Our favourite library turned up a lovely book of reminiscences called “A Victorian Boyhood”, written by Lawrence Evelyn Jones in 1955. The title seemed full of potential – and when we saw that a third of the volume was simply entitled ‘Eton’, we started quickly scanning its pages for interesting anecdotes.
However, aside from one very brief mention of ‘swishing’, the book was short on descriptions of traditional Etonian discipline*. But there were a few sections that would doubtless hit the spot for anyone fascinated by the English public school.
First up: fagging:
[We] never ceased to wonder at our enjoyment of things such as fagging. For myself, my heart leapt up when Cockerell, who rowed in the Eight and was in ‘Pop’, told me after prayers to put a can of water in his bath, or sent me with a note to his friend George Lloyd.
To be free, if only a valet, [in] Cockerell’s room, where the Rules of the Eton Society were framed in light-blue ribbons and the white cap of the Eight hung upon the corner of a picture, was to taste privilege indeed.
But more impressive was his description of the man who served as Eton’s headmaster from 1884 to 1905:
Dr Warre, as we saw him, was greatness itself. I do not think it would be possible to exaggerate the prestige he had with us boys. Even today, I cannot imagine myself a contemporary of Warre’s, someone who could call him ‘Edmond’, pat him on the back, chaff him about his school-mastery ways… There must surely have been such friends in his life, for he was warm-hearted, affectionate, and entirely without pomposity. But no, Imagination refuses to contemplate such persons.
Warre stood alone solitary in his majesty. His physical presence, when he swept into a classroom on one of his periodic visitations, was overpowering; even a tough character like Mr. Impey, all sang-froid and disdain, became pliant and courtier-like when the Head came striding in, and Mr. Dyer ceased, temporarily, to exist.
Warre’s authority was quite remarkable:
And that reminds me of a sad, shameful episode. There was a visiting preacher who never should have been invited. Tiny, round, and red, with a voice like Mr. Punch, he was too small for the pulpit [and] kept falling off his stool… Throughout his sermon he appeared and disappeared over the rim of the pulpit with rhythmical alternation.
It would have been funny at a circus; in Chapel the effect was overwhelming. Yet nobody laughed; so small was he, that the point taken was not the absurdity of his eclipses, but the gallantry of his reappearances.
These began to be applauded, by a stamping of feet upon the wooden cross-bars of the desks – at first a controlled stamping by a small group, but one that gradually spread and swelled until every time he bobbed up again twelve hundred boots drummed out grateful acknowledgment.
There was nothing he could do but go on; there was nothing the Masters could do but become engrossed in the details of the Chapel roof; even the Headmaster could only chew the inside of his cheek and gaze sternly into space..
Next day came the inevitable summons to Upper School ‘after twelve”. Never was Warre so quiet or telling. He was not angry: he was heartbroken. He did not talk of irreverence or sacrilege. He simply said that he could not have believed that Eton boys would be so rude to a guest, to an old friend of his own. There were no punishments, no deprivations. He showed us his heartbreak and left it at that. We went away thoroughly ashamed.
Not a mention of a birching – yet I bet a fair few readers will have gone weak at the knees!
* When I used Word’s spell-check on this entry, it thought I was writing about ‘Estonian discipline’. If anyone has any interesting information on spankings in the Baltic States, you are of course most welcome to share…