I weep for any child who, like me, is sent to boarding school at 11
She did it for love and to toughen him up. But in his new memoir, the BBC’s JUSTIN WEBB says it was a ‘crime’ for his doting mother to send him away
IN THE first part of our serialisation of his new memoir last Sunday,
Radio 4’s JUSTIN WEBB told how it wasn’t until he was aged eight that his mother told him the identity of his father – a famous BBC TV newsreader. Here, in the final part, Justin recalls his very unorthodox schooldays.
IT WAS a crisp autumn afternoon and my mother and I were in the garden burning leaves. I must have been about ten years old. That day, I told Mum that my perfect holiday would be the two of us together, staying in bed. I can remember it vividly. Mum had laughed but I sensed a sudden frisson in the atmosphere. wonder, did my remark give her pause? As her only child – the son of a married man who had not wanted a relationship with her and who had seen me just once, as a baby – the two of us could not have been closer. But was that the moment she decided to send me away to boarding school? To a place where I might have a more normal, perhaps happier, childhood?
Mum hinted in later life that boarding school had only happened because of the need to get me away from my troubled stepfather Charles, who suffered from severe mental health problems. But was it also due to a fear of the intense bond with me that she had created?
Whatever the reason, the die was cast. In September 1972, I became a pupil at the Quakerrun, fee-paying school Sidcot House in Somerset, a few miles south of Bristol.
When you look at reviews of this school today, they make happy reading. The 2020 edition of the Good Schools Guide tell us: ‘For those untroubled by notions of social pretension or academic snobbery, yet for whom a considerate, altruistic atmosphere really matters, this is just the place.’
I am genuinely glad for the school and for the pupils there today. I am glad especially about the altruism and selflessness.
It wasn’t like that when I was there, though. It was grim. It was lost. A place of despair. A wrecker of already damaged lives.
It was a place where children were tortured.
MY PREPARATION for boarding school had been wholly inadequate – although I am not sure any amount of prior effort would have made it any more bearable.
Mum and I had read Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings stories of pillow fights and stern but kindly masters, of the hero’s wizard wheezes with his best friend, Darbishire. When things go wrong there’s a ‘jumbo jet of a hoo-hah’ and then all is well.
Mum seemed to think that Buckeridge must have known what he was talking about and that my schoolboy experiences would somehow be the same as Jennings’s. ‘You’ll love it,’ she told me briskly when she dropped me off for my first day.
The teachers were full of false bonhomie as they welcomed us – ‘Hello, young man! – as if it were all going to be tremendous fun. It didn’t last.
On the first full day, at our form meeting, the teacher gave us new boys our first warning – not about bullying but about snitching if you were being bullied.
‘Don’t come running to me,’ he said, ‘if you get hit as a result of being cheeky.’
It was a standing joke. ‘Are you being cheeky?’ a 15-year-old would ask an 11-year-old before punching him in the face with impunity.
One day we, too, would be able to bully the teary new boys. That was the implicit promise. But until that day came, there was no remedy for being young, bruised, lost and far from home. How to survive in this
Dickensian world became our sole concern. Every room echoed, every floor hurt if you were hurled on to it. Doors clattered and slammed.
In the rooms off the corridors, anything went. In the showers, cornered by older boys, you would be punched by one, manhandled on to the next to be punched again, handed back. On and on until the tears came. Nothing could stop this happening. There was no appeal to be made to the teachers, no authority that could protect younger or vulnerable boys.
On a grand scale, the Quakers, a peace-loving religious group who ran Sidcot – the board of governors, the headmaster, the senior teachers, all of them – abrogated responsibility. They knew, but they didn’t care. My second year was probably the worst. Our dormitory was above the dining room, huge, with 60 steel beds. There was a matron – enormously fat – who would sniff our underwear to check its freshness and confiscate pornographic magazines, which she would keep in a pile in the laundry room.
A master was nominally in charge but at night he would stay in his flat watching films on a blackand-white TV while chaos reigned. Beds were turned upside down. Pillows were held over heads. Bells would be rung in our ears just as we’d dropped off.
The boys’ lavatories would have disgraced a prison. They were one of the most disgusting, unsanitary places I have been. And in later life as a foreign correspondent in Russia, in the Middle East and in the heart of Africa, I have been in a few.
To reach them, you had to go downstairs into the basement and through a tunnel. They were unheated. In the winter they would freeze. The water in the lavatory pans would have a sheen of ice in the mornings.
Since the lavatories were so uniquely disgusting, few members of staff would ever venture there. As a result they became the scene of epic bullying.
Doors were kicked in. Boys were held down, half-drowned in muck. With the cubicles open at the top and bottom, there was no privacy,
no refuge. Even when they were present, the masters’ idea of discipline was erratic at best.
Before gym lessons, or any sporting activity, we had a kit inspection. Anything missing, any piece of kit out of place, any gym shoe less than fully white earned you a whack on the bum from Mr Sisman.
A neat little man with sandy hair, Mr Sisman was a sports teacher straight out of central casting.
He was one of those people who favoured the kind of mass punishments commonly meted out to prisoners.
The wallop with a gym shoe for everybody if one boy’s kit was not properly adjusted. An entire dormitory slippered because two people were fighting after lights out. I know Mr Sisman continues to be regarded with affection by many. I bear him no ill-will, in fact rather the opposite. He was in parts cruel and in parts a gruff but genuinely caring human being.
Occasionally we rebelled, as happened on one memorable day in June 1975. This day had begun with a noisy insurrection at the start of morning assembly – something to do with bedtimes, or haircuts. Shouting and fighting had replaced what was supposed to be Quaker-like tranquillity.
Lessons were suspended while the older pupils retreated to smoke cannabis and the younger ones, excited and frightened in equal measure, were kept in their classrooms as the school waited to see how the revolution would play out.
ATENSE truce was finally reached several hours later, only after the inappropriately named chemistry master Mr Hope waved what he claimed, at the top of his voice, was a loaded pistol.
On another occasion two friends and I had staged our own – rather less dramatic – mini-rebellion when we asked for permission to go to London to take part in a march and music festival organised by the Anti-Nazi League.
For me, the idea of taking part in a mass struggle against evil was enormously appealing, especially as seen from our dull corner of Somerset. The other advantage of a trip to London was that we could go to a pornographic film in Soho. It was the perfect elision of lust and goodness, truth and pleasure.
The school examined the first part of our suggested programme and didn’t have the capacity to imagine the second. Permission was granted, and the three of us were allowed to go by rail to London with the proviso that we stayed with the parents of one of the boys, who lived in Surrey, a short train ride home from Central London.
We went dressed like extras in the film Withnail And I and marched in Trafalgar Square next to girls with no bras.
We went to the festival in a park in Hackney and pretended to enjoy horribly distorted music played by people who screamed rude things about the Queen.
We went to Soho, where we saw for the first time sex on screen, in the company of men in raincoats, some of whom moved suddenly and jerkily and left before the denouement. Later we dined on melon boats with maraschino cherries, gammon steaks and Black Forest gateau. Afterwards, at Victoria Station, because we were broke, having spent our cash on the meal and the film, we asked a man for money so that we could get to our friend’s parents’ home.
It never occurred to us that this was actually begging and nor, apparently, did it occur to the man. Like proper public schoolboys, we took his address and promised to pay him back. But we never did, because we were also hippies.
NOW that I am a radio broadcaster, online trolls often take to social media after they discover I went to a fee-paying school. They post triumphant messages suggesting that I have no right to question Tory privilege or American imperialism because I had such a privileged upbringing myself.
I suppose they imagine tuck boxes and wall games and younger boys bringing me freshly buttered toast. A life of bumping into buffers one had joshed with in the common room; of banking with pals who are ‘something in the City’ and know where the best deals are to be had. ‘Anything for you, old chap.’ I wish it had been like that. My school life never felt privileged. Quite the reverse.
If I had ever thought about it, I would have yearned for actual, genuine privilege: for a home with two loving parents and a life in a nice comprehensive school like the one my wife went to, where all the children of the lecturers at the local university formed their own cosy group and holidayed together before gliding off effortlessly to other top universities.
Now, having kids of my own, I weep for us all. To send a child to live away from home at the age of 11 may be forgivable in some circumstances, but not in most. To send a child 40 minutes down the road to the Sidcot of the 1970s was – sorry, Mum – a crime.
And yet, somehow, I came through it – perhaps because of two significant events in my final years at the school. The first was the arrival of a new headmaster. Thomas Leimdorfer was a Hungarian Jew who had lost nearly all his family to the Nazi death-camps. With his mother, he had escaped into Austria and eventually to England.
The exigencies of his life had turned him into a kindly, thoughtful man, but a man of action, too. He was inheriting a disaster zone and he was keen to sort out what could be saved and what could not. It came as a shock that among the things he thought could not be saved was me.
‘You are doing too many A-levels,’ he said. ‘Just take two and try your best.’ Two! This was the route that led to a polytechnic college – not quite the glittering academic career my doting mother had in mind.
I think I cried out ‘No!’, but on paper he was right. I had scraped a handful of O-levels but had failed maths and had not taken any sciences. In fact, I had spent the entire year before these exams perfecting my table tennis technique and being cool.
Thankfully, in that interview with Mr Leimdorfer, there was another teacher present. The deputy head Mrs Plant, who had never changed her expression in all the years she taught me Latin, astonished me by smiling. Quite broadly. ‘I think Justin will change,’ she said.
Moments after this life-changing interview – on the day I resolved to do better and to think of my life beyond table tennis, beyond Somerset – a remarkable teacher
Any missing piece of gym kit earned you a whack on the bum
How to survive in this Dickensian world was our only concern
Home from school, there were cannabis plants in the sitting room
called Martin Bell sought me out in the playground.
‘Ah, Webb,’ he said.
‘Sir.’
‘There is a qualification in British Constitution, halfway between O- and A-level, and you shall do it and I shall teach it and we begin tomorrow.’
Good old Mr Bell. What on earth was he doing, what on earth was anyone doing, teaching at Sidcot?
We sat, every week for a year, in his foul-smelling study, and he lectured me straight from the syllabus. Bagehot. The Fulton Report of 1968. The Cabinet. He spoke, I wrote.
The power of the Prime Minister. Committees of the Whole House. It could not have been drier – the whole subject stank of stale whisky. And Mr Bell offered not one moment of reflection or discussion, not one single nod in the direction of modernity.
It suited me perfectly. I was captivated. Something clicked. At the end of the summer term, I took an exam and, for the first time in my life, passed with flying colours.
Nothing had ever stuck before. But ask me today about Lord Hailsham on elective dictatorship or the Heath government’s invention of the Central Policy Review Staff and I can still bore you to death with the pros and cons of early 1970s fears about extremism in the Commons, or efforts to co-ordinate strategy across government departments.
This was a rescue mission by Mr Bell, pure and simple.
I owe this man a huge debt.
I am no Albert Camus. My circumstances were not as poor as those of the great French writer, nor my successes as great (to put it mildly) but Camus’ famous letter to his former teacher when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature always puts me in mind of Mr Bell. ‘Without you,’ he wrote, ‘without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened.’
My late-flowering seriousness of purposes resulted in a pass at maths O-level and three B-grade A-levels – a huge deal in a school from which most pupils did not go to university. I tore up my plans for a degree at a
minor-league university and applied to the London School of Economics, where the serious people were. I would never play table tennis again.
IN THE summer before I set off for university, my stepfather Charles died. After years locked in her tormented marriage to a man whose mental health troubles had never been properly acknowledged, my mother was finally free.
She had a new life ahead of her, a life of freedom from her husband and from her son, who was ready to face the world. But before I left home for London, we had one more joint task. One more private piece of unfinished business.
Charles had owned a wardrobe, a huge, dark-stained lump of Edwardian furniture. It smelled of him, of the life we had all lived with him. The difficulties and the rarer moments of peace. The fear of what he might do next. The uncontrollable anger. The rows. The suffering – his and ours.
Mum and I dismembered it. We sawed it up. I wonder why she didn’t sell it. Or perhaps I don’t really wonder. We laughed as we sawed. The top of the wardrobe came off in one piece and we took it outside to complete the job. When we snapped the lighter wood, elderly ply that formed the back, it seemed to burst. Dust everywhere. Ancient dust.
We had survived.
All too often, my mother’s desire to be different, to throw off shackles, real or imagined, led her into behaviour that seems, in retrospect, unhinged. As well as being a hippy and a Quaker, she became a Maoist. This is a heady brew.
At one point she was extremely keen that I took up smoking. On one of our day trips, we bought matches and cut some bracken-like plant by the side of the road – the dead tubes of the stems made cigars that burned for minutes. Acrid smoke, slightly sweet, poured out. I did not inhale, thank God, but we took some stems home and I smoked them in my room, filling it with pungent clouds and giving myself immense, unstoppable headaches.
In the summer of 1975, I came home from school for the holidays to find eight cannabis plants growing in the sitting room. She treated it in the same way she had treated our talk about sex a year or so earlier: ‘Do you know about all this stuff? Good.’
The plants yielded a crop of nicesmelling leaves which we dried and, somewhere along the way, lost. My mother would never have smoked anything. But cannabis was completely illegal then and this was, to be frank, a deeply irresponsible thing to do.
She also gave me a ‘Legalise Cannabis’ T-shirt.
It was bright yellow with green lettering. What was she thinking?
© Justin Webb, 2022
that the Spotify music row couldn’t get more controversial…
James Blunt has threatened to release new music on the audiostreaming service if it does not remove a podcast by the US commentator Joe Rogan.
In one of his trademark selfdeprecating tweets, in which he often ridicules his own musical style, the You’re Beautiful singer wrote: ‘If Spotify doesn’t immediately remove @joerogan, I will release new music on to the platform.’ The tweet quickly received more than 150,000 likes.
The 47-year-old made the joke after Joni Mitchell became the second high-profile musician after Neil Young to remove their music from Spotify in protest against its hosting of the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience.
Kicking off his world tour in Dubai last night, Blunt also quipped on Twitter: ‘By popular demand, I have renamed my tour The Greatest Hit tour and shall only be playing “that song” 20 times.’