by Adam Sisman
Now in their early teens, the Cornwell boys were often left alone for days at a time, and ran a little wild as a result. David tells the worrying story of how they came across an abandoned goods wagon while exploring the untended common land beyond the large wooded garden at Carriden House. Parked near the rim of an old quarry, it was too tempting to resist. With a length of old iron, they levered it to the lip of the quarry and pushed it over the edge. As it crashed on to the quarry floor, a scream rang out. The boys fled in horror. They never knew who had screamed, and never asked.
For a while Ronnie and Jean shared Carriden House with Edward Ryder Richardson and his wife Glyn. Ryder Richardson, always known by Ronnie as Ryder, was the barrister who had unsuccessfully defended him in the mid-1930s; Ronnie took the boys to watch him plead in court, perhaps hoping that they might be inspired by what they saw. The Ryder Richardsons had two sons around the same age as David and Tony; the four boys would be ‘allowed’ to sleep in the garage, which in the eyes of the adults was a great romp. In fact the ‘romping’ seems to have taken place in the main house.
Jean and Ronnie were married on 21 December 1944, at Marylebone Town Hall. During the reception, held in a smart London hotel, two policemen arrived and took the groom outside. There was much whispering that Ronnie had been arrested, before he returned alone, beaming. Though Ronnie had yet again been called up, he served only a few weeks before requesting leave to contest the upcoming Chelmsford by-election as an Independent Progressive. The seat had become vacant as a result of the death of the sitting Conservative MP on active service. Under the terms of the wartime pact his successor benefited from the official backing of all three major parties participating in the coalition government, though each studied the by-election closely for clues about the mood of the electorate, aware that peace was not far off, when competitive politics would resume. The Conservative candidate was opposed by one standing on behalf of the new Common Wealth party, founded in 1942 by the former Liberal MP Sir Richard Acland and the left-wing maverick Tom Wintringham. Like the Conservative candidate, he was a young RAF officer.
Ronnie’s participation threatened to turn a straight fight into a three-horse race. By standing for election, he ran the risk that his record might be exposed, though he seemed blind to this danger. The new candidate was ‘a mystery’ according to the Common Wealth spokeswoman Peggy Duff.23 ‘He has no real policy,’* she suggested to the local paper; ‘his background is obscure, though he calls himself a “businessman”.’ This may have been a veiled threat.
Ronnie delayed his arrival in the constituency, pleading a severe attack of influenza, and then withdrew from the contest altogether five weeks before the poll, claiming he did not want to split the anti-Conservative vote – the very antithesis of the reason he had given for withdrawing in 1931. In the event, the Common Wealth candidate overcame a huge Conservative majority to win by 6,431 votes. This stunning result signalled the shift in public opinion away from the Conservatives and influenced the Labour Party to withdraw from the coalition government, precipitating a general election only ten weeks after the Chelmsford poll, in which Labour would win a landslide victory. Ronnie played a small part in this general election, acting as political agent for Edgar Granville, who stood successfully as a Liberal in the Eye Division of Suffolk, a seat he had represented as an Independent beforehand.
Ronnie was now free of military obligations. On his wedding certificate he had given his occupation as ‘property & finance broker’, and in his election literature he had defined his business as being ‘connected with property and estate development’. Just as the war had presented opportunities, so would the peace.
Meanwhile David had discovered ‘the fickleness of the fair sex’ for himself. Towards the end of the war the boys were sent to another holiday school at Thorpeness, on the Suffolk coast. There he met a girl called Judy, who allowed him to row her around a boating lake in a small dinghy. Like David, Judy was twelve years old, though unlike him she was brazen. Back at school, he received from her through the post a cheque for a hundred kisses, ‘payable on presentation’. David was appalled. He understood her motive only too well, for a Mr Lawry had told his pupils ‘what girls are after’ in a series of school lectures. She wanted to get pregnant by him during the next school holidays, so that he would have to marry her; then she would take all his money (two shillings a week), thereby holding him back from a fulfilling career. He hid the cheque, told nobody and awaited the holidays with dread. Back at Thorpeness he contrived to avoid Judy for the first week, until he met her coming out of church. To his eyes she looked about twenty.
‘Did you get my cheque?’ she asked. ‘Well, don’t try to cash it, or it’ll bounce. Mickie got me first.’
David saw Mickie for the first time at the tennis courts the next day. He was short, foul-mouthed and spotty, and played a lousy game. Yet for years to come he would remain for David his archetypal supplanter. ‘He was that robust Other Man who lacked all the delicate inhibitions which I had been taught to believe were synonymous with good breeding. He took what he wanted, as Judy did.’24
Encouraged by ‘Crusoe’ Robertson-Glasgow, David began filling exercise books with lurid short stories. In one of these, an heroic old racehorse expired after being ridden to victory by an unscrupulous jockey, who had loaded his whip with buckshot. ‘I thought this the most moving tragedy I had ever read, let alone written,’ David told an interviewer thirty years later. He persuaded the school secretary to type it out for him. Unfortunately she was discovered doing so. The headmaster returned the manuscript to its source, informing David that if he wanted to write ‘trash’ he should get it typed out at his own expense.
Summer term 1944 saw David elected to the school Literary Society. The Society’s activities included readings (poetry from Keats, stories from The Ingoldsby Legends and Chesterton’s ‘Father Brown’, Conan Doyle’s ‘The Speckled Band’ and passages from Dickens), debates (‘Town Life is preferable to Country Life’), picnic excursions on the river and dramatised play readings (Shaw’s Pygmalion and Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton). One of David’s contemporaries remembers David’s sophisticated vocabulary, which (so he subsequently surmised) had been acquired during these play-reading sessions. On the last day of term David was one of a quartet who recited ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ in front of the whole school. ‘Alice would have known them anywhere,’ commented the anonymous reviewer in the school magazine – presumably ‘Crusoe’.
David was proving himself to be a skilful performer. That autumn, when bad weather kept the boys indoors, he gave an impromptu act in the gymnasium, taking the role of an American woman conducting a long-distance conversation with her husband, via a roller skate improvised as a telephone. According to the school magazine, this ‘greatly entertained the house’. At the end of the Easter Term 1945 David played Captain Billy Bones in a production of Treasure Island. The school magazine described his performance as ‘rollicking’, while deploring his ‘tendency to over-act’.
Another role he took was that of a police sergeant in a production of Erich Kästner’s classic children’s story Emil and the Detectives, anglicised to avoid any embarrassment over the use of German names and places. By now David, aged thirteen, had become a big fish within the small pond of St Andrew’s: section leader of his house (‘Blue’), a prefect and, in his final term, head of school, as Tony had been two years before.
In his penultimate term at St Andrew’s, David, together with most of the other boys of his age-group, had been confirmed into the Church of England by the Bishop of Reading. Two years earlier Tony had undergone the same rite of passage. As a matter of course Robertson-Glasgow had asked their father beforehand whether the boys had been baptised. Ronnie had paused before replying. ‘I think they were,’ he said at last, ‘but perhaps it wouldn’t do any harm if you did it again.’
The celebrations marking the end of the war in Europe in early May 1945 took place just as St Andrew’s was rea
ssembling for the summer term. On VE Day itself a Thanksgiving service was held in the Chapel, though only fifty of the school’s seventy-eight boys had arrived by then, and David was not among them; he was at a crammed party held in Ronnie’s Conduit Street office, full of ‘lovelies’. Somebody poured water from a window on the revellers in the street below, and a policeman came upstairs to remonstrate. Three days later a vast bonfire on the school lawn consumed an effigy of Adolf Hitler.
That month David sat the examination for a leaving scholarship from St Andrew’s. Perhaps surprisingly, he did not perform well. Neither did he succeed in obtaining an entrance scholarship to Sherborne, though he was accepted there as an ordinary pupil, to start in September. In his testimonial Robertson-Glasgow had assessed David’s work as ‘very steady – without brilliance!’ He noted that David was ‘weak at maths’. As for his character, the headmaster rated him ‘good’ for truthfulness, industry, obedience and general conduct. Concerning his leadership qualities, he wrote that ‘he is beginning to be a most useful member of the school’. In a conclusion marked ‘confidential’, Robertson-Glasgow added, ‘I don’t like his father! The boy is a good lad, though, like his elder brother.’
David was more successful at cricket, topping the batting averages and captaining the 1st XI. On 21 July he captained the school for the last time in the Fathers’ match. Tony appeared for the visitors, temporarily promoted to parental status; during his innings, according to the school magazine, he ‘lashed out with controlled fury’. Despite this formidable onslaught, the 1st XI was victorious, by a margin of thirty runs. Ronnie, who had opened the batting for the Fathers, was out for a duck.
The housemaster at Sherborne sent a letter of welcome to David, who replied that he was ‘very much looking forward’ to going there. His letter was written in an informal, man-to-man style, though he was still only thirteen; reporting on the cricket season, for example, he referred to a match that his team had won easily, ‘though after some absolutely frightful fielding!’ His last sentence seemed less assured, however. ‘Could you please tell me some of the routine and customs of your house, so that I shall be sufficiently prepared for next term?’25
* During the war Constantine took legal action, with Ronnie’s active support, against a hotel which had refused him accommodation. The case came up before Norman Birkett, by now Mr Justice Birkett, who found in Constantine’s favour. This has been regarded as a landmark case in the struggle against racial discrimination. Constantine was knighted in 1962, and was made a life peer in 1969, becoming the first black man to sit in the House of Lords.
* Then boys only, but now co-educational. Among its more recent pupils are the Middleton sisters, Kate and Pippa.
* Christopher ‘Kit’ Probyn is one of the protagonists in le Carré’s A Delicate Truth (2013).
† One of David’s contemporaries, the artist Howard Hodgkin, has acknowledged the debt he feels to Probyn, though he was otherwise unhappy at St Andrew’s and left prematurely.
‡ His nickname of ‘Crusoe’ came, according to Robertson-Glasgow himself, from a batsman whom he had bowled first ball. When his captain asked how he had been dismissed, he replied: ‘I was bowled by an old —— I thought was dead two thousand years ago, called Robinson Crusoe.’
* Thursgood’s Academy in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is modelled on St Andrew’s; in the novel the chalk-pit is known as ‘the Dip’.
* H. E. (Henrietta Elizabeth) Marshall (1908).
† Percy F. Westerman (1876–1959), prolific author of adventure books for boys, lived on a converted Thames barge on the River Frome at Wareham in Dorset.
* Though described as being of ‘incessant good humour’, ‘Crusoe’ took his own life during a snowstorm in 1956.
* In 1942, incensed by an RAF attack on Lübeck, Hitler ordered that the Luftwaffe should launch retaliatory raids on historic British cities. It was said that these were selected according to their ratings in the Baedeker travel guides.
* William omitted the hyphen from the family name.
† A section of British public opinion argued for a ‘Second Front’ in Europe to relieve the pressure on Russia as it fought the German invaders.
‡ Douglas Home was liaison officer with the German forces occupying the besieged town of Le Havre. The German commander’s proposal to evacuate French civilians before the Allied bombardment began was rejected by his British counterpart. Douglas Home’s refusal to obey an order sprang from his view that this decision was morally unacceptable. He told David that his commanding officer had threatened him at pistol-point.
* Ronnie advocated a ‘Three-Point Policy’, as follows: ‘1. Full recognition of the part played by Russia in the defeat of Germany; 2. A vigorous agricultural policy to be in the forefront of our post-War plans; 3. Extensions of our social services, and provision of permanent homes at the earliest possible moment.’
3
God and Mammon
More than 1,300 years ago St Aldhelm became Bishop of Sherborne and founded a school where, according to legend, Alfred the Great was a pupil. For centuries this school was linked to the Benedictine abbey that still dominates the town. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries, it was refounded, like so many others across England, as a free grammar school for local boys. To this day Sherborne’s anthem sings the praises of King Edward VI, who in 1550 graciously gave the school its charter (‘Vivat Rex Edwardus Sextus! Vivat! Vivat! Vivat!’). By the mid-nineteenth century, dwindling student numbers and a dispirited staff prompted a transformation to a fee-paying boarding school. The public school that David attended from 1945 onwards is therefore comparatively modern. An historian of Sherborne refers to its establishment as ‘an example of the rising educational expectations of the Victorian era, its high-mindedness mixed with a nose for business, the impact of the new railways, and, not least, the Victorian genius for creating new institutions and then pretending that they were, after all, very old’.1
The illusion is sustained by the fact that the school stands adjacent to the Norman abbey, on land that once belonged to the abbey’s monastery. Its Victorian founders commandeered buildings associated with the abbey, and added new ones in a compatible architectural style. As it expanded, the school established boarding houses in the town, to accommodate the growing number of pupils: around 500 by the time David arrived in 1945, and still increasing. Under a forceful headmaster, Alexander Ross Wallace, Sherborne seemed in good health – though ‘the Chief’ feared for the future. Soon after David arrived, Wallace gave a solemn address to the boys. The newly elected Labour government, he announced with a choke in his thunderous voice, planned to abolish public schools. He spoke as if the world were about to end. The new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, and many of his ministers were themselves public schoolboys, traitors to their class. You boys, he told them, should gird yourselves and wait bravely for the worst. You are the last of the Romans. The barbarians are at the gates.2
Sherborne celebrated values that seemed dated in democratic, post-war Britain. ‘It is taken for granted that all boys will strictly observe the standards of behaviour of a gentleman,’ read one of the school rules, published in January 1946.
‘The Chief’ was a big man, whose dynamism contrasted strongly with the lackadaisical approach of his predecessor. Indeed, in his very first term one housemaster had resigned after a minor row with the new headmaster; his body was subsequently washed up on the beach at Lyme Regis. Wallace characterised his own response to this tragedy as ‘great agony of mind’, but there was no doubt that his combative style antagonised some of his colleagues.3 There was an inherent tension between the headmaster and the housemasters, who enjoyed considerable independence, collecting their own fees from the parents and running their houses as separate concerns. This separation between houses was intrinsic to the culture of the school. Members of different houses were not encouraged to mix; when David became friendly with a boy from another house, it was taken as a sign of incipient homosexualit
y.
Like the Robertson-Glasgows, Wallace was a high Anglican, whose religious belief was central to his life; in 1938 he had taken holy orders, and in 1942 he became a canon of Salisbury Cathedral. Striding across the Sherborne courts in clerical collar, mortarboard and gown, he resembled an active nineteenth-century don. Before the war he had established a link with a local community of Anglican Franciscans, based first at Batcombe and later at Cerne Abbas, where the occasional boy would be sent on retreat.
Unquestioning allegiance to the Empire was expected of all Shirburnians. ‘The best life you can get is in the Colonial Service,’ a careers adviser visiting the school told the boys. ‘Of course, you’ve got to learn how to talk to the natives.’ Under Canon Wallace’s leadership the school continued to emphasise the public school ethos of duty, service (to the school, and by extension to the nation and to the Empire), fortitude, self-denial, fair play and physical courage. Pupils at Sherborne were being trained as leaders – in warfare above all. Military training with the junior division of the Officers’ Training Corps (OTC) was compulsory, two afternoons a week, one in uniform and the other in plain clothes.
If ‘games’ were no longer, as they had been in the past, the only thing that mattered, it was still held that athletic competition was essential in developing ‘character’, which meant holding your ground without flinching, whether on the rugby field, in the boxing ring or on the field of combat.4 ‘We fought rugger wars almost literally to death,’ David wrote thirty years afterwards. ‘Boxing was obligatory and I was knocked out cold.’ Around the end of his first year, David was summoned by his housemaster to explain why he wanted to give up boxing. ‘People are saying that you’re a funk,’ the housemaster told him. David responded that he didn’t mind what people said. ‘I’m a pacifist,’ he announced.