old Etonians. Seventeen out of the 26 members of Boris Johnson’s Cabinet went to private school. “Of the more visible recent political buccaneers,” writes Beard, “the English private boarding school has sent out Rees-Mogg, Hunt, Mitchell, Cash, Redwood and Cummings: English boys with English minds.” To put all this in perspective, I went to a comprehensive in South Wales, where the most illustrious pupil went on to qualify as a dentist.

Though only seven per cent of youngsters are educated in the independent sector, these will always be the button-cute chaps filling the professions, politics, judiciary and, once upon a time, running “the machinery of the British Empire”. “We are the finest race in the world. The more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race,” said Cecil Rhodes, and though we hear a lot of “woke” stuff about pulling down his statue and “decolonising” the curriculum – farewell Elizabeth Barrett Browning (her father owned a Caribbean estate); good riddance Shakespeare (Prospero treats Ariel and Caliban as slaves) – if a revolution really is to take place, then Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Radley and the rest of them should be closed immediately, the ground sown with salt.

There is little prospect of this happening. Roy Hattersley, when shadow education minister, pledged himself “to reduce and eventually abolish private education”. He didn’t do so, preferring instead to write a book about his dog, Buster, who’d killed a goose in the Royal Parks. “Independent schools still represent a major obstacle to equality of opportunity,” it was stated in the 1979 Labour Manifesto. Nothing was done to follow this up; private schools can even still claim charitable status.

Wilson, Heath, Callaghan and Thatcher were all grammar school pupils – but there has since been a resurgence of entitlement, with ordinary folk such as myself treated as oiks, with “coarse faces, hideous accents and gross manners”. Would I now be a Conservative Life Peer if I weren’t so common?

Beard, an Oulipo novelist, seems to want it both ways. He decries the public school ethos, with its curdled brand of charm and arrogance, yet makes us fully aware that he is himself an Establishment insider (“It’s all right, I’m one of us”), a pupil at Radley in the 1980s, where he enjoyed “the same education as men who run the country.” He now lives in a flat down the road from his old school and, like Mr Chips, takes a daily constitutional in its grounds, “the largest area of mown grass in England”. He has also been nostalgically watching on YouTube the nine-part documentary about Radley, first broadcast 40 years ago, in which the headmaster, or warden, the creepy and “unctuous” Dennis Silk, who like a Dickens grotesque was always screwing his right fist into the palm of his left hand for emphasis, justified corporal punishment by saying: “A little bit of fright doesn’t do them any harm.” Another of his genial rubrics was: “A bit of hardship is quite an important lesson to be learned.”

Here was a world, Beard recalls, based upon threats and fear. Like others of his class, he was sent to board at the age of eight, “sad and alone”, blubbing himself to sleep and “wetting the bed”. It was as if he’d been “abducted by aliens”, and as “toughness is the price of survival”, school was deliberately grim and austere. The teachers, swooping about in black academic gowns, were “megalomaniacs, paranoiacs, fantasists and sadists”, one of whom caned 150 boys in a day. (Another, at Beard’s summer camp, used to cry “Bleed for Jesus!”) Lavatory arrangements were primitive, dinner meant lumpy custard and horrible stews, the non-sporty were “weedy”, the worst thing a pupil could be was a “sneak”, and when parlance wasn’t in Latin it was like Molesworth: “hard cheddar”, “jolly decent”, “piffle”, “humbug”, “codswallop”. Everyone wore Harrodssupplied shorts and shirts, never put their hands in their pockets or whistled. Foreigners were to be avoided. Warden Silk described a jazz band as “prehensile negroes”. Girls were even more to be avoided as “untrustworthy, distracting boys from the one true path”, that of winning at rugby and passing exams.

If it sounds like an army barracks in Carry on Sergeant, the military atmosphere was deliberate. Beard says that, even in the 1980s, Radley was stuck in the 1940s, with everyone treating the Second World War as a current event. Chat revolved around Bomber Command and the Desert Rats. Adults on view had anachronistic polished shoes and short back and sides. Field Marshal Montgomery himself made a ceremonial visit. Pupils and staff were in favour of capital punishment, especially for trade unionists and socialists. “Images of combat and a patriotic imagination were as

One master caned 150 boys in a single day. Another used to shout ‘Bleed for Jesus!’

natural in this environment as breathing,” says Beard, who evidently never choked.

By such means, “hardy Englishmen, sound and true”, were made. On the other hand, John Bowlby, a scientist who made a study of attachment disorders, described the British public school system as “time-honoured barbarism”, and the best sections of Sad Little Men explore the damaging long-term behavioural effects of these places, the way they encourage emotional repression and coerce children into concealing “genuine feeling” – the natural reactions of human psychology and warmth, which angrylooking Silk interpreted only as “selfishness and self-indulgence”.

As Beard says, “what brains we had were used to depersonalise our selves and we put our emotions into compartments”. The public-school survivor perfects an ironic sensibility. Everything is at a remove, is a sort of joke, as nothing must seem serious or sombre. Ruthless, coldness, harshness, ambition: these, though prevalent, are disguised, dissimulated. In the end, the “hard pragmatism of school” will make a boy become “tough-shelled and invincible,” ready to take up the “top jobs in the country” by primordial right – like Boris Johnson, who with his Just William “urchin’s unbrushed hair” looks “confident of not being caught”; or else pupils inwardly seethe and want revenge, going in for “lies, betrayal, cruelty, rapaciousness”, like Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt.

The saddest category are those who become suicidally depressed. Beard, whose seemingly cheerful best friend shot himself, says most public schoolboys, himself included, get divorced. They can’t cope with close relationships, finding it easier to face “a bleak deficiency of love”, as that’s what they were early on conditioned to accept. He doesn’t mention Peter Cook and Dennis Price, who also went to Radley and drank themselves to a premature death.

Parents always claim they “wanted the best for their children”, when paying to send them to these institutions, which are usually converted stately homes set in picturesque backdrops. The conclusion I long ago came to – and is reinforced here – is that, in fact, the British, who anyway prefer dogs, actually hate their offspring, if they put them through all this, generation upon generation. For myself, I sent my children to schools in rural France, and all the money I saved on fees I spent on drink.