Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (16 page)

The sons of the aristocracy, as a general rule, were not educated at home like their counterparts in some other countries. Nor, by the nineteenth century, were they attending local grammar schools where they would share a bench with the sons of local tradesmen. England and Scotland did not have a state school system until the 1870s, and by that time private schools had had centuries in which to dominate public awareness and to accumulate prestige. Such schools dated, in many cases, from the Middle Ages, and had been founded for entirely different reasons. They were originally for the poor, and for the training of priests. This was the motive behind the first of them, Winchester College, founded in 1382. Such a school provided free education for a set number of scholars, but within a few generations these had been joined by other, wealthier, boys who came to the school to take advantage of the excellent teaching it offered. They lived outside the buildings, and paid fees to attend. At Winchester such pupils are still called Commoners. At Eton they are Oppidans (‘townsmen’). Gradually they began to outnumber the scholars, and also to change and to dominate the institutions.

It is difficult to overstate the extent to which these schools formed a basis for the rest of their pupils’ lives. Schools would attract the fierce loyalty of particular families which would send their sons for generations (the record for some such families is now reaching close to 300 years), as can be seen by a glance at the names carved on the panelling in many ancient form rooms. Loyalty might be usual but it need not be absolute, and many aristocratic families have had members at both Eton and Harrow. The Dukes of Marlborough began attending Eton in 1722, yet in the 1890s when one family member, Winston Churchill, was sent to Harrow instead. The reason was that his health was delicate, and they felt a hilltop location (Harrow is known colloquially as ‘The Hill’) would suit him better than the damp vapours of the Thames Valley where the rival school was situated. Churchill’s younger brother joined him at Harrow, but his son would attend Eton.

Within their parameters these schools were surprisingly democratic. However aloof they might seem to those outside, inside their community the titled and the most well-born were not granted any particular favours. The popularity of a boy would depend on an outgoing nature, a sense of humour, skill at games or in his studies (probably in that order). Titles were so common among the names on the School List that a holder of one could not expect to stand out, and he would be subject as a junior boy to the same obligations as all other pupils of his age.

Much is written about the English school system of ‘fagging’, by which the youngest boys in a school were obliged to run errands for the oldest, and to prepare their tea as well as some other meals – brewing the stuff itself, making toast, boiling or frying eggs. This ritual did not necessarily mean that only basic skills were needed: one boy at Eton in the 1850s, Sir Francis Burnand, was required by his fag-master to get up at six o’clock each morning to prepare a breakfast that included coffee, toast and grilled chicken, and in consequence became an expert in preparing all these things.

This custom, now extinct (Eton had abolished all forms of fagging by 1980), was often cited as evidence of barbarity and institutionalized bullying in schools. The zealots who criticized it would have found that most of those involved did not mind, and indeed learned some valuable basic culinary skills as a result. It had another, more important, side effect, unintended at first but definitely worth remembering: it meant that no matter how wealthy a boy or how many servants he might have to do his bidding at home, he too would learn to take commands and to perform menial tasks. He would have the chance to see life as it were from the lowest level, and might gain a new perspective on and sympathy with his own employees as a result. Similar practices occurred among the youngest cadets in the Royal Navy, and indeed in any community of young men who were making their way through a hierarchical period of training. Adolescents and young men of the lower social classes would be undergoing similar rites of passage – occupying menial and humiliating positions from which they gradually but steadily earned promotion and acceptance – in their roles as apprentices and office-boys. It was simply the way that things were done, and those who eventually reached the top could enjoy their triumph the more for knowing that they had so thoroughly earned it.

Departure to boarding school had considerable advantages for young upper-class boys. Once they had negotiated the pitfalls of being at the bottom of a hierarchy and grown used to the discipline, they would make friends with other young men of similar background. It meant that, no matter where in the United Kingdom the boys’ families lived, they would have grown up with those in their age group who shared their life experiences, tastes and background. They would cement these friendships through common experiences. It is summed up in a verse from what is perhaps the world’s most well-known school song, composed in 1872 and sung at Harrow, one of the greatest of the English public schools:

O, the great days, in the distance enchanted
Days of fresh air in the rain and the sun,
How we rejoiced as we struggled and panted –
Hardly believable, forty years on!
How we discoursed on them, one with another,
Auguring triumph, or balancing fate,
Loved the ally with the heart of a brother,
Hated the foe with a playing at hate!

The schools taught conformity and responsibility. They supposedly instilled a taste for over-boiled vegetables and solid puddings—the ‘nursery food’ for which Britain was long notorious. Above all, they fostered organised games cricket, rowing and various types of football – creating a cult of the athlete the like of which had not been seen since Ancient Greece. Games taught courage, resourcefulness, teamwork, stoicism, modesty in victory and graciousness in defeat. Their beneficial effect on the British character and on the wider world cannot be measured.

Schools were run, from early on, by a monitorial system. In other words, older boys were charged with keeping the younger ones in order and ensuring that discipline was maintained. Such schoolboy officials had been stipulated in the charter with which Harrow School was founded. In some cases this system evolved or was adopted by headmasters of other schools who admired it. Sometimes the officials were called monitors, otherwise prefects from the Latin
praepostor.
The point was that they learned to exercise command, to help run the small universe in which they lived, to practise leadership. It would be easy to consider them merely bullies, and there can be no denying that bullying was rife, but as the century went on and the system became more structured and more supervised – once those boys in authority were made fully answerable to those above them – it worked well and promoted confident leadership. Those at the top of the school, their positions earned both by seniority and by skill at games or in study, were entitled to a number of privileges. At Rugby School they could in summer wear hats of plain instead of speckled straw. At Harrow they could carry a cane. At Eton the members of ‘Pop’, an elite and self-electing society founded in 1811 that fulfilled the prefectorial function, wore (as they still do) outrageously colourful silk waistcoats. This system of graded privilege in return for effort and service to the community was, once again, surprisingly democratic. The son of a duke could be passed over when prefects were selected in favour of a scholarship boy, if the latter were better at games or a more popular personality.

Such was the ‘bonding’ created by the shared experience of these schools – a thing that foreigners either tend to underestimate or simply fail to understand – that former pupils would be established for life with influential friends. Friendships were strengthened by the English cult of competitive games, something that transferred across the Atlantic and took root among American colleges but which failed to make the same headway on the Continent. To a very considerable extent, these boys married each other’s sisters, perpetuating the same sense of exclusiveness – though at the same time absorbing suitable new blood – that has kept the aristocracy a powerful element in British society despite the advance of democracy and meritocracy. The boys whom they met at school would form the core of their circle of friends throughout life. They would meet each other constantly over the years and the decades ahead – at university, in regimental messes, in business, in the House of Lords or Commons, in gentlemen’s clubs, and at a host of sporting and social events. They might become related by marriage, allied by political inclination, united by passion for sporting pastimes. Their education would give them an undoubted advantage when it came to positions at Court or in diplomacy and the higher reaches of government. Lord Curzon, the product of such a background, was appointed Viceroy of India in 1899 at the age of thirty. To celebrate this event he attended a dinner in London at which, on the back of the menu, were shown the names of all the previous Viceroys. The ones who had been – like Curzon – at Eton were printed in the school colour of pale blue. Only one or two names were in black. ‘It was like the P&O steamer,’ Curzon remarked complacently, ‘it [his school] was the only means to get there.’

The development of character became something more important than mere academic excellence in the upbringing of young Englishmen. The English upper class has never been known for its respect for intelligence, though it has produced writers and thinkers of genius, from the Earl of Pembroke (1566–1618) to the philosopher Bertrand Russell (who was also an Earl). Nevertheless, an all-round good character that was not given to too much reflection was regarded as the ideal, and this was summed up in a seminal passage in the novel
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
, written in 1857 by Thomas Hughes (1822–96), a Christian socialist and MP. These words, spoken by the boy’s father – a country squire and archetypal Englishman – as his son parts from him to go to Rugby School, perfectly express not only the expectations of many parents but also the more or less universal attitude of upper-class society towards the purpose of education:

Shall I tell him to mind his work, and say he’s sent to school to make himself a good scholar? But he isn’t sent to school for that – at any rate not for that mainly. I don’t care a straw for Greek particles, no more does his mother. If he’ll only turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian, that’s all I want.

In other words, decency and common sense were far more important characteristics than academic intelligence or book learning. The lessons of the playing field, and indeed the friendships formed there, were more important than the rote-learning that might fill a boy’s mind with Greek and Latin. The Duke of Wellington was reputed to have said, in one of history’s most used and most inaccurate quotations, that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. This was nonsense, not least because when he was at the School in the 1780s the cult of organized games had not yet begun. The phrase has entered English mythology, however, because it so completely fits the image that both public schoolboys and society at large had of these places. They were ‘character factories’, seen as giving the best possible training to the young men who would go on to run both the United Kingdom and the wider British Empire.

To the British upper class, school was always a more important stage of education than university. To have attended a great public school was better than having a degree from an ancient university, because the schools were smaller and thus more exclusive, and because for many of the professions into which gentlemen went (such as agriculture or the Army) a degree was not necessary. Oxford and Cambridge Universities had been intended largely for the education of priests until the Reformation, and had nothing to do with the training or the values of the military aristocratic caste. Only from Elizabethan times did gentlemen’s sons with secular careers in view begin to attend them in numbers, and the notion of these establishments as part of a gentleman’s upbringing dates from that time. By the eighteenth century they had fallen into decay, and were wedded to practices that were viewed as outdated. They were therefore ignored by numbers of important families, for whom the Grand Tour was thought to provide a better education. An indication of the level to which they had sunk was given by the Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) who, when writing to his illegitimate son regarding the boy’s career choices, suggested that he should enter academia: ‘What do you think of being Greek professor at one of our universities? It is a very pretty sinecure, and requires very little knowledge (much less than, I hope, you have already) of that language.’ The boy was sixteen at the time. Oxford and Cambridge could only be attended by young men who would swear allegiance to the Anglican Church, thus excluding those of nonconformist background. Members of the nobility, recognizable at once in court or quadrangle by the gold embroidered gowns they wore, were entitled to receive a Bachelor of Arts degree after two years, whether or not they did any work. Lord Byron, who entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1805, attended only one lecture during his university career, and spent much of his time in London. Because the college was not full and there were several empty rooms near to his, he was able to keep a pet bear (the regulations forbade the keeping of dogs, but said nothing about other animals). Even commoners could easily get through the oral exam necessary to attain the BA.

Families often developed a loyalty to specific colleges, just as they did to schools, sending their sons there for generation after generation. There was, however, another attitude in evidence. William Douglas-Home, younger brother of Alec (who was Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister), followed his brother to Eton and Oxford but, as he mentions in his memoirs, Alec went to Christ Church (the grandest and most imposing college, socially as well as architecturally, in either university) while he himself was sent to New College. Christ Church, he explained, was regarded as an ‘elder son’s college’ while younger siblings merited something less ostentatious.