The English Boarding School System and

Muscular Christianity
NIGEL SINNOTT
(Talk given to the Atheist Society, Melbourne, on 8 April 2014.)
This evening I plan to give you a revised and enlarged version of a talk I gave to
the Melbourne Unitarian Church in July 2013.
1
On that occasion my delivery
time was limited to about 23 minutes but, with your indulgence, I will speak
for rather longer, about 46 minutes. What I have to say is partly a description
of the boarding school culture and its history, and partly an account of my
own experiences of and feelings about English private boarding schools.
I will start with some background history. Conventional English boarding
schools seem to have several origins. From the early mediaeval period boys of
infuential families were often sent away to be educated by literate priests or at
monasteries, and many monasteries established schools, a few of which
survived the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Other schools were established by
royalty, guilds or wealthy merchants, sometimes, ironically, for gifted children
of poor families. In the eighteenth century a number of grammar schools
attracted students from wealthy families who did not live nearby. Finally, in the
nineteenth century, a lot of new private boarding schools were established to
cater for the rising middle classes, or at least for the wealthier and more
conservative section of them.
Most of the traditional, conservative private schools belong to the
Headmasters and Headmistresses Conference, established in 1869 as the
Headmasters Conference and now an international confederation with about
243 members.
With the exception of a few progressive private schools, the ideology that
pervaded conventional boarding schools by the end of the nineteenth century
was muscular Christianity, an austere and spartan system that combined cold
dormitories, poor food, lots of sport, especially team games, plenty of religious
services and indoctrination, hierarchical discipline and a rather exaggerated
masculinity or manliness. Dr Thomas Arnold encouraged sport and introduced
senior boys acting as praepostors, or prefects, at Rugby School in the 1830s.
The system was copied by existing private schools and by the many new ones
founded in the nineteenth century. Muscular Christianity also became popular
in books, for example, Tom Browns Schooldays (1856) by Thomas Hughes, and
Charles Kingsleys Alton Locke (1850).
English boarding schools aimed at turning boys into conservative Christian
gentlemen and trained them for entry to Oxford, Cambridge and Durham
universities, the civil service, the army and particularly as administrators of
the growing British Empire. This explains why a number of new schools were
founded in the nineteenth century and why the system was exported, with
varying results, to Scotland, Australia, Canada, South Africa and elsewhere.
The schools subjected boys to a process that I would sum up with a little-used
word, induration: to become or make callous, hard or unfeeling. It is
epitomised by the notion of Stif upper lip, chaps! and upheld in Sir Henry
Newbolts hideous idea that war is like a game:
The sand of the desert is sodden red,
Red with the wreck of a square that broke;
The Gatlings jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with the dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its banks
And Englands far and honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
Play up! play up! and play the game!
This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the School is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in fame,
And falling fing to the host behind
Play up! play up! and play the game! (Vitai Lampada)
It was written in 1892, and I am hardly surprised that junior ofcers in the
British Army died rapidly and in droves during the First World War.
2
Boarding school products are usually represented in fction nowadays as
high academic or professional achievers who are emotionally constipated or
repressed. Those of you who have watched the television series Death in
Paradise will recall Detective Inspector Richard Poole (played by Ben Miller);
and the series Doc Martin had two such people: Dr Martin Ellingham (Martin
Clunes) and his former girlfriend Dr Edith Montgomery (Lia Williams). The
1968 flm If . . . , by contrast, paints a grim picture of private boarding school
life and concludes with a very black, far-fetched and bloody ending. Its script
writer, David Sherwin, drew on his experiences at Tonbridge School, Kent,
such as for one of the brutal corporal punishment scenes.
You may be interested in how much English boarding schools cost. Well, by
happy coincidence I have very recently received from a friend in England an
article on this subject.
2
It lists the seven most expensive schools; and you may
be surprised to learn, as I was, that Eton and Harrow do not top the list. I
have converted the fees into Australian dollars, to the nearest fve dollars, at
present exchange rates.
Top comes Queen Ethelburgas College, York, whose annual fees for
international sixth formers are $71,865 (39,885). Next comes Cheltenham
Ladies College with $61,805 (34,302), followed by Tonbridge School, $61,510
(34,137); Sevenoaks School, $60,195 (33,408); Westminster School, $58,540
(32,490); Marlborough College, $58,160 (32,280); and seventh, Eton College,
$57,780 (32,067).
By way of comparison, I tried to fnd the fees for Geelong Grammar School,
but could not. Melbourne Grammar School was more forthcoming. It lists
tuition and boarding fees separately, and I have added these together here.
Year 12 fees for Australian boarders are $49,680 (27,570), and for Year 12
international students are $75,120 (41,690). Melbournes major Catholic
private school, Xavier College, charges Year 12 boarders $42,350 (23,500) a
year, but there are discounts for fees paid early.
The article also mentions that Britain has 36 state boarding schools which
combine high quality state-funded education with parent-funded boarding
facilities, and it says they have been called educations best-kept secret.
They cater for the children of armed forces families serving overseas, but not
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exclusively. The article gives as an example Keswick School in Cumbria which
charges $16,430 (9,120) a year for boarding and has an outstanding
academic reputation. I suspect these schools have a diferent ethos from the
conservative private schools, but I have no other knowledge of them.
I spent just over ten years in English private boarding schools, from April
1952 to July 1962; and I loathed almost every day of it. Indeed, one of the
worst moments of my life was the frst Sunday at boarding school, probably
two days after my arrival and about two months after my eighth birthday. I
hated institutional, semi-monastic life and felt imprisoned for months on end,
even though I went home for the school holidays. I would much rather have
gone to co-educational day schools, where I could have had the company of
girls as well as boys.
My frst experience of boarding was at Christ Church Cathedral School,
housed in a red-brick building in a side-street in Oxford, next to Campion Hall,
the Jesuit training college. The school had been founded in 1546 by King
Henry VIII for choristers at Christ Church Cathedral, but it later took non-
choristers, like me, and day boys as well.
It was a private preparatory school: it catered for boys aged eight to thirteen
and prepared them for the Common Entrance examination or scholarship
examinations for what the British, at any rate, call public schools. These
public schools are not state schools: they are private secondary schools where
the word public signifes that they will take children of parents all over the
country and overseas; they are not restricted to a limited geographical area.
I did not need to be at a boarding school. My parents lived in rural north
Oxfordshire and my father worked in Cowley, the industrial suburb of Oxford,
about half an hour by car from the family home. Sending me away was my
fathers idea, almost certainly because he did not want me at home for most of
the year. But then boarding schools are far more about child rearing, class
identity and indoctrination than about education. As my mother remarked on
two or three occasions, This will make you or break you! which gave me
the insight to spot the indoctrination component and resolve, at about the age
of ten, never to be made in my parents image, whatever the cost. I vowed
that no children of mine, if I had any, would be sent to schools like this. I can
still remember exactly where I was when I made these decisions, and the time
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of year: it was a long summer evening, around sunset.
Some years later I discovered that my mother, when a girl, had been sent to
board briefy at a small Catholic convent school in rural Oxfordshire. She had
been unhappy there, and had asked her parents, neither of whom were
Catholics, to remove her, which, being kind and reasonable people, they did.
I was desperately unhappy about being sent to boarding school, but my
pleas and complaints went unheeded. I started biting my nails and put on a lot
of weight, so I was taken to a paediatrician who put me on a diet, though he
failed to realise that the problem was mainly emotional: comfort eating. The
schools headmaster, a snobbish and rather cold clergyman, gave me the
nickname Bunter, from the character Billy Bunter in books by Frank
Richards, one of several noms de plume of the writer Charles Hamilton (b.
1876) who glorifed the boarding school system. I was watching television at
my maternal grandparents home one afternoon in 1961 when the news
announced that Hamilton had died. I cheered loudly!
Boarders at my preparatory school were allowed parental or home visits
every third Sunday, but their parents were not allowed to collect them until
after the morning service in Christ Church Cathedral; and they had to be back
in time for evensong at the Cathedral at 6 p.m. For many years afterwards a
wave of misery would break over me when I heard the tune of the hymn The
Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended.
3
I think a case may perhaps be made for allowing emotionally secure
teenagers to go to boarding schools, but only if they want to and if they are
promised they may leave as soon as possible after a brief trial period. I am
frmly of the opinion that sending younger children, especially those of eight or
younger, to boarding schools is a form of emotional abuse and cruelty.
I soon discovered that I lacked ability for strenuous exercise and was non-
competitive, so I disliked activities like football (soccer), cricket and athletics;
and after considering Catholicism, as an alternative to Anglicanism, for about
a year and a half I concluded that the basic concepts of Christianity were false,
and the way its practitioners behaved, especially towards children, was
downright unethical. I became a staunch atheist. My sympathies were, and
still are, with the prey rather than the predators, with the underdogs rather
than the overlords, the Sioux not the Seventh Cavalry. In other words, I was
5
not keen on being a member of Englands smug, Tory, Anglican Herrenfolk.
I liked most academic subjects, except mathematics, and although no
science was taught at the school I picked up a fair knowledge of elementary
biology from reading, especially during the holidays.
The staf at the school were a mixed bag of talents and personalities. The
worst example was a mathematics master, a former naval man, who walked
with a stick and was a disgraceful bully, verbally or physically, to one or two
boys he picked on. I very occasionally fell foul or his tongue or his spite, but
his treatment of others incensed me. I would cheerfully have watched him
hang, and I am sure there would have been a queue of boys willing to lend the
hangman a rope.
At the other extreme was a young history teacher who was a breath of fresh
air. He came from Nottinghamshire, and read the Manchester Guardian (The
Guardian today), which was subversive literature in that atmosphere. He got
me interested in the English Civil War by allowing me to embellish my history
notebook with bloodthirsty illustrations. He also spotted that there was a
small cell of exercise-shy aesthetes in the place, of which I was one of the
ringleaders, and bestowed on us the title of the Soft and Sloppies. I wore it
with pride like an invisible medal!
When the history master came to leave the school he was invited as guest of
honour to a midnight feast in one of the dormitories. I am sure no other
teacher in the schools history was esteemed so highly.
In about 1963 I was surprised and pleased to see a former member of the
Soft and Sloppies on B.B.C. Sunday evening television, putting the case
against religion in schools and for atheism.
The other ringleader of the group is still a friend of mine. He is now a
professor of music in the United States, and when not engaged with music
writes about neo-pagan ideas and fashions in the Renaissance, and about
wacky religious and pseudoscientifc cults, such as the hollow earth
movement, which fourished like toadstools on a compost heap in the
nineteenth century. He has also done a defnitive English translation of a very
early and beautiful book, published in Venice in 1499. The State Library of
Victoria holds a copy of the original book and of my friends page-by-page
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translation.
Another friend, though probably not one of the Soft and Sloppies, was a lad
named Richard Stott. He also lived near me for a while, which was handy
during the holidays. After trying and failing to get into Oxford University, he
resolved to be a writer or journalist. He got a job on a local newspaper and
soon graduated to London. I lost contact with him after 1962 until he became
international front-page and television news in 1991 as the Fleet Street editor
who was lumbered with the job of clearing up the mess when press baron
Robert Maxwell died and was founded to have stolen hundreds of millions of
pounds from his companies and employees pension funds. My younger
daughter was arranging to meet and probably stay with Richard when he was
diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It was, as is usually the case, very swift and
lethal. He died far too young at 63 in July 2007. But I have a signed copy of
his memoirs, Dogs and Lampposts (2002) which was a delight to read. He had
a nimble sense of humour and a great command of English.
I left Christ Church Cathedral School in 1957, but was then sentenced to
another fve years boarding at Denstone College, on top of a windy hill in
Stafordshire. It was one of a number of schools founded by Canon Nathaniel
Woodard (1811-91) for the Christian education of the sons of the middle
classes.
St Chads College, as it was frst called, opened in 1873, and when I was
there the mind-set and atmosphere of 1870s muscular Christianity pervaded
the place like a sour, musty smell. There were chapel services at least once
and sometimes twice a day, and almost all were compulsory. Sport was also
compulsory. Two afternoons were devoted to parades of the Combined Cadet
Force, compulsory as well; and the only free afternoon was Sunday, when the
boys were supposed to take a walk. With a few short gaps, life was timetabled
and regimented from the moment you got up until you went to bed.
Denstone struck me as a miniature fascist community: lots of heavy-handed
hierarchical authority, an emphasis on middle-class symbolism like jackets
and ties, a superfcial veneer of respectability; and just below the surface an
ethos that I would summarise as: Think and act like we do or well ostracise
you or worse.
Discipline at the school was maintained not so much by the masters as by
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house prefects and school prefects. It was sometimes rigid, sometimes
arbitrary, and occasionally downright unfair. I recall one obnoxious senior
prefect announce that the use of the word unfair in his hearing would be a
punishable ofence! The prefects could dole out the task of writing lines to
boys who infringed minor rules. If a boy accumulated more than a certain
number of lines during a given period, he could, in addition, be caned by the
prefects. For serious ofences, beatings were administered by the
housemasters or the headmaster.
Strangely enough, I was never beaten at Denstone College; those who were
tended to be both academic strugglers and also emotionally immature or
disturbed. In other words, they were often boys who were least able to cope.
A few weeks after the start of either my frst or second term the
housemaster called the younger boys together, just before bedtime, and among
his announcements told us that another new boy was about to join us. He
explained, in a dry and brief fashion, that this boy had had a lot of problems
at home, and asked us to go easy on him, though no mollycoddling was
suggested either.
The new boy arrived a few days later. I remember him as fairly tall and big,
and rather quiet but amiable. If he had any problems, he did not parade them
in my presence.
About six weeks after this boy started at the school, he was summoned by
the prefects one evening, after lights out for the younger boys, to the large
washroom at one end of the dormitory. Here he was caned by one or more of
the prefects, presumably for the ofence of accumulating too many lines during
a prescribed time.
I did not see the beating, but I was lying in bed and I heard it very clearly.
The sound of it haunts me to this day. From that time onwards, I detested
Denstone with an enduring vengeance, and despised any system of pretended
education and discipline that could promote and perpetrate such barbarity. I
have loathed and shunned corporal punishment ever since.
One of the authoritarian traditions at Denstone was the fagging system, a
form of petty slave labour whereby young boys were assigned as fags to work
for a particular prefect. Their jobs could include making beds, cleaning shoes,
making toast for the prefects, and washing up and cleaning in the prefects
8
room. Fags were supposed to be rewarded for their services every so often by a
treat, such as baked beans on toast, outside normal meal times.
Boys were liable for service as fags if they were in the third and fourth forms
of the school, and for no more than two years if they repeated a year in these
forms. I was more fortunate. Because I had won an exhibition, or minor
scholarship, and was considered academically promising, I started in the
fourth form, during a year when there was a large intake of third-formers. So I
was eligible for fagging service for only a year, and, because of the third-former
infux, I in fact had to fag for about two terms.
The boys at Denstone College were arranged in a series of houses. These
were administrative units rather than buildings. Each house except a new one
had a long dormitory holding as many as 42 boys, and a common room for the
junior members. You were supposed to have house spirit and be prepared to
compete for your house against others. But I was unimpressed. There were
several house prefects, and one or two school prefects one of whom was head
of house. Each house had a housemaster, who had his own study and
bedroom.
Sport was one of the things that made life at Denstone a misery for me. The
summer term was not too bad: there was cricket and, occasionally, athletics.In
the winter and spring terms I was at frst made to play rugby, a game for
which I had neither skill nor liking. Consequently, I was selected for fewer and
fewer games; but this meant that, instead, I had to go for cross-country runs,
along a prescribed course. I found running for any appreciable distance
unpleasant and painful, and having to do it in the dank Stafordshire
countryside was frustrating and depressing.
About once a month, on a Saturday, there would be an inter-school rugby
match at Denstone. On these occasions I did not have to play rugby or go for a
cross-country run: I had to watch the match! This meant standing for an hour
and a half, with my feet getting colder and colder, in a crowd of other boys,
while a spectacle went on in front of us that I loathed. When not stamping my
feet, I walked up and down or occasionally had a chat to someone who was not
interested in the game. Or I daydreamed of descending on a famous rugby
ground, ploughing up the hallowed pitch, and planting saplings on it!
The school had a large and imposing chapel. On weekday mornings there
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would be prayers, lasting about twenty minutes; and on Sundays there were
matins or communion in the morning and evensong in the late afternoon. The
Sunday services each lasted an hour. During Lent, there was an additional
compulsory service in the evening: compline, I think. Fortunately it was short.
Although I had to attend the services, I refused to sing. You can force a horse
to water, but you cannot make it drink. And, of course, I refused to be
confrmed in the Church of England. I bitterly resented the hundreds of hours
I wasted because of sport and chapel at Denstone, for I could have put all this
time to good account, walking or reading.
Yet the people who promoted private schools had the gall to prattle about
excellence in education! The frustration and waste say very little for the type of
mind that ran institutions like this or sent children to them!
Eventually a couple of boys were nave enough to ask for voluntary chapel
services. They got them in addition to the compulsory ones.
On another occasion the junior chaplain gave a series of sermons on
fringe Christian denominations. One was on the Mormons (the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), and another, I am fairly sure, was on Mary
Baker Eddys Christian Science. A little while later he was asked if a speaker
from these religions could come to Denstone to put the denominations case.
The assistant chaplain, of course, refused the suggestion.
There was a debating society at Denstone College, believe it or not. But it
was not allowed to debate religious matters!
I have mentioned reading; my one place of solace was the schools library. It
had some very interesting magazines and books, such as old bound volumes of
the National Geographic Magazine and Punch; and it included a copy of School
for Barbarians (1938) by Erica Mann, about education in Nazi Germany. I was
also a volunteer school librarian for several years, and while browsing through
several poorly-lit rows of shelves that no one else besides me ever visited, I
found that the library held some old, rare and very valuable scientifc books.
One of them, on fungi, kindled my life-long love of mycology. I suggested to the
zoology master that some of these rare books might be put in a safer place in
the biology and chemistry building; he agreed. A year or so after I left, the
school sold most or all of the rare volumes to the antiquarian book trade.
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I was not the only misft at Denstone. 35 years before me a boy named
Denis Charles Pratt (1908-99) arrived there. He stayed four years, left in 1926
to study journalism and later art, and was forgotten for half a century. But in
1975 he suddenly rocketed to fame under his new name of Quentin Crisp, the
Naked Civil Servant and raconteur on all things camp and efeminate. I am
afraid Canon Nathaniel Woodward was not available for comment.
I have mentioned the fagging system. Well, once I was no longer required to
be a fag, I made it my business to say that I disapproved of compulsory chapel,
compulsory sport, corporal punishment and the fagging system. The other
boys were not greatly fussed about my views on Christianity and the cane, but
threatening the ancient, hallowed privileges of the prefects was quite
unpardonable. I was told that prefects could not do all their duties without
fags to wait on them. And I did not make myself unpopular with just the senior
boys: I was banned from joining the Junior Scientifc Society.
Later I was about the only boy in the Sixth Form not to be a house or school
prefect; and I knew very well why. I received a tip-of that the prefects in my
house were embarrassed about the Sinnott situation and were discussing
trying to do a deal with me. Now I may lack most military skills, but the one
thing I pride myself in doing is setting an ambush. I prepared. A morning or
two later, I had a visit from a house prefect who wanted a private word with
me, and I obliged him. The trap was set.
Weve been talking over the possibility, he informed me, of making you a
monitor. Monitors were probationary or junior prefects, peculiar to the new
house I had been transferred to in 1958.
Oh yeah?
Yes, but on one condition.
I tried hard not to show a triumphant smile. Oh, what?
That you agree to having fags!
I had won! The fool had broken one of the authoritarians vital tactical
rules: Never negotiate with bloody-minded dissidents unless they have ofered
to surrender.
You mean that, if I agree to have fags when Im a prefect, I can be made a
monitor?
Yes, thats right!.
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I struggled hard to keep a straight face. Well, I replied, Can I have a think
about it?
Yeah, okay, he said; and we parted.
I knew exactly what to do.
I went straight to see our housemaster. I told him of the deal that had been
put to me, and then said in a determined voice I was not prepared to be made
a monitor or a prefect ever if a fag or fags went with the position.
My second housemaster once described me to my face as a self-centred
individualist; but he and I both knew that in this case he was damned if he
did, and damned if he didnt. When he arrived at the school, he had posed as a
reformer. If he met my conditions, he would further fan the fames of disdain
in the minds of the prefects, who regarded him as half-way to the Kremlin or
even on the outskirts of Moscow. If he placated the prefects, the insuferable
Sinnott would go around blabbing, and the housemasters reforming image
would be ruined!
He chose the lesser of two evils. I was made a monitor and, the following
term, a house prefect. And I was able to do the duties perfectly well, of course,
without being waited on by a fag.
In late December 1961 I won an open exhibition to one of the Oxford
Colleges, and when I returned to Denstone a fortnight or so later I found I was
now a school prefect and had been appointed to the new post of Senior
Scholar. The former pariah was now introduced to parents of prospective new
students on tours of the school. My only duty as Senior Scholar was to compile
a roster of school prefects to say grace at lunchtimes, and this was convenient
as I could ensure my name was not rostered to say grace.
I also felt confdent enough to, well, disappear when sport was on the
timetable for the afternoon. I even absented myself from watching rugby
matches. One day, however, an obnoxious young man accosted me with, I
didnt see you watching this afternoons match!
Thats because I wasnt there. I had gone for a country walk, looking for
fungi.
Well, if the headmaster hears about this, you could be deprefected.
Fine. By all means go ahead and report me; and tell him I said you could!
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I had an idea that would hear no more, and I was right.
During what I think was my last term I found I could partially escape the
boredom of chapel services by raising my head and listening to the chirpings
of sparrows nesting high above in holes in the outside of the walls. I greatly
appreciated the birds but, alas, others did not. One afternoon as I walked past
the chapel I found a workman who had just cleared out all the nests from the
walls of the building. A wheelbarrow was piled to overfowing with dbris and
dead fedglings. I was disgusted and angered by this needless barbarity. I have
had a soft spot for sparrows ever since.
I left Denstone on 29 July 1962. It was a day I had looked forward to for
years. Ten years of misery and resentment were fnally over. And as my father
drove me out of the school grounds for the last time I swore lifelong enmity
towards indoctrination and bullying masquerading as education, the Church
of England, church privilege and Christian triumphalism.
Two terms after I left Denstone, the headmaster abolished the fagging
system. Some years later the school decided to take girls as well as boys, and
day students as well as boarders. Today there is shock! horror! an art
department with its own building and even a bar for students over 18. I do not
know when corporal punishment was done away with, but in any case it was
banned in British state schools and state-aided schools in 1987 and in all
private schools in England and Wales in 1999. Denstones fees today are
nowhere near the top of the scale. It charges fourth to sixth-form boarders
$41,340 (22,944) a year.
By the time I left Denstone I was emotionally run down after a decade of
resisting what I saw as a miseducation system. I would much rather have
spent my childhood exploring, growing and enjoying learning. But in the
circumstances in which I found myself, I had done my duty as I saw it. My
experiences then and since have left me with a rather sceptical view of formal
education, and a corresponding respect for self education. I acquired a visceral
loathing of most forms of sport, though I loved archery as a child, and a
lasting detestation of authoritarian ideologies: religious, social or political.
My experiences of the authoritarianism, callousness and religious
indoctrination of the boarding schools I attended led me fairly swiftly to getting
involved in the freethought movement. Within three months of leaving
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Denstone I joined the Oxford University Humanist Group; in 1963 I joined the
National Secular Society and the Rationalist Press Association
4
, and am still a
member of both. And at the end of that year I became a founder member and
frst secretary of a humanist group in the Greater London area. In late 1971 I
was appointed the editor of The Freethinker, an atheist magazine that has been
running since 1881. When I moved to Victoria in 1976 I joined freethought
organisations here.
I was also well aware of the emotional damage that boarding schools can do
to children. So more recently I was pleased to fnd that eforts were being
made to help such people. I am now a member and supporter of Boarding
Concern, founded in Britain in 2002.
5
It was an ofshoot of the provocatively
named Boarding School Survivors, started by Nick Dufell in 1990.
6
Boarding
Concern publicises the adverse efects boarding schools can have on children.
Through its web site and newsletters it provides information to parents and to
former boarders; it publishes research fndings, runs conferences, deals with
the media, and gives links to psychotherapists with specialist knowledge about
the efects of boarding school on later life. I should perhaps mention that the
opinions in this talk, unless attributed elsewhere, are my own, rather than
Boarding Concerns.
Most objectors to boarding schools are of the opinion that sending children,
especially young ones, to such schools disrupts their healthy and normal
emotional bonds with and dependence on parents or carers, and places them
in institutions that extol premature independence. Later problems may include
difculties relating to partners and children; obsessive or workaholic
behaviour, including inability to relax and often or always feeling on the run;
an overbearing or bullying manner or feeling a failure; feeling lonely; and
occasionally sleep or psychosexual disorders.
Nick Dufell has grouped responses to boarding school into three broad
categories: the compliers, who are often in denial about their unhappy
experiences; the rebels, whom he describes as engaging but infuriating; and
the casualties, who were unable to cope satisfactorily and are left with low
self-esteem and under-achievement.
The writer John Le Carr, who once worked for M.I.6 and presumably had a
good knowledge of the British establishment, had this to say in a review of
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Nick Dufells book, The Making of Them: The British attitude to children and
the boarding school system:
If the Church of England is the Tory Party at Prayer, the Public School
system may be called the Tory Party in the nursery. Here are set out the
traumas, deformations and truncations of character that explain the British
Establishment from the appalling Dr Arnold to the Thatcher Matronocracy.
The British are known to be mad. But in the maiming of their privileged young
they are criminally insane.
Even if this errs on the side of hyperbole, Le Carr is not alone. I was a
great admirer of the British character actor, Robert Morley (1908-92)
7
, who
had the misfortune to be sent to Wellington College, Berkshire, which he
detested. In later years Robert Morley refused all requests to go back there
because the only reason for me visiting Wellington would be to burn it down.
His sentiments echo mine only too well.
But I will conclude with a more measured remark from Robert Morley:
Show me a man who has enjoyed his school days and Ill show you a bully
and a bore.
Notes
1 Muscular Christianity and the English Boarding School System. The personal
aspects of both talks rely heavily on an account I wrote in 1995 (A Measure of
Sliding Sand; typescript) about my life from 1944 to 1969. Dr Sabine Apel and
Halina Strnad kindly read through and commented on early drafts of the frst
version of the talk.
2 Lewis, Jane, (School Fees) The Price One Has to Pay; The Week (London)
Independent Schools Guide, [March?] 2014: 22 & [23]. My thanks for this to Dr
Ivor Williams.
3 Tune by Clement Scholefeld for words by John Ellerton.
4 Now the Rationalist Association. The older name is used just for its publishing
company.
5 www.boardingconcern.org.uk.
6 www.boardingschoolsurvivors.co.uk.
Nick Dufell is the author of The Making of Them: The British attitude to children
and the boarding school system (ed. Rob Bland; London: Lone Arrow Press, 2000;
available from www.genderpsychology.com/public).
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7 He was also Melbournes frst (1967) King of Moomba (March community festival).
o0o
11 Smart Street, Sunshine West, Vic., Australia
nigelsinnott@optusnet.com.au
Original text composed 25 May 14 July 2013.
Enlarged and revised July 2013; April 2014.
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