SIR,—In the interests of historical accuracy I must modify Mr.
Raven's account of the sudden growth of delation in a well-known public school. The verb 'to show up' was certainly extant by the early Thirties, and it is my recollection that the practice had already acquired some respectability. Of course the detailed thought-control exercised by Mr. Raven's Head Monitor was still impossible in my day, in which the rough rule of the Tudors had only recently replaced the brutal anarchy described by Robert Graves. In- forming for moral and political profit certainly did not exist, but the ultimate right of the tormented to 'show up' his oppressors to the central government was the best safeguard against the sadistic barons who still roamed the corridors and changing-rooms. Little did I think at the time that I was living through the glorious Elizabethan phase in the constitutional evolu- tion of the school from feudal anarchy to the police state. I was then more conscious of the drawbacks of a social and political system in which the ash-stick was as common an instrument of government as the gallows in Tudor England.—Yours faithfully,
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