SIR,—Mr. Bernard Levin may not have learnt of our disgraceful
opium war against China at school. But I did.
It was all told to us at that subversive, radical in- stitution, Wellington, in the year of doubts and ques- tionings, 1912, and told with no effort to mitigate or to extenuate the flagrant criminality of nineteenth- century imperialism in many aspects. Few of our form survived the 1914-18 War. But two who have come through and who were with me in the Upper 2nd were boys called Gerald Templer and Alexander Grantham: I met both later, forty years on, when one was High Commissioner for Malaya, the other Governor of Hong Kong.
It may be that the teaching of the Chinese point of view at Wellington explains the understanding both these men displayed recently in dealings with the Chinese underprivileged.
Perhaps, too, the now much-blown-on education of the pre-1914 public school was rather more liberal than is generally supposed.—Your faithfully, 14 Great Ormond Street, WC1 GEORGE EDINGER
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