Grammar School Boy

EDUCATION

By ALAN JENKINS

So Eton keeps its tails and white ties, while Anthony Crosland and compapy are going to ensure that ultimately no one is going to be free to pay more for quality, in education as in other consumer durables. Between them the poor old grammar schools—for me, the minimum quality of education which should be offered to anybody—look like being crushed out of exis- tence.

Mine was founded in the Midlands by a sixteenth-century bishop. We were rather sorry for public schoolboys. We occasionally played them at rugger or cricket, noticed that their voices were different from ours, but felt no inferiority or envy. We had heard they were badly fed, thrown into cold baths every morning, bullied and beaten. Sometimes they wrote novels with bitter titles like Decent Fellows and Little Victims, saying how miserable and queer they had been at school.

Visiting them was like visiting a convent. We felt ourselves more worldly than they. At 4.15 p.m. we bicycled back home to warmth, family and the six o'clock news. They had more grace- ful manners, but we knew more about life: life being something that began in collieries and ended in the Cabinet.

There was never any boy in my school who had not been down a mine: we were surrounded by them. The School Scientific Society saw to that. It saw also that we visited a power station, a steelworks, an explosives factory, Fort Dun- lop, the Bournville chocolate works, a sewage farm and Liverpool Docks. Since we were probably destined, on leaving school, for one of these Midlands industries, we might as well look at them.

Nobody considered the army, or anything abroad, as a career: the Cadet Corps was bad enough, and, to our mainly nonconformist minds, soldiers were rather common, and empire- builders a joke.

Examinations were all. If you were a clever council school kid, you came in on a Minor 'D' Scholarship (we talked Midlands—won for one and after for after—but they talked pure Brummagem and their noses ran : we thought them rough and awful). If you were a clever fee-paying kid, like me, you won a Minor 'C' Scholarship at twelve or thirteen and got the rest of your schooling free. At fifteen (or even fourteen) you sat for School Certificate, and if you matriculated (five credits) you could stay on and go into the Sixth.

The object of this was to get Higher School Certificate, and if you had a scholarship back- ground, you were put in for a County Major or a State Scholarship plus any Open Scholar- ships or Exhibitions that were going at univer- sities. But most boys left at fifteen or sixteen and went into Dad's Works (usually ICI, GEC, Kynochs or GKN). It was rather non-U to have a father who had an Office instead of a Works.

There was, I now realise, a certain amount of `streaming': there were 'a' and 'b' forms all the way up, and rebels and non-workers collected in the 'b' forms. I do not remember anyone ever being promoted from 'b' to `a; but certain 'b' boys were asked to leave.

Examinations were all. There were eight of us in the Sixth. Our examination technique was shrewd. We learnt to 'gut' set books at high

speed, and to cram a two-year syllabus into six months. We reckoned we were cleverer than 80 per cent of public schoolboys. We attacked Oxford and Cambridge impartially. On arrival among the dreaming spires we looked down the list of candidates. If any of them were from Manchester Grammar School, Winchester, St Paul's or Haileybury (in that order) we knew we hadn't much chance: these four we feared. Other public schools were non-starters. Eton hardly entered our consciousness: it wasn't so good at publicity in those days, and we thought of it as a kind of ancient monument.

There were, at my school, about half a dozen pale, hungry boarders whom our mothers pitied and sometimes asked to tea. Otherwise we were day boys, and gloried in it. We had the daily adventure of bicycling four miles to school and back. Once home, our homework done, we built wireless sets, boasting next day that we had got Duke Ellington on short waves from Schenectady. School dinners were disgusting but not compulsory: many of us ate at cafés in the town, which cost no more, and you could spend your pudding money on sweets. Even the school uniform was optional.

Nobody, even on Speech Day, talked much about character-building or leadership. It was assumed that you had a character already. Prefects had minor disciplinary powers, but were not particularly respected. Any show of authority was greeted with ridicule. Patriotism was bad form. 'Keenness' was suspect. Corporal punish- ment, never very rampant, was abolished by a new headmaster who thought that if a boy had to be caned, he was probably the sort of boy who ought to be expelled.

The result of all this was to produce boys of no very strong convictions, no great love of power or responsibility, a dislike of being in- volved and a tendency to deride. (Years later, I saw the grammar-school mind perfectly expressed in TW3 and BBC3.) The object of education seemed to be to push and equip boys so that they could get out and start earning, quick, in a world of much unemployment. Those who didn't go into Dad's Works became bank clerks. civil servants, accountants. One or two became schoolmasters; but for most of us, seeing two masters have nervous breakdowns (one from overwork, one from delayed shell-shock) was warning enough.

It was at Oxford that I first observed public schoolboys under a microscope. Yes, they were different from us. They used Christian names straight away. They had social know-how and better haircuts. They accepted certain values without question. Eton and Winchester were immediately recognisable, from their relaxed manner and certain code-words. Neither told you about his school unless you asked him. Harrow seemed much tougher, with twangier voices and a certain—I can find no other word =sharpness.' Chaps from very minor public schools either seized an early opportunity of telling you about them or spoke of 'my public school,' which even I knew was wrong.

I was not aware, at Oxford, of any snobbery about grammar schools, partly because I was at an egalitarian college where more than half of us had some kind of grant, and partly because, like many scholarship boys, I had an academic superiority complex. True, grammar-school boys, if the subject came up, were thought to be a bit dull; but if you had any talent at all—for talk- ing, acting, games, playing an instrument— nobody gave a damn where you came from. Conversely, the grammar-school attitude to Oxford was watchful, critical, determined to be neither impressed nor seduced into taking it for Real Life.

Where do we stand in the 1960s? What on earth has happened, that people like me— different only in being specialists and techno- crats—are running practically everything? When did the breakthrough start? Was it all those grammar-school fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain, followed ten or twenty years later by Lucky Jim and David Frost? What I could never understand about Jimmy Porter was the idea that he was working-class, deprived of edu- cational opportunity. I diagnose him as a grammar-school failure—too idle to get his '0' levels and inherit the earth. For this is the Age of the Grammar School Boy, and if only I could have foreseen it, I wouldn't have bothered to change my accent.