by Bryan Magee
Until the late nineteenth century it was standard practice for masters, including the headmaster, to take in private pupils, so there were boys who were taught in the school’s buildings by its masters but were not members of the school. One of these was Warren Hastings, who became a governor. Others included Camden and Pugin – and one who possesses my favourite name in the English language, Sir Cloudesley Shovell.
In 1784 the girls were separated from the boys and given their own school in Hertford, thus becoming the first girls’ public school in England. At the end of the nineteenth century the boys’ school, in search of space for playing fields, bought a vast twelve-hundred-acre site in the Sussex countryside, built a new school there on the largest scale for eight hundred and fifty boys, and moved into it in 1902. However, it remained a ‘London school’ in its conception of itself and, since universal education had now come in, it tried to recruit the more promising boys from the London state schools – hence its involvement in the LCC scheme for assisted places. When I went there the great majority of boys had come from private schools, but the state-school minority was big enough, and sufficiently long-entrenched in the school’s history, to be taken for granted, so there was as little class awareness among us as there had been in Leigh Hunt’s day.
One did not need to be poor to go to Christ’s Hospital, merely not well-off enough to belong to the five per cent or less of the population who went to the other public schools. In fact, most of the families were of above-average prosperity. I have since discovered things about this that I did not know at the time. The bulk of the boys were children of professional people who were not well paid – doctors, teachers, army officers, clergymen and the rest – or were from families like this in which the father had fallen ill, or had died. Some came from poor branches of grand families, or from families that had once been well-off and had now fallen on hard times. Others were from working-class backgrounds. In the England of that day it was almost ostentatiously true that we came from all social classes.
People often suppose, because Christ’s Hospital is a charity school, that it must be a poor one, but the opposite is the case. Because it provides free, or at minimal cost, what at other boarding schools has to be fully paid for by parents, the school needs to be rich, and is very rich. At the time I write these words it is by a long way the richest school in Britain, in the size of its endowment – more than twice that of Eton, for example. Its money comes chiefly from land, large amounts of it in the City, but also elsewhere – a great deal in Sussex, for instance. Some of its possessions are surprising: when I was there it was the ground landlord of two of Shaftesbury Avenue’s theatres, the Queen’s and what is now called the Gielgud.
The school assessed my parents’ means and decided that they should pay £6 a term – £18 a year – towards the total cost of keeping me in every way, including all my clothing, sport and entertainment, for the nine months of every year that I would be living there. It also suggested that they send ten shillings a term to my housemaster to be doled out to me in instalments as pocket money. Among the information it sent was the fact that piano lessons could be provided as an optional extra, for a small fee. I asked if I could have them. My father said yes, my mother said no. My father pointed out that if I had gone to any other school I would have been a day boy and continued to live at home, and this would have cost a great deal more than sending me to Christ’s Hospital, so they were saving money by sending me there, and could afford the lessons. My mother said they were having to kit me out with all sorts of things for my new school (I asked her what things, and she was unable to say – Christ’s Hospital provided everything, and these ‘things’ were imaginary: she thought kitting a child out for school was something you did) and they could not afford more expense. The argument became heated. It began in the living room, but when the two of them started to get angry my father ordered me to go to my room and stay there until they decided.
I went off to my room and perched on the edge of the bed, my face in my hands. Usually in a dispute between my parents I could put money on my father to win, but not always, and something made me unsure this time. There was something deeply rooted about my mother’s opposition to my learning music. It was beginning to create in me a kind of depression. I could hear their clamant voices through two closed doors, but not what they said. Then the anger seemed to subside, and all I could hear were mumbles. But I still went on having to wait a long time. At last my father came into my room, with a sympathetic look on his face, and put one hand on my shoulder as I looked up at him. ‘We’ve reached a compromise,’ he said. ‘You won’t have lessons straight away, but you can start a year from now.’
A year was an endless time. To me this answer sounded like no. If it had come from my mother it would have been no. But at least I knew my father would keep his word.
The school asked him to bring me on a particular train from Victoria station, and to have with him an empty suitcase to take my clothes away in. We found an unoccupied compartment and took possession of it, he almost as nervous as I was, though showing it less. When the train got under way I stuck my head out of the window, as I always did in trains, and saw the face of a boy of my own age at almost every other window. When the train went into a curve I could see a row of little white faces along its whole length, each one poking out separately, like horses’ heads from stable doors. I asked my father to have a look, and it made him laugh. The phrase we used ever after to evoke that journey was ‘little white faces’.
We disembarked at a station called, I could scarcely believe it, Christ’s Hospital. In those pre-Beeching days it was a substantial building in red brick, with three covered platforms and a comfortable waiting room – all of it since demolished, so that it is now just a halt, though still with frequent trains. Most of the other passengers got off too, the grown-ups carrying suitcases. In the station’s large concourse we were gathered together by those waiting to receive us, and led away in a long winding line up a slope that passed successively alongside the school’s gymnasium, swimming pool, armoury and post office to one of its gates, at which point playing fields opened up beside us and we could see large buildings filling the view ahead. There was a row of turrets against the sky, and beside them a square tower that overtopped them. We were led round a free-standing shop to the other side of the tower, where we found ourselves in what I was later to be told was the biggest quadrangle in England except for the Great Court of Trinity College, Cambridge. Enclosing the lawn were the dining hall, the chapel, the main assembly hall (called Big School) and the Old Science School – all in bright red brick, and all looking to my eye gigantic. Embedded in the sides of the buildings were life-sized statues of people, some of whom seemed to be kings; and in the centre of the quadrangle was a statue of another king. Cloisters ran along two of the quadrangle’s sides. The quadrangle itself opened off an avenue that ran away into the distance under grey stone arches in the cloisters, through which we could see school houses one beyond another. From the expression on my father’s face I could see that he, like me, was too impressed to say anything. Neither of us had realised that a school could be like this.
We were ushered into the dining hall – big enough, my father was to be told later while waiting for me to change, to contain Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory, its ceiling the largest unsupported wooden ceiling in England. Along one wall was what remains the biggest oil painting I have ever seen, a canvas, not a mural, representing the ceremony at which King Charles II founded the Royal Mathematical School, painted at the time by Antonio Verrio. It was eighty-seven feet long and sixteen feet high. On other walls were life-size equestrian portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. By this time the impression I had above all others was of size, sheer size, a scale that had been inconceivable to me in relation to a school. And first impressions are notoriously important. Although this school was to be my world for several years to come, and to become as familiar to me as the skin on my hands, there was a small p
art of me that never ceased to be impressed by it, to see it as magnificent. And the detail that always impressed me most remained the very first one I had encountered, the fact that a school in the middle of the countryside should have its own railway station with frequent trains to and from Victoria.
Boys wearing the famous uniform came to lead us new arrivals to go and get ours. Our parents gave them the empty suitcases, and we were taken away. We were led to one of the school houses and up some stairs into a dormitory. There, against rows of beds, stood several queues of boys in front of people carrying out fittings on them. Next to me in my queue was one of the few boys taller than me, the first new boy I talked to. An affable fellow, he told me his name was Morrison. Smiling cheerfully, he said: ‘D’you suppose either of us’ll become head boy?’ Then, surveying the others without looking impressed: ‘One of us’ll have to.’ Seven years later he did.
Eventually it was my turn to be transformed. First the knee breeches, the silver buttons surprisingly loose and clunky. Then an open-fronted white shirt with no buttons and wide three-quarter-length sleeves. Then came the tricky bit: how to tie the separate white bands round the neck and safety-pin them to the shirt so that they did not drift askew. I had to have it done for me, and was told it would take a few days to learn. Then I rolled on the mustard-coloured stockings, and finally elbowed my way in to the big, billowing coat – more silver buttons on the sleeves and down the front, ending with an extra big one at the bottom. And there I stood, just like the boys I had seen in the London streets. I was given a leather girdle to hang round my waist, and for a moment I just stood there with my thumbs stuck in it, trying to take myself in. Then my minder, who had packed my former clothes into the suitcase, led me back to my father, who by this time was standing outside the dining hall gazing at the view. When I emerged from under the cloister a look of astonishment crossed his face, followed by a repressed radiation of pride. I knew what his emotions were, and basked in them. As I walked towards him I was overcome with shyness because of my clothes. I could feel them on me in a way I never did again, and my stride was self-consciously long.
The next thing we did was go to my house and meet the housemaster. The sixteen houses were in eight blocks, each named after an Old Blue – worthies such as Middleton, first Bishop of India, and Peele, a poet and playwright contemporary with Shakespeare (he was Shakespeare’s collaborator on Titus Andronicus) – so each house had that name plus the suffix A or B. Mine was Barnes A. This, I was told – erroneously, it happens, but I believed it throughout the time I was at the school – was after Thomas Barnes, the outstanding journalist of the nineteenth century, the editor of The Times who earned it the nickname ‘The Thunderer’. So we went past Lamb to Barnes (the two had been friends) and were shown into the senior housemaster’s study.
There sat Douglas Burleigh, known to his boys as either Dougs or Snugs. He and my father got on famously, with an ease and warmth that I found unexpected. I suppose I thought my father would be a little overawed, for no better reason than that I was. But now I began to feel left out of the conversation – they were not even talking about me. I remember my father using the phrase ‘in this democratic age’ in a sentence the rest of which eluded me. They seemed not to want to end their conversation; but another parent was waiting at the door, so I was taken away.
My minder was waiting outside for us, and showed us the rest of the house, which was home to fifty-something boys: dayroom, with separate studies at the far end for the nobs; tuck cupboard outside it, where he said any food of my own would have to be put away, to be unlocked for only a couple of hours each afternoon; changing rooms, a forest of clothes on hooks and pegs, ankle deep in rugby boots; washrooms, including a row of showers over a trough big enough for a whole rugger team to sit and bath in at the same time; shoe room, pairs of slippers in pigeonholes all round the walls; lavatories at the back on the other side of an air passage. Doing a turn round the back of the house we saw a swarthy eighteen-year-old, the skirts of his coat tucked up into his girdle, pumping a bicycle tyre. ‘That’s Neighbour,’ murmured the minder with admiration. ‘He’s the house captain.’ All the way down the front of his coat, so close as to be almost touching, were big silver buttons of the sort that I had only one of; he had a stand-up black velvet collar, which I did not have, and at the end of his sleeves were half-drooping black velvet cuffs, again with silver buttons – very elegant. I asked why his coat was so different from mine, and was told: ‘He’s a Grecian. Grecians all have coats like that. They’re the top boys of the school.’ Taking a leaf out of Morrison’s book I said: ‘I’m going to be a Grecian,’ at which the minder said: ‘I expect you will be one day.’
There came a seemingly natural point when my father left us, as he was meant to, and went to the station to catch the next train back. I was so full of my new surroundings that I did not mind him going.
That night I was taken down to ‘the tube’ to sleep. German bombers had been flying over Christ’s Hospital on their way to and from London, and a few had been shot down nearby, so the whole school had taken to sleeping underground. This was made possible by an ingenious feature of the school’s construction. The houses, thickly laid along a central avenue for half a mile, contained the usual tangle of wiring and piping; and so that their underground supply connections could be got at without digging up the surface outside, these ran along a tunnel that could be accessed from inside any of the buildings, a tunnel big enough for several men to walk along abreast. This was known as the tube. In downpours of rain, or when the school was snowed up, it was a walkway for everyone’s use. And during the Blitz it became a mass dormitory with beds along the whole of its length.
The houses kept their separate identities in the tube, and slept in that part of it that was under their own house. In the Barnes A section we junior boys were supervised by a house monitor called Morgans, a six-footer from South Africa. There were six house monitors, all of whom looked to me like giants. I had never been in a school where the oldest boys were eighteen, and fully grown. For me there was conceptual dissonance in the fact that these adults were ‘boys’ in my house. I looked up at them with awe. They seemed to me even bigger than ordinary people; and their differentness was emphasised by the Christ’s Hospital clothes, which made them seem like creatures from elsewhere.
In those days the monitorial system was exceedingly powerful. Almost every aspect of life in the school outside the classroom was organised by the older boys. They had what felt like total power over us, including the power of punishment. We saw it as them, not the masters, who ran our day-to-day lives. When they left the school they went straight into the army, where they arrived ready-trained in exercising authority over their fellows – with the result that in wartime conditions they sprinted up the ladder of promotion. We became used to the sight of uniformed captains and majors around the place who were young Old Blues revisiting the school.
Next morning the first thing to do was to find my class. A noticeboard in the dayroom told me which one it was. All new boys were in two forms, it said, the third form and the lower fourth – LF for short. This LF was divided into five streams, from A to E, and I was in LFA. All clear up to this point. The notice announced what time this class was supposed to meet, but did not say where. I turned from the board to a biggish boy who was passing, and said: ‘Excuse me, can you tell me where the LFA are supposed to meet?’
‘No such form,’ he said, not slowing down.
‘Yes there is. It says so here.’
‘There isn’t,’ he said, sweeping on. I looked at the notice again.
There it was: LFA.
Across the room was one of the monitors, so I went over and put the question to him.
His manner was kindly. ‘You must have made a mistake,’ he said. ‘There isn’t such a form.’
‘But it says so on the notice.’
‘It can’t do.’
‘It does.’
‘Show me.’
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bsp; He came across to the noticeboard with me and I pointed it out. Understanding spread across his face.
‘Oh, you mean LFA,’ he said. ‘You were saying LFI.’ And he told me where to go.
I was foxed for a while. But that day, as it went on, I made the discovery that I had a cockney accent, a realisation that had never entered my head. As a new boy I was constantly being asked what form I was on (everyone said on, not in), and when I answered, everyone thought I was saying LFI. I came to realise, though with extreme difficulty, that I must be. It was a milestone discovery. All my life I had assumed that the way I talked was normal. The only people who had ever had any problem understanding me were country people, and that was because they were different. They had an accent, not me. Country people had remarked on what they called my London accent, but that was because they spoke country, and weren’t used to hearing London people talk. In this, as in everything else, I took it for granted that London was the touchstone. London set the standard that others followed, unless they did not know any better. But now it was unquestionably I who was different. Yet I could not hear the difference. I was being made aware of it only from outside. I suppose, looking back, I must have been familiar with the way the other boys were talking because I had been hearing it all my life on the radio – indeed it was often referred to, until well after the Second World War, as BBC English. As a broadcaster myself, many years later, I became used to the fact that when people with regional accents hear themselves on the air for the first time they are astonished and taken aback by their own accents, which they were previously unaware of. But at school, of course, I had no such way of hearing myself.