Richard Beard - Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England

Richard Beard is the author of Acts of the Assassins, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, and most recently the memoir The Day That Went Missing, which was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and won the PEN Ackerley Prize. In the United States the book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In the twenty years since his first book, he has published critically acclaimed novels and narrative non-fiction, including Becoming Drusilla, the story of how a friendship between two men was changed by a gender transition.

He has served as a judge for Canadas Giller Prize and for the BBC and Costa Short Story Awards, and is a dour opening batsman for the Authors Cricket Club.

Also by Richard Beard

Fiction

X20: A Novel of (Not) Smoking

Damascus

The Cartoonist

Dry Bones

Lazarus Is Dead

Acts of the Assassins

Non-fiction

Muddied Oafs: The Last Days of Rugger

Manly Pursuits (or How to Beat the Australians)

Becoming Drusilla

The Day That Went Missing

these people had the air of settling something: they either just had arranged or soon would re-arrange England. Yet the gateposts, the roads he had noticed them on the way up were in bad repair, and the timber wasnt kept properly, the windows stuck, the boards creaked. He was less impressed than he had expected.

E. M. Forster, Maurice

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the experiences and recollections of the author. In some cases names of people have been changed to protect their privacy.

Skools are not what they were in my day. Boys are no longer cruel to each other and the masters are friends.

Geoffrey Willans, How to be Topp, 1954

I had a feeling I couldnt immediately place. I wanted to go out but wasnt allowed, except in strict measures of time. Shelves were emptying at the nearest supermarket, and instead of fresh fruit and vegetables I was eating British comfort food sausages and mash, pie and beans. My freedom to make decisions like an adult was limited. I had homework I didnt want to do a novel not going well and I was lonely. I wondered when Id see my mum again.

March 2020, first week of the first lockdown: I was fifty-three years old and felt like I was back at boarding school. Which wouldnt have mattered, but for the fact that at a time of national crisis my generation of boarding-school boys found themselves in charge.

I know how two of the last three British prime ministers were treated as children and the kind of men their schools wanted to make of them. My first night at Pinewood School was two days after my eighth birthday in January 1975. A term earlier David Cameron had left his family home for Heatherdown School in Berkshire, while also in 1975, at the age of eleven, Alexander Johnson was sent to board at Ashdown House in Sussex. The exact school picked out by the parents didnt really matter, because the experience was designed to produce a shared mindset, and about our Covid prime minister in particular I feel as Thomas Mann did about the leader of his country in the early 1930s. Whether I liked it or not, he was a brother a rather unpleasant and mortifying brother. He makes me nervous, the relationship is painful to a degree. But I will not disclaim it.

At the age of thirteen, after the preparation of the prep school, Cameron and Johnson progressed to Eton. I went on to Radley College near Oxford. Im therefore a little out of bounds, without permission, but Im old enough to risk that now and accept the consequences. Our parents were paying for a similar upbringing with a similar intended result: to establish our credentials for the top jobs in the country. In 1840 the founder of Radley, William Sewell, had dreamed of building a Winchester and Eton, and something more than Winchester or Eton. Presumably not to emulate the brutality (in 1825 an Eton boy died after a fight lasting two and a half hours), but for the prime ministers. Between 1721 and 1900, of the thirty-two British prime ministers twenty-eight had been educated at English boys boarding schools.

We followed a pattern. As small children we were sent away to school and in the summer went on family holidays to Cornwall, because that was who we were or who we wanted to be. The tribal nature of the education was part of its appeal, and when in 1923 George Bernard Shaw advocated razing the public schools and sowing their foundations with salt, he meant the usual suspects Eton, Harrow and Winchester but also their cheaper and more pernicious imitators.

In its defence, I dont believe Radley College was more pernicious. Nor in fact very much cheaper. But Shaw was right to see that this was recognisably the same kind of school in the same tradition. Sewell planned to build on an established recipe for success:

[The English public school] has sent out into the legislature, into the Army, into the Professions, into the House of Commons, into political life, into the magistracy, into society generally, English boys with English minds, toned and trained to work with the machinery of the British Empire Our best men have been Public School men.

The newer, upstart Victorian public schools put into words, rather tastelessly, the assumptions that Eton left tactfully unspoken. And a hundred years later, by the end of the 1970s, the aims of these schools hadnt significantly changed. Public school men were still expected to dominate the sectors that Sewell identified, whether they were the best men for the job or not.

Today, much of the private school system has adjusted to phones and computers, to carpets and co-education and going home at the end of the long school day. But, to some degree, all anglophone private schools exist in the shadow of the institutions that influenced their founding. They replicate the segregation and social exceptionalism reserved for superior beings destined to lead. Private schools of various shapes and size, and not just in Britain, seek similar outcomes to Eton, Harrow, Winchester and Radley, which now stand alone as Englands four enduring boys-only, boarding-only private secondary schools; the English private school in its purest form. These schools too will have tweaked and adapted, but to assume they change for the better is a tradition as old as the schools themselves, as described by Winston Churchill, here looking back at his childhood in the 1880s:

Several grown-up people added that in their day, when they were young, schools were very rough But now it was all changed. School life nowadays was one long treat. All the boys enjoyed it. Some of my cousins who were a little older had been quite sorry I was told to come home for the holidays.

Churchill is joking, of course, his private schools were horrific. But in My Early Life he wrote about his education knowing the past was never dead. He chose to recall his resilience at prep school and Harrow to promote his qualities as a political leader. In that sense, the reality of these schools as they are today will only be felt in years to come, whereas now, in the early 2020s in the time of pandemic and Brexit, our leaders were moulded by the events and attitudes that characterised these schools in the late 1970s and early 80s. How those children survived then is the model for their survival now.