‘The college of God’s gift’
Charles Sprawson
DULWICH COLLEGE: A HISTORY, 1616-2008 by Jan Piggott Dulwich College Enterprises, £24, pp. 408, ISBN 9780953949328 The only man from Dulwich College I have ever known, or met, was a master at my school, M. H. Bushby. A distinguished cricketer at Dulwich, he went on to captain Cambridge. Here he is described, in later life, as a ‘much respected and much loved housemaster’, so my attitude to Dulwich has always been entirely favourable, though all I knew of it was its vague outline on the edge of the South Circular road, a distant palazzo surrounded by extensive playing fields.
This monumental volume, beautifully produced by the college, leaves nothing out. Old boys of Dulwich are known as Old Alleynians because of its founder in 1619, Edward Alleyn, who played all those ‘over-reaching’ heroes in Marlowe’s plays. Alleyn’s presence on the stage might even have prompted Marlowe to write these parts. It was Alleyn who first declaimed, ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships ...?’ Some say that a vision of the devil in this play so frightened him that he resolved to abandon his rakish past and devote the rest of his life to helping the poor. He retired at his peak at the age of 31.
The best actors of the time made fortunes, through investment in theatres, land and property. Alleyn concentrated on buying up land south of the Thames, particularly around the hamlet of Dulwich. A college was built, and the ‘Poor Scholars’ were taught by some Fellows (masters) who were meant to be graduates, but rarely were. Their salary was so poor that few stayed for long. Most of them were lazy, and despised the ‘Poor Scholars’. Alleyn had set his heart on creating another Winchester, an education based on the classics, but no Greek was ever taught, and little Latin. The Master and Warden were not required to be academic, but merely unmarried and with the same surname as his own, though Allen would do. Whenever a vacancy arose, numerous bachelors named Alleyn/Allen from a variety of professions would apply, as the positions were wellknown to be sinecures. Any surplus revenue from Alleyn’s estate was pocketed by them. Nothing was spent on the ‘Poor Scholars’ or the alms houses set up by the founder. They entertained lavishly. The threat of litigation always hung over them. Any visitor to the college, such as John Evelyn, would be shocked by its melancholy air and contentious atmosphere.
This strange, idiosyncratic system meandered on somehow for almost two and a half centuries. By 1850, newspapers were demanding the reform of antiquated charitable institutions and endowed schools. Trollope in The Warden highlighted Dulwich as a ‘hotbed of peculation’ (embezzlement). It took three great headmasters to turn it around and bring Dulwich in line with the other public schools emerging at the time.
‘You leave Dulwich, not as you found it, a small and struggling school of less than one hundred boys, but one of the greatest education institutions of the century’ was the tribute paid by the Common Room to Canon Carver on his retirement in 1883. For the first time the headmaster was not an Allen. The college was rebuilt on a more elevated site, in a mixture of Gothic and neo classical styles. There was now a governing body, headed by a philanthropic Etonian who opposed every attempt by Carver to make the college in any way exclusive. There were numerous obstacles to his reforms. Whatever their tribute, he left the Common Room in an agitated state, enervated by a libel action and Carver’s own suspicious nature. It fell to his successor, James Welldon, the archetypal muscular Christian, to reunite it. If Canon Carver ‘fought to save the body of Dulwich’, it was Arthur Gilkes, Master from 1885 to 1914, who ‘gave it a soul’. His moral effect on the school was compared to Matthew Arnold’s at Rugby. In the Great War, Old Alleynians won five VCs. He adopted the prefect system, encouraged team games, distrusted individualism, and so banned tennis.
His aversion to frivolity made him immune to P. G. Wodehouse, who was there with him. ‘He asks the most absurd questions’, he wrote in his report, ‘and has the most distorted ideas about wit and humour.’ Wodehouse clung to his memories of the school, and could never detach himself from it. After his wartime broadcasts, he wrote to his Dulwich friends for reassurance, wondering what the old school thought about him, then in 1946 confessed from Paris:
Isn’t it odd, when one ought to be worrying about the state of the world and one’s troubles generally, that the only thing I can think of nowadays is that Dulwich looks like winning all its school matches.
On Long Island he would rip open the Times and make straight for the Dulwich match results. Something of Gilkes’s moral force must have rubbed off on Raymond Chandler, like Wodehouse an outstanding classicist, as his detective Philip Marlowe has been described as a public school man, a model of truth and virtue, adrift in the jungle of Los Angeles.
Other writers there were A. E. W. Mason and C. S. Forester, who was highly critical of the school. The literary film director, Michael Powell, claimed to have spent most of his time there up a tree, reading. Dulwich has produced perhaps a more interesting variety of writers than any other school. Wimperis wrote the hit song of the music halls, ‘Gilbert the Philbert’, before turning to screenplays for Korda such as Mason’s The Four Feathers, then Mrs Miniver in Hollywood. The popular song of the 1930s, ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’, was written by the bandleader, Ray Noble, after overhearing late one night a couple on the No. 11 bus saying goodbye to each other.
Dulwich has now become so cosmopolitan that their rugby players have gone on to represent ten different countries. Notable among their cricketers were the Gilligans and Trevor Bailey, though the most dashing was Hugh Bartlett, Alan Ross’s favourite, ‘whose every movement and expression were the stuff of my dreams’. The first Dulwich boy to play for England, Monty Bowden, went out to Africa under the captaincy of Sir C. Aubrey Smith, fell from an ox cart and was trampled to death. The monument that covered his remains was destroyed recently by Mugabe’s ‘veterans’.
Written with devotion by a retired English master, this is a fascinating and scholarly account of Dulwich’s transformation from its abject beginnings into a great school, though ‘This will give pleasure in the future’ is hardly adequate for ‘Haec olim meminisse juvabit’. It would have disappointed Chips, who was fond of quoting it. q
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