by Adam Sisman
Over the centuries Eton has preserved its traditions while adapting to social change – much like the aristocracy itself. Indeed the College was something of a hereditary institution, in that many of the masters had been educated there, and 60 per cent of its pupils were sons of Old Etonians.3 Even today boys still wear tailcoats, with stiff collars and a black waistcoat underneath – except members of the privileged Eton Society (‘Pop’), who are permitted to wear garish waistcoats of their own choosing. Eton has its own terminology: masters are known as ‘beaks’, terms as ‘halves’ (though there are three of them each year), cricketers ‘dry bobs’, rowers ‘wet bobs’, and so on. This was all Greek to David. He found many of the customs risible. ‘I didn’t know the language and I didn’t know the ethic,’ he would say later.4
Perhaps inevitably, the culture of Eton reflects the values and the manners of the class from which the majority of its pupils are drawn: including social ease, effortlessness, entitlement and an assumption of superiority, occasionally tending towards boorishness. As he walked along the High Street towards the College, a candidate for a teaching post at Eton in the late 1950s was indignant at being forced into the gutter by ‘Pop’ swells lounging on the pavement, canes in hand, and complained vociferously to Birley at his interview.
Birley himself was a large, clumsy, absent-minded man, whose earnest idealism was obvious to all. Known as ‘Red Robert’ because of his liberal views, he was believed to be a reformer, though this side of his nature was restrained by an innate cautiousness. He endeavoured to consult his staff, though some noted that he did so only in small matters. David thought him ‘extraordinarily patient and tolerant’: his ‘great and probably only failing’ being to ‘talk incessantly and ineffectually whenever he gets a chance’.5
Some of the masters, particularly those who were Old Etonians, had never taught anywhere else and would spend their entire careers at Eton; naturally such men developed a strong attachment to the College and its traditions and tended to resist change. By contrast, there was a rapid turnover of young men, who left for more lucrative salaries and more exciting careers elsewhere. Under Birley’s headmastership the proportion of masters who had not themselves been Etonians rose; such newcomers (like David) tended to be less taken with the College’s mystique.
It was a custom that housemasters at Eton gave dinner parties to welcome newly arrived masters and their wives. These were formal, intimidating occasions. Dressing for dinner was de rigueur; at the end of the meal the ladies left the table to be entertained by the housemaster’s wife while the port circulated among the gentlemen. At one of these dinner parties David encountered the Hartleys, sticklers for correct clothes, the correct ritual for a dinner (‘Darling, you hand the vegetables from the left side’) and correct forms of address, about which they cared passionately.6 Hubert Hartley had just retired after almost half a century at Eton; his wife Grizel was an Eton ‘personality’, kindly and cruel, mannered and snobbish. Their conversation went as follows:
Grizel: ‘Darling, are we by any chance related to the Cornwells of Shropshire?’
David, bridling: ‘No, actually my father is a self-made man.’
Grizel, very pleased: ‘Darling, how sweet!’
‘There are some very sticky people,’ David wrote to Vivian Green early in his first term, ‘but a lot of awfully nice ones too – and obviously you can pick your company.’7 With over ninety members of staff at Eton there was plenty to choose from. In general, David was welcomed by the other Eton beaks, who found him entertaining, even delightful, company. One of them, the history master William Gladstone, commented on David’s skill in depicting their colleagues, observing that while some beaks were easily caricatured – the fat ones or the tall, cadaverous ones, for example – others were not: nevertheless David could capture the essence of a personality in a simple sketch, perhaps by drawing the person concerned in the act of a sudden, sardonic glance.
One of those whom David at first thought ‘awfully nice’ was his boss, Oliver Van Oss, another powerful Eton personality, who had been at Eton more than a quarter of a century. Depending on whom you spoke to, he was either a man of culture or ‘a bullshitter of Olympic class’.8 Van Oss was a large, rubicund figure, a wicked mimic whose eyelashes fluttered almost imperceptibly when he said something clever. Thanks to him, David had been allotted the brightest boys studying German. ‘They are very good, & seem to learn by themselves’, David told Vivian Green, though he complained that their essays were ‘very clever-clever and crammed with idiotic careless mistakes’.9 To his pupils, David’s enthusiasm for the German language and German culture was obvious. Alexander Chancellor, later a successful journalist, thought him a very good teacher, even though David had ‘torn over’ (an Eton expression indicating poor performance) a piece of his work in front of the class because he considered it inadequate.
Before he arrived at Eton David had been warned that the boys would try it on with him at the start, to test his strength. Indeed his predecessor had been unable to keep control and had ‘retired hurt’, to go and teach in a girls’ school. Sure enough, the boys began playing up in the first class he took. After about five minutes, a pile of books slid from one boy’s desk on to the floor with a thump. ‘Sorry, sir,’ said the boy, affecting innocence as he picked up the books. About five minutes later another pile of books slid to the floor. ‘Very sorry, sir.’ And then again: ‘So sorry, sir.’ After the third time, David announced, ‘Very well, then. Now all of you can spend the rest of this class dropping your books on the floor and picking them up again.’
In one of his French classes, David discussed the French word paysan. ‘How do we translate it?’ he asked the boys. ‘As you know, nobody in England talks about peasants any more.’
‘Oh, Sir, Sudeley does.’
Later David would be told by one of the housemasters that Old Etonian fathers encouraged their sons to ‘mob up’ beaks when they arrived at Eton, ‘to show them their place’. Ronnie had suggested that his boy might be ‘out of his depth’ at Eton, but David proved equal to the challenge.10 When he caught a boy doodling grotesque heads in his exercise book, he turned the tables on the miscreant by telling him that he wanted ‘five hundred of those by lock-up tonight’. Like his creation Jim Prideaux, David used the expression ‘horrid little toad’ to address any boy who was cheeky or who otherwise misbehaved. In response to a smart-ass remark in class, David asked: ‘Is that another effort at wit, Marsh?’
‘You think that you’re superior to these grammar school boys with their caps on the back of their heads, but you’re not,’ David told one of his classes. ‘Look at you. You’re just a crowd of penguins.’
At this one of his titled pupils was stirred into a drawling response: ‘But Sir, we dress better in the holidays.’
One of his former pupils, Ferdinand Mount, has written an account of David’s early days at Eton:
At first sight the new master looks quite innocuous, with a mop of corn-coloured hair and a soft, hesitant, slightly insinuating voice as though he means you to read between the lines of what he is saying. But from the beginning of the first lesson he is in control, apparently without making the slightest effort to exert authority. He switches on charm or menace at will and when the yobs at the back start to make trouble he delivers merciless and exact parodies of their arrogant, languid voices. For me David Cornwell also has the marvellous freshness of a born teacher who is teaching his subject for the first time …11
‘The boys are collectively quite frightful, and individually variable and rather unnerving,’ David told Green. He had been appalled by a colleague’s report of an overheard conversation between two boys after one of them had been to tea at Wheatbutts:
‘Had tea with Cornbeef the other day.’
‘How was it?’
‘Usual stuff. Milk in first and then Indian.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever met so much arrogance,’ David concluded. ‘However, it’s all right as long as
you preserve the strength to resist.’12
Not for the first or last time, David found himself both attracted to and repelled by the institution he had joined. On the one hand he was enchanted by its good manners, by its ethic, by the civilised attitude to responsibility it instilled in its pupils. On the other hand, he found it objectionable that boys should be educated from an early age into privilege. He thought it wrong that they should dress differently and talk differently from the people that they were being trained to govern.13 David was one of a small group of younger masters pressing for Eton to reform.
As an Eton beak David wore a white bow tie and stiff butterfly collar underneath a dark suit. Early each morning he would bicycle a mile and a half to the college to arrive in time for the seven o’clock lesson, returning afterwards for breakfast, before cycling back again. Ann was somewhat isolated at Wheatbutts, with no car and a long walk from town, but they acquired a new dog for company, a German Shepherd puppy called Barney, and a cat called October; and they quickly made friends with some of the other masters and their wives, the younger ones in particular. One of these, Geoffrey Marsland, also newly married, had been a contemporary of David’s at Oxford. The Cornwells’ closest friends also lived in Eton Wick, the assistant art master Oliver Thomas and his wife Sylvia, a chaotic bohemian couple, tolerated as eccentric by the College community. Oliver Thomas was a painter, one of a group of artists who had experimented with painting under the influence of mescaline before the war.
The social life within the community of Eton beaks was not all formal. Ann remembered in particular a party at the Birleys’, at which they played charades. One of the housemaster’s wives rolled on the floor, emitting alarming groans: this was Jean Barker, the future Baroness Trumpington, who would become a Conservative minister and House of Lords whip, enacting The Birth of a Nation.
Most important of all for Ann, she had discovered that she was pregnant, a fact that became increasingly obvious towards the end of the year. David asked Vivian Green if he would act as one of the godfathers to the imminent baby (the other was Robin Cooke), and perform the christening. ‘Impending parenthood finds me intrigued, apprehensive and extremely nervous.’14
The Suez Crisis, which reached its climax at the beginning of November 1956, only a few weeks after David’s arrival at Eton, aroused passions now difficult to imagine. The emotions unleashed were even stronger than those caused by the invasion of Iraq in 2003. As in that case, the British government was condemned from both left and right. Those who disapproved of the use of force in international affairs were predictably opposed to the Suez expedition, but so too were many who took the opposite view. Some thought that the government had been panicked into action; others believed that action should have been taken more promptly. The denial of collusion with the Israelis looked like a dishonourable cover-up. In parliament, the opposition leader Hugh Gaitskell condemned the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt as ‘an act of disastrous folly’ which would do ‘irreparable harm to the prestige and reputation of our country’. In a letter to his MP, the Conservative junior minister Edward Boyle, one Eton master expressed his ‘complete abhorrence of the policy which the government is pursuing’. He informed Boyle that he had voted Conservative in the last three elections, but that his next vote would be for Labour.15 Boyle himself would resign from the government in protest at the Suez invasion.
The Crisis divided opinion within the College as it did across the country, stimulating vehement debate on the dinner-party circuit and wherever masters met. The apparent duplicity and poor performance of the Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, caused particular pain, as Eden was an Old Etonian – as indeed was half his Cabinet. ‘Eden has not taken the country into his confidence,’ sighed Hartley, an ex-soldier and a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative. A letter to The Times protesting at the government’s actions was strongly mooted. David was one of those masters keen to sign.
As headmaster, Birley was in a difficult position. Although regarded as dangerously left wing by some Old Etonians, he had an exaggerated respect for the judgements of politicians and statesmen. Moreover he was anxious about the danger of adverse publicity for the College. He persuaded those intending to put their names to a letter of protest to hear the government’s case put by Lord John Hope, then serving as Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Lord John was an Old Etonian, and closely involved with the College as the masters’ representative on the Governing Body. He addressed the masters in Birley’s sitting room. He was not especially convincing in defending the government’s policy, but he succeeded in persuading his listeners to delay any letter to The Times until the situation cleared and until British troops were no longer in action.
The Suez Crisis ended in a humiliating withdrawal. It punctured British prestige and made painfully obvious the steep decline of British power in the decade since the war. British pride was hurt and national honour damaged. No doubt this was one reason why the Crisis aroused such strong feeling.
In a 2003 interview, David likened Tony Blair, the Prime Minister who earlier in that year had taken Britain into the Iraq War, to Anthony Eden. Like Eden, he argued, Blair had been adversely affected by his public school. In the course of the interview David mentioned the planned letter to The Times, and implied that John Hope had been despatched down to Eton by order of the Prime Minister. He suggested that Eden had been preoccupied by Eton during the Suez Crisis: ‘it was still all about school’. He told his interviewer that Eden had come down to Eton himself on several evenings to consult his old housemaster about what to do.16 Clarissa Avon, Eden’s widow, was furious at this allegation, which she knew to be false. She consulted Eden’s biographer D. R. Thorpe, who was able to show that Eden’s housemaster had retired long before the Suez Crisis erupted, indeed had died more than six months earlier. David wrote Thorpe a letter of retraction, and sent Clarissa Avon an apology that she thought fulsome.
Early in 1957, David wrote a long letter to Green in which he gave his impressions of Eton. In many ways, he said, his second ‘half’ had been very pleasant, ‘without all the nervousness of starting from scratch’. But he was becoming more and more irked by what he called ‘the “Herrenvolk” doctrine’, which he felt was encouraged in the boys by the ruling body of masters: ‘the free use of comparison with the “oik” classes …’
He noted a ‘curious lowering of standards’ in the aristocracy: for example, Lord Charles Spencer-Churchill, younger son of the 10th Duke of Marlborough, ‘tells me that he spends his evenings with his father glued to the television, watching parlour games’. David had learned from a colleague who spent the holidays at Blenheim tutoring Lord Charles that the Duke continued to watch ‘telly’ while flunkeys served up meals to him and his family.
David fulminated to Green about the ‘infuriating’ Eton tradition ‘of not being enthusiastic about anything, or surprised’. Discussion on painting, for instance, was limited by the extent to which a boy would admit to being impressed – ‘and to be impressed by anything a “beak” does is pretty “wet” anyway’. He was dismayed by the lack of discipline: ‘at concerts and so forth boys whistle and behave very badly, and leave before the speaker has been applauded’.
Yet David had to admit that Eton was astonishingly liberal in many ways – not the least of these being the number of boys who were terribly bad at games, ‘whose lives remain unimpaired by this handicap’. This would never have been tolerated at Sherborne. David was impressed that the senior boys were allowed to drink beer at their own pretend-pub called Tap, a tiny bar room hidden behind the High Street. He told Ferdinand Mount that this was the most civilised thing he had heard about the school.17
David would later admit to ‘a fascination with the mores of the Etonian class’. Some years after he quit teaching, he would have a bizarre encounter that seemed somehow characteristic, with a former pupil whom he found dead drunk on the corner of a street in Pimlico: the young man had laid out the family silver on a folding table and was tryin
g to sell it to passers-by.18
Each Eton schoolboy chose a tutor for his last two years, with whom he could study almost anything that the two of them decided upon, in time set aside for ‘private business’. David’s ‘pupils’ liked the fact that he treated them as intellectual equals and did not talk down to them; of course it helped that he was younger than most beaks. But in any case he stood out from the other masters as someone with a sense of the wider world, ‘a breath of fresh air’. He took pupils for walks, and lent them books. He introduced one of them, Bill Drummond-Murray, to Rembrandt, Vermeer and the other Dutch masters, showing him slides and talking them through. Ferdinand Mount related how during private business David talked ‘about anything that comes into his head’.
One of the things that I like about him is his irreverence towards the school and its encrusted traditions but at the same time his fascination with the place as if he was marking it all down for future use: ‘Really, only Upper Boys are allowed to walk on that side of the road? I heard that but I could not believe it, and tell me, that business about who can wear the bottom button of his waistcoat undone, amazing.’ Then we talk about Goethe or Schiller …19
David enjoyed his pupils, some of whom were exceptionally bright, though he was a little dismayed by their limited horizons, as he told Green. Of his first three, two, on being questioned about their future careers, ‘replied that they were going to “manage the estate”! The other is going into “father’s business”.’