If we turn our backs on these fierce old heroes we will lose our liberty
APRIVATE school in Devon says it is removing the names of Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh from its buildings. Exeter School is having an inclusivity drive, and says these two men no longer represent the ‘values and inclusive nature’ of the school.
This miserable grovelling to the commissars of political correctness is pretty much universal among supposedly ‘independent’ schools in these times. Those fool enough to
pay thousands a year in fees to such places, thinking that they are buying an old-fashioned education, are in for a big disappointment.
Not that this appeasement of the new regime will save them. Sir Keir Starmer’s tax plans will make it harder and harder for anyone but Russian oligarchs to pay the fees of British private schools. The middle classes can forget this fast-closing escape route. Comprehensive schooling is an egalitarian political project that inevitably makes schools worse. It is so bad that nobody with any choice will let
their children undergo it unless they are forced to. So choice must be relentlessly squeezed for everyone except the elite, who have their own secret ways of escape.
As for Drake and Raleigh, those sunburned, ferocious, bearded men of might and courage, how they would have laughed at what their country has become. Why, they would probably have raided its coast towns and carried off the soppy teachers to serve before the mast. They were not, like us, deluded by temporary good fortune into thinking the world is safe and soft. They knew that security and wealth came only to those prepared to fight for and defend them. I was brought up to admire them and the age in which they lived. I was, I suspect, the last person to undergo this, in a different Devon school, which I will not name, for fear the Thought Police will find it and go in search of lingering heresy there.
It was a boarding school, with dormitories furnished with plentiful chilly fresh air and hard ironframed beds on which new arrivals wept for home for a few nights, before – like the young heroes of the books we used to read – we put that behind us and accepted that, to be good, life had to be a little hard. I will not say it never did me any harm. But I will also not say it did not do me any good. Each of those dormitories was named after a great British sea-dog, Drake and Raleigh included, but also all the others, some now forgotten, from
Hawke and Blake to Hawkins, Benbow, Grenville and Rodney. My favourite of these was Sir Richard Grenville, who, in Tennyson’s fine and historically accurate poem The Ballad Of The Revenge fights an entire Spanish fleet to a standstill from his tiny ship and then, mortally wounded, declares: ‘“I have fought for Queen and Faith like a valiant man and true;
‘I have only done my duty as a man is bound to do:
‘With a joyful spirit I, Sir Richard Grenville, die!”
And he fell upon their decks, and he died.’
LOOK, I didn’t actually care in those days if Sir Richard Grenville was involved in the slave trade, or was a bit of a pirate. No doubt his enemies were far worse. This does not mean that I approve of slavery. But what I knew was that if a country had such men in it, prepared to set off across the boiling furious seas that smashed against the Cornish rocks not far from our hilltop school, and to do harm to the Queen’s enemies when necessary, then that country was safe from those enemies.
And behind that belief stood a long and glittering procession of similar men, my forebears, kings, soldiers, priests, rebels, troublemakers, peaceful and eloquent at home, berserk in battle, who were the reason why we lived as we did, free and happy. This version of the past, now mocked by weedy academics as ‘drum and trumpet history’ was doubtless lacking in details of the 14th Century NHS or of wage scales for villeins. But it made us dangerous to our enemies, as we now are not.
And I remember the day, round about 1963, when a progressive teacher we had somehow acquired came into my classroom and gathered up all the unfashionable old history books, with their small dense print and wistful grey engravings of battles and Kings, and ships of the line. And I remember the new books coming in, all big print and bright colour pictures of dams in Commonwealth countries, and car factories, and sparkling new hospitals. Fortunately, it was too late. I could still hear the old trumpets blowing, far off, and the names of Drake and Raleigh were still honoured. In my house, they are honoured to this day.