by Jilly Cooper
Things have changed, however, during the last twenty-five years. Death duties and capital transfer tax made it impossible to leave much money to one’s children; taxes were eating into capital and income. The only inheritance one could be sure of giving one’s child was a good education. When the Russians come a good engineering or physics degree might save him from the salt mines. In the nick of time, most public schools abandoned their role as character-builders and gentleman-factories and became academically excellent. The Old Boy Network was a thing of the past.
This obsession with education spread down the classes, because, according to the Census, you can’t be in Social Class I unless you’ve got a degree (nuns for some reason being the only exception). To the working classes barristers, doctors and dentists are upper class. To them an ‘educated’ voice means an upper-class voice. A good education therefore means climbing the social scale. It gives the bright child the chance to leap from Class V to Class I, and enables the middle-class child to stay put.
Education, as a result, has become a complete rat-race—with nine-year-old day-school children working ten hours a day, with no Arthur Scargill to protect them, with teenagers being offered holidays in Bermuda if they pass A levels and whole families, including the cat, going on tranquillisers before O-Dear levels.
Last year 67% of middle-class children interviewed in one sample said they would rather work for an exam than go to a party, and one working-class family knifed their father collectively because he pushed them so hard to get into university. Even the upper classes are infected and in August the beaches at Bembridge and the grouse moors echo with Caroline Stow-Crat and her friends upstaging each other over how many A levels Fiona’s got.
‘’is teacher says ’e’s gifted at writing.’
Consequently the crammers are overflowing, coaches are having a field-day teaching new maths in the holidays, and the paediatricians are coining it in testing middle-class children because they aren’t coming top of the class. They’ve even evolved a new category called ‘Gifted Children’, who are the new educationally deprived, according to the Daily Mail, because they’re not being sufficiently stretched. One can’t think how poor Beethoven and Shakespeare managed in the old days. The Great Train Robbers are all supposed to have been gifted children.
We now see that the aim to produce ‘extra-bright’ children is common to all classes. The pressure on the middle classes to stand firm against competition from below not only kept the private and direct-grant schools full, in spite of increased fees, but has also been a factor in people having smaller families.
In The Anatomy of Britain Anthony Sampson expressed his doubt as to whether the public schools could maintain their dominant position in the ’80s. The middle classes would no longer be able to afford them and the great lower-middle-class movement, the growth of the grammar schools, was acting as a bridge between the lower classes and the corridors of power. Getting into a grammar school was the crucial step for upward mobility, since this made entry into the middle classes and the professions much easier. But in 1975, with the abolition of the grammar schools, the bridge was smashed. The direct-grant schools joined the public schools, as did several of the old maintained grammar schools. In fact, with the scrapping of the grammar schools, the schism has been intensified. With the feepaying and the comprehensive schools glaring at each other across the abyss, the result is well and truly a class war.
Traditionally the public schools look down on the grammar schools, and equally the boarders at public schools looked down on the day boys because they pay less for their education. Etonians look down on everyone, and the smartest Catholic school, Ampleforth, looks down on Eton. The big London public schools tended to be superior academically, but it wasn’t smart to be academic, and most of the St Pauls and Westminster intake lived in and around London, and no gentleman lived in London. And so it goes on. The great public schools, Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby and Marlborough look down on the minor public schools. And the boarding prep looks down on the day prep, who looks down on state school boys who, in return for such contumely, duff prep school boys up on the way home. Finally the good comprehensives despise the ‘sink’ schools, where the brighter children despise the dumber ones, and the dumber ones actually refer, according to one schoolmistress, to the bright ones as ‘snobs’.
Harry Stow-Crat thinks streaming has something to do with trout.
The ’seventies also ushered in another great movement: the fight-back of the middle classes, they were soon selling their houses, giving up drink and holidays, the fathers taking highly paid jobs with the Arabs, grandparents digging into capital and flogging the silver—all to keep their children at boarding school, or, as my daughter calls it, a ‘balding school’. You go bald worrying about paying the fees.
The independent schools themselves are also showing a strong will to survive. Godolphin and Latymer, one of the London direct-grant schools, rather than become a mini-comprehensive, accepted the challenge of independence. Their plight appealed to the middle classes; legacies and covenants poured in; old ladies sent postal orders. ‘Old Dolphins’ ran Christmas bazaars, girls organized mammoth sponsored skip-ins. Parents coughed up. Industry helped with £1000-a-year bursaries.
Meanwhile, headmasters have taken up fund-raising with a vengeance, producing glossy brochures with photographs of scaffolding with the word Erection printed underneath, and whizzing round the country giving appeal parties, which, after all, is far more fun than teaching. Suddenly it became all-important for them to become financial wizards. The Headmaster of Millfield, for example, is the consultant to a firm of brokers in the City. Radley got their half million for a new complex devoted to industry in under a year. My son’s old prep school raised £42,000 in a few months.
But how long can they all survive? At first sight the fee-paying schools seem to be booming, and all appear to be heavily over-subscribed. In fact, as John Rae, Headmaster of Westminster, pointed out recently in The Sunday Telegraph more and more public schools are losing boarders, the extent of the loss being concealed by the recruitment of girls and foreign pupils. There are well over 7,000 girls in boys’ schools now, stripping, as it’s delightfully put, the girls’ schools of their sixth form, and making it increasingly difficult for them to hang on to their staff. Recently a leading girls’ school refused a reference to any girl who sloped off to a boys’ school.
Apart from general fund-raising, the schools are devising all sorts of schemes such as enabling parents to pay on the never-never and establishing recruitment agencies in Hong Kong and the Middle East, which conjures up a marvellous picture of masters in lovat green tweed coats and baggy trousers sidling up to rich Arabs muttering, ‘Not-at-all-feelthy public schools’.
The public and private school holidays are also getting longer and longer: nine weeks in the summer, compared with six weeks in the state schools and four-and-a-half weeks at Christmas and Easter (compared with the state schools’ two-and-a-half weeks) and the children allowed home nearly every weekend, which means food and train fares, particularly if they bring school friends with them. One father said having teenagers home for the weekend was like entertaining mediaeval barons. The massive increase in rail fares also means that parents are tending to send their children to schools much nearer home, so in a way public schools are becoming more local.
‘Your father is making every sacrifice to pay for your education!’
In the future, according to John Rae, it looks as though the middle and upper classes will shop around. Some will try state schools up to thirteen, then use the independent schools to try and get their children through A levels; alternatively state schools up to sixteen, then a sixth-form college. Others will send them to a good prep school and hope that the discipline will carry them through comprehensive school. The directgrant schools have places at eleven and so cream boys off the prep schools. Public schools, suspecting that parents can’t afford to fork out from eight to eighteen, may lower the en
trance age to eleven, juggling to catch a new market of parents who sent their children to a state primary. Whereupon the prep schools, feeling the draft, may extend the curriculum through to 0 levels, thus knocking the small public schools. A glorious free-for-all is envisaged with parents getting more and more muddled and obsessive.
Except for the inner cities, Mr Rae feels, the comprehensive schools are likely to improve to a point when the middle classes opt out of the private system, and when they do it’s likely to be in droves.
‘We must abolish the private schools,’ writes C.E. Daunt, a schoolmaster who had moved over to the state system, ‘for they more than any single institution perpetuate the hoary social curse of our uniquely divisive and persistent English class system.’ On the other hand in the next chapter he lists the obvious advantages of boarding schools: ‘the education, the widening of horizons, the stimulus of new activities, friendships, a relief from the tensions commonly built up in the nuclear family during adolescence, and above all the development of autonomy.’
One of the saddest passages in a book called The Hothouse Society, which consists of interviews with schoolchildren, comes from an East End boy in a state boarding school in East Anglia:
‘I leave in four weeks time, and have been very happy here. Just you try living in Bethnal Green, instead of watching it on T.V. or reading those sociological books about it by people who live in Hampstead. I’ll never live in a lovely house like this again, the grounds, the birds, the trees, the space here all helped me, and the people, they’re kind and interested.’
In fact, if you examine the rigors of public-school life, it’s amazing people feel any envy at all. It seems that beautiful, glass-wall, modern buildings are for children of unskilled workers and are free; while mediaeval ruins with ancient, ink-stained desks all jumbled up on top of each other are for sons of managing directors and peers of the realm.
Boarding schools in the old days were far worse than Borstal: Marlborough used to toss people in blankets over the stairs until one boy missed and fell to his death; in another school new boys had to crawl along boiling hot radiators, singing ‘Clementine’ and have their faces slapped at the end.
But although schools are now less spartan than they used to be, the younger boys still suffer: Take another extract from The Hothouse Society:
‘My teddy helps me when I cry,’ said a seven-year-old prep-school boy. ‘It is from home. He’s old but I like him. I miss my mother tucking me up. I worry because when I’m eight in the big boys’ dormitory they take teddies away.’
In fact Mrs Definitely-Disgusting, who charges round to schools threatening to duff up a form master if he so much as lays a finger on one of her children, would never put up with weeping on Waterloo Station as her darling was towed away to a one-sex borstal with all the risks of beating and buggery behind the squash courts.
But one can’t believe that the abolitionists lose a wink of sleep over teddyless small boys, or the flogging and the buggery. What irritates them is that these products of what seems like a cross between the Weimar Republic and a concentration camp somehow make people who haven’t been there feel inferior.
The difference, too, is that the public schools select while the comprehensive schools are meant to take everyone. The grammar schools accepted the able minority and discarded the incompetent. Comprehensive schools are supposed to encourage a wide standard of excellence and protect the incompetent—a sort of Non-Utopia. ‘You realize X can’t read, and you respect him for it,’ said one state school master pompously, which is all very well as long as you go on respecting the boy who can. The Labour Government wanted to introduce F levels which will be far less demanding than A levels, in order that more children will leave school with qualifications.
The situation has now been reached that the more ‘disadvantaged’ a school is (a euphemism for the more problem pupils it has) the more money it gets from the Government. As a result our local state school, which has an impeccable reputation and no hooligans, gets its subsidies slashed every year, and has to rely more and more on contributions from parents. Equally, all comprehensive schools have three bands like a deb dance: 25% in band one for bright children, 50% for average children, and 25% for below average, so you often find a bright child can’t go to the school she wants because band one is over-subscribed.
There is also the belief that fee-paying schools push you harder:
‘I’m sending Darren to a fee-paying school,’ said a Mr Nouveau-Richards from Cheam, ‘because they teach you to com-pete.’
‘Independent schools have a different attitude to work,’ said a girl at Godolphin and Latymer. ‘My friends at comprehensive school don’t care if they work or not. Someone like me who is basically lazy needs the push of a school like Godolphin and Latymer.’
A comprehensive school mistress told me that she would beg, borrow and steal to send her daughter to an independent school over the next ten years until the dust settles. The most pessimistic say it will take 75 years to sort the mess out.
ETON
‘Our chaps often get scholarships to Winchester and Bryanston,’ said a Surrey prep-school master, ‘but not Eton. We don’t aim that high.’
On the same note, Simon Raven, an Old Carthusian, tells a horrible story about a Jewish boy who was a brilliant cricketer who’d played regularly in the eleven, but who was dropped when the team went to Eton. Where boarding schools are concerned Eton is the crème de la crème.
‘Roddy Llewellyn went to Shrewsbury,’ wrote Paul Callan in the Daily Mirror, ‘a school low in the pecking order of the élitist world; for the strata of society he hoped to move in Eton was essential.’
Eton is a very large school, which means that there are a lot of Old Etonians about. They have long had a tradition of political dominance, stemming from the days when power lay in the hands of the land-owning aristocracy who automatically sent their sons to Eton. They still hold considerable sway in the Tory Party. Six members of Mrs Thatcher’s first Cabinet were Old Etonians. Coutts’ only branch outside London is in Eton High Street.
Eton is also a prime example of self-perpetuating selectivity. Seventy per cent of the boys are the sons of Old Etonians.
All gentlemen go to Eton but all Etonians are not necessarily gentlemen. It is very vulgar to wear an Old Etonian tie except with a morning coat. There is a belief that Eton is secure enough to assimilate all types, that the Nouveau-Richards will be less pilloried there than at other schools, that intellectuals and eccentrics are more tolerated. Recently, however, a boy who said he supported Labour had his study covered in red paint.
To muddle les autres, Etonians often refer to the school as Slough Comprehensive. They call masters ‘beaks’, the matron ‘m’dame’, terms ‘halves’, and use quaint expressions like ‘Lower Boy Pulling’, which is a rowing race, having been in ‘pop’, which means one of the élite, not a fizzy drinks manufacturer. In the school list Hons are called ‘Mr’.
Eton’s activities are closely reported by the Daily Mail which regularly quotes the Eton College Chronicle, as though it were the bible of upper-class behaviour.
The press also regards Harrow as very up-market.
‘Harrow boys may all come from the upper classes,’ a housemaster’s wife is quoted as saying a year ago, ‘but they are not all rich. Some of the boys do their own laundry, and we’ve even got two Punk Rockers’ (rather like token blacks).
One is reminded of the Winchester headmaster, chided in the nineteenth century by the authorities for taking rich boys, who somewhat irrelevantly replied: ‘The boys are not rich. In fact most of them are extremely poor. It’s their parents who are rich.’
SPORTS DAY
The upper classes, regarding the word ‘sports’ as vulgar, call sports day things like ‘the Fourth of June’ or ‘Gaudy’. At Eton it is rather like a race meeting without the horses, but the deficiency is more than made up for by the braying voices. Everyone knows everyone, so the din is tremendous. Picnics
of megalomaniac lavishness are unpacked and dog bowls are laid on the long grass. The place is stiff with dogs, barking with delight at seeing their young masters again.
In the middle-class sector sports day used to be a great hassle, but now that parents are far more interested in academic laurels they are very relaxed occasions. At prep schools a lot of little boys run round a daisied lawn for ‘silver’ cups. Every time the starting pistol goes off all the labradors look up, expecting a large duck to fall out of the sky, rather like Chekhov with fairy cakes. There are a lot of masters in lovat green tweed jackets and baggy grey flannels swaying from one leg to another. At state school sports day, the masters wear off-the-peg suits or T-shirts and track suits. At state schools the children all wave back at their parents. At prep schools they insist you turn up and then ignore you; it is the beginning of middle-class inhibition.
What is amazing at middle-class sports days is the number of fathers present. Are they all ‘concerned and caring parents’, or just skiving or on the dole?