The joy of school magazines
School magazines trained writers – from Philip Larkin to Harold Pinter – since 1786 but they’re now in decline, says Arnold Harvey
Robert Graves, Kingsley Amis and Ted Hughes all had their first poems printed in their school magazines. Philip Larkin wrote comic sketches, in the manner of Tony Hancock’s soliloquies, for the magazine of King Henry VIII’S School, Coventry.
The Review, the magazine of Hackney Downs School, tells us that the 20 runs achieved by Harold Pinter, Vice-captain of Cricket, against Recent Departures was the third-best score of the 1948 season. A couple of years previously, the Review had printed an essay by Pinter on James Joyce: ‘As a very sensitive young man, James Joyce experienced seething discontent with his life in Dublin. All his work was about Dublin – a great Irish Catholic shadow that for ever lay over him.’
Politicians often make their debut in school magazines. In January 1981, Boris Johnson contributed to the Eton College Chronicle a short story about an Old Etonian having a heart attack while dreaming he has scored (illegally) in the Wall Game: ‘Exposed, his chest contrasted with the sheets like a toad on marble. “No use arguing with the Umpire,” he murmured as his heart gave away [sic].’
The first school magazine was the Microcosm, which appeared weekly at Eton between November 1786 and July 1787, and so predates the first undergraduate magazines such as the Loiterer (1789-90), published at Oxford by Jane Austen’s brothers, James and Henry, while they were undergraduates. Each issue of the Microcosm consisted of a literary essay in the style of Addison and Steele’s Spectator magazine. A similar work, called the Trifler, began appearing at Westminster School in 1788.
With a couple of exceptions, mainly from Westminster, school magazines remained essentially an Eton phenomenon until the 1830s and were primarily literary ventures. As boys at other schools began to take up the idea of a school magazine, the school-life element came increasingly to the fore. Such magazines lasted only as long as their founders remained at school. The modern type of school magazine, though produced largely by pupils, is under the control of the teachers. It is passed on from one generation of pupils to the next, and functions as a more or less official record of school life. This model dates from the late 1850s.
The 1850s saw important developments in the institutional life of Britain’s public schools. Regular and frequent sporting matches against other schools (with the results printed in the school magazine), the formalisation of the house system and the popularity of schoolboy fiction all date from the decade.
By the 1860s, school magazines were appearing that were almost indistinguishable from those of the 1950s. Almost, but not quite. In later generations, teachers, sensitive to the nervousness of fee-paying parents, might have suppressed a letter to the editor printed in the Radleian for October 1866, calling attention ‘to the want of any means of escape in case of fire in a part of the building which is entirely composed of woodwork’. And then there’s the two-part prose poem Hasheesh, beginning, ‘Did you ever taste hasheesh – the magic drug that translates us to Paradise? No? then you shall now.’ That appeared in the April and May 1876 issues of Ulula, the Manchester Grammar School magazine.
Girls’ schools – and their magazines – were less obsessed with sport. For much of the 19th century, the only exercise permitted at girls’ schools was walking or, in rainy weather, going up and down stairs ten times without talking. The first women’s hockey club was founded in 1887, and the first women’s hockey match between Oxford and Cambridge was played in March 1894. But girls’ schools weren’t quick to take up the sport. As late as 1906, Cheltenham Ladies’ College, though having an inter-house hockey competition, did not play other schools – because, the Cheltenham Ladies’ College Magazine explained, ‘Strain and excitement are guarded against.’
Many school magazines of the 1914-18 era printed letters and diaries sent from the front line by former pupils. Hackney Downs School’s evacuation to King’s Lynn during the early part of the Second World War was the subject of a ten-page article in the Review. North London Collegiate School’s NLCS Magazine produced a 1942-6 special number describing the functioning of the school in wartime in systematic detail.
Attempts by comprehensive schools to establish magazines have generally been unsuccessful. The demise of the majority of local-authority grammar schools (many of which published magazines) has meant that school magazines in recent years have become what they were in the early days: essentially a publicschool phenomenon.
If you drew up a list of periodicals printed in the 1870s that are still around today, you would find that the majority are school magazines. Still, they are survivors of a threatened species. You can’t help but wonder how many will make it through the next 30 years.