The world of Dr Arnold
Peter Levi
Boys Together John Chandos (Hutchinson £15)
When Winston Churchill said that the traditions of the British Navy were nun, sodomy, and the lash, he might with more or less equal truth have spoken of the older Public schools. The honours among Eton are not quite equal: more murders at 'ton and more suicides at Winchester, as °Ile might expect. Indeed, Jane Austen notices in a letter that the principal protec- tion against suicide at Winchester in her day was the lack of trees. But it was Eton, ap- DarentlY. that produced Jack the Ripper, and of course poor little Swinburne. John ehandos concentrates on these good old days, and mostly on Eton, Winchester, liarrow, Rugby and Shrewsbury, mWit though h some raids into a later period. Well- ington gets mentioned only three times or once for an attack of VD, once when the headmaster is not a distinguished athlete, id oncewhen 'the captain of the dor- „ ory eleven' swept some flowers onto the ro and trampled on them. 'There is no
Gsaid.M for this rotten effeminate stuff here,' 'le
bj,he many lurid lights that this excellent than casts on Eton in particular, rather
'Ran on the other schools, seem to be
available for the unfair reason that more ..tonians could read and write, so the evidence is fuller, the archives are richer rtInd the historians have been more t Innerous. The Eton archives possess the nrelasure of one hundred volumes of jour- tone Margaretta Brown, sister-in-law. to famous Keate. But Harrow nearly died (int. By 1844 it had only 69 pupils, whose horses desand people provoked the Vicar of 1.,:trow, one of the school governors, to Should sack the lot and start again.
Public schools before Arnold had stan- dards of a kind. Modern comprehensive schools are in some ways worse. One was flogged at Eton for stabbing another boy in chapel, a harsh sentence in modern terms, and at Rugby, even before Arnold, boys could be expelled for rape. The masters were badly outnumbered. We hear of nine masters in chapel at Eton controlling 500 boys, and later of 19 teaching 800. Of course, we must assume that most scandals, even at Eton, were covered up. No boy ever seems to have been hanged or transported from the unreformed public schools, though several might have been. The behaviour of the boys, and the progress of reform, simply reflected the altering stan- dards of British society. Arnold made less difference to Rugby than we have been led to believe. Keate was a better schoolmaster than people think. But thank God that Tennyson and Bertrand Russell escaped a public school education. Westminster was a particularly vicious place. 'Were it not for the dormitory at Westminster and the quarter deck of a man of war, we should be a nation of macaronis,' said some old admiral. For systematic torture, Winchester and Rugby were as bad. Dr Vaughan is supposed to have reformed Harrow after 1844, but he was later blackmailed into resigning and into refusing bishoprics, having stolen for himself the lover of a homosexual boy. He did, in the end, become Dean of Llandaff. The facts of this intrigue are in the unpub- lished autobiography of J. A. Symonds, in the London Library. Mr Chandos is severe and moralistic about Symonds, and all but sentimentally sorry for Vaughan, a revolting old figure in my view, and none the more sympathetic for being a pupil of Arnold, who was still more nauseating, though in another mode. He haunted the unhappy Matthew, he ruined Clough, and he drove another boy into and then out of the clergy until he retained nothing but a sense of mission and founded the Primitive Positivist Church, famous for consisting of three persons and no God. That atmos- phere of 'hearty and confident gloom', which Pevsner singles out in the buildings of Harrow, expresses the reform movement that Arnold started.
A culture of shame and honour bit the dust, and conscience, guilt and hypocrisy took over. In Amold's lifetime the move- ment had not got far, and it is pleasing to record that he had to expel Archbishop Fisher's grandfather for drunkenness. Organised games, organised mediocrity, and organised spying put an end to an era. It will not surprise anyone that, as in the old days, the wildest and worst boys were often the children of clergy, so as time went on the most disgraceful ones emerged as rectors and dignitaries of the Church.
Most teaching, as William Johnson Cory said, was a kind of game. Mr Chandos is too ready to credit the masters with high scholarly attainment. Very few British classical scholars in his period were any good at all. But he also misjudges the nar- row syllabus, based on Latin verse composi- tion as a supreme attainment, and the classics as a foundation. Boys are naturally and blithely pagan, and the classics offer a culture, a history and a society quite unlike our own, which are useful ingredients in what might otherwise be a narrow and over- whelming system of Christian dogmas. The verse, at best like wallpaper, was a mistake, because it produced a polished elegance of taste without substantial poetry or serious scholarship. Today the utilitarians have won their battle, and the public schools now represent a subtle and successful infiltration of the middle classes by the upper and the lower. I cannot see this as a striking im- provement, particularly if verse is any criterion.
Mr Chandos has reported in great detail on what is now an utterly remote world; like a social anthropologist he can amaze his readers equally with anecdotes and statistics. At Eton until 1800 you had to pay extra not to share a bed. In spite of the ob- vious wickedness of the early 19th century, and the earnest snobbery and complacency of the later Victorians, what he describes is `a world of innocence in decay and on the edge of dissolution'. It is nicely caught in a portrait of three Eton boys in Montem uniform in 1795, glamorous and ephemeral. How they would have infuriated Warre, with his fear of sex, his compulsory cricket and rowing. The pressures in single-sex boarding schools have found numerous strange outlets, but their worst effect in every period has been obsession with one's school or one's schooldays.
The most sympathetic character in this long survey is an Eton boy who 'was never in chapel without the company of his dearest pets, two mice who lay perfectly still and quiet until he stroked them when they uttered a "mournful whine”. Not all his pets were as docile, and a future bishop who knelt in front of him in chapel was ac- customed to finding a snake in his pocket.'
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