by Peter Rees
Charles found the early weeks at Clifton hard going. He had failed to win a scholarship and began to wonder whether being in a bigger pool might lower his academic standing. His early results were of concern. His father urged him not to be disheartened ‘as long as you are doing your duty.’ He recommended that it was ‘a good thing to make for oneself some opportunities of being alone, when one can perhaps hear the inner voices that are drowned in the rush and stir of school life.’ Edwin explained that a classical education developed the immature mind better than any other form of study. ‘If you seem to grasp a subject, to look at it from different points of view, compare it with other kindred subjects—then your classical work is training your mind.’
When Charles’ first half-term report showed he had not excelled, Edwin encouraged him to maintain steady work habits and keep healthy in both mind and body. He assured his son that a few places higher or lower in the class did not matter, nor whether he made the First or Second XI. It was more important to develop and uphold strong moral values that would set his course for life. The letters kept coming. Edwin warned Charles not to yield to ‘the manifold temptations’ or live for the present rather than the future and, above all, not to do anything base that he might live to regret. He likened the process of public school education to tempering steel. ‘Some blades of finest temper are made: and alas! How many are spoiled and flung aside. You are plunged in the fire of temptation and chilled in the cold waters of unpopularity—all to bring out the temper of your mettle.’
Charles’ results did not improve in his second year. The form master noted that he was careless and inaccurate—‘the more to be regretted because his work is not without signs of capacity and taste when he takes pains.’ Charles’ report at the end of the year bore the headmaster’s note ‘thoroughly discreditable’. This clearly stung Edwin, and he chided his son:
You carry your future in your own hand . . . One thing would grieve me more, and that would be to think that you had lived immorally as well as idly—but that, I trust, I need not fear. But remember that you must live a life of duty. If your new study life produces results like this it cannot be good.
Edwin sought to rationalise his son’s poor marks, putting them down to his rapid growth. He thought that ‘physical exertion is bad for your heart. You will grow out of all that in a few years, if you don’t overtax your system.’ Charles took note. Later that year he won a £25 scholarship, with another the following year. He attributed both to his Latin prose.
His mother, Lucy, was also concerned about his indifferent health. Aware that with his tall, slim build he found boxing a trial, she offered encouragement:
I should not like it, but we’re too ‘Noblesse Oblige’, you have to do it, so do it in a manly way, making up your mind not to care a rap about the fellows laughing or about being licked, there is nothing to be ashamed of. You laugh with them, and don’t let them see you care a bit . . . After all, it is only a training for many similar battles in the world you will have to fight; each one will be easier and you will have a feeling of very pleasant satisfaction each time you go through these things in a manly, cheerful spirit.
Clifton enabled Charles to indulge his love for cricket, and he made the Second XI in his first year. While his batting and bowling were competent enough, he was no star. ‘If I could only manage to field really well I should feel quite at home. But I must practise fielding hard to be good.’ He pinned his hopes on getting his colours but failed through being too nervous in the field. ‘I dreaded missing catches, and consequently missed one in the match against Liverpool. W.G. Grace’s son, Charles Butler Grace, got the colours instead.’ Even then it was clear that Charles was a cricket tragic—and one who played his best cricket in his head.
Among Charles’ closest friends at Clifton was Thoby Stephen, Virginia Woolf ’s much-loved brother. There were similarities in their family backgrounds. Thoby’s father had been a personal friend of Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s School Days. Some years later, when writing about her brother’s time at Clifton, Virginia noted that Thoby’s house master ‘had to apologise when he put another boy over him as head of the house.’
This reference to ‘another boy’ appears to be as close as Virginia Woolf ’s published writings come to noticing Charles Bean. He would later write of the matter:
I started near the bottom of the house and finished as the head of it, although my great school-friend, Thoby Stephen, was immediately above me in the school. He was a son of Leslie Stephen, the writer, and had a far better brain than I, but he was very young, and the housemaster (W.W. Asquith, a brother of the Prime Minister) thought it better that I should be head of the house. When I left Stephen succeeded me.
In later years Charles described how he and Thoby—‘a good deal quicker and cleverer than I’—did their homework together: ‘As he was quickest it always ended in his doing most of it—indeed nearly all.’
Although he did not see himself as ‘a real scholar’, Charles liked to write essays. His approach, he freely admitted, was to imitate the style of the fiction he read—authors such as Jerome K. Jerome, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling. From his study of Greek he learned the important lesson: ‘to hate overstatement, and to make a point tell, when possible, rather by understating than by overstating it.’ This was a skill he continued to hone.
In 1897, Charles became president of the debating society at Clifton. One debate considered the notion that ‘conscription is not necessary in England.’ Even though he personally opposed conscription, Charles spoke for it and was at least pleased that he made ‘a very successful speech.’ His side lost.
As Charles prepared for confirmation in the Church of England, Edwin wrote to him to underline the importance of the event, likening it to a crisis in which he would assume ‘some of the responsibilities of manhood.’ He himself was taking holy orders to enable him to deliver Sunday sermons in the school chapel, and foremost among his advice was to urge Charles ‘to resolve to follow Truth wherever it leads.’
Charles struggled with the big existential questions of religion and philosophy that beset many a teenager, turning to Lucretius and Socrates for answers. He read Lucretius’ epic philosophical poem De Rerum Natura which he found ‘tragically depressing’. Lucretius ‘believed that everything, including man, was merely the result of the rushing through space of innumerable atoms, combining and recombining; we and everything affecting us were just temporary products of that continuous process.’
He turned to Socrates and the study of the self, concluding that the philosopher ‘was only wiser than others because he knew that he was ignorant and they did not.’ But he saw that appetites such as ‘love of wealth . . . love of power, and ambition and perhaps vanity, love of approbation’ had to be kept in check as they belonged to ‘the brute part of our being.’
If such answers remained elusive, other subjects did not—among them the Royal Navy. He and Edwin—who had become a second lieutenant in the Volunteer Forces—visited the Navy’s headquarters at Portsmouth and walked the decks of Nelson’s Victory. He soaked up stories from Navy & Army Illustrated, and scoured The Times for naval news. He joined the Clifton College Rifle Corps. Jack Bean would later recall that by his middle teens, ‘Charles knew the tonnage and gunnage of the various ships of war to a nicety—and the meaning and make-up of the various naval flags; similarly the regimental uniforms and badges of rank—and something of the traditions and history of the great outstanding regiments.’
Edwin Bean recognised that Charles’ classical education and neglect of mathematics had virtually ruined his son’s chances of a military career in the Royal Engineers. But he was confident that Charles would be ‘shown his life’s work all in due time.’ He offered support if Charles wanted to pursue such a career, but warned that ‘the soldier’s is a hard life and there is much self-sacrifice in it and, of course, much risk.’
As his years at Clifton ended, Charles had developed into a spare,
gangly figure, with a shock of red hair and a quiet intensity evident in his eyes. Jack Bean thought him ‘as handsome as a young Greek God—a typically Greek face in its perfect proportions and straight Greek nose’. By his latter teens, the nose grew larger and, according to Jack, took on a straight yet ‘Jewish’ look, inherited, he believed, from their maternal great-grandparents. ‘This disturbed the classic balance and beauty of the sixteen-year-old “Greek statue Charlie Bean”,’ he later contended.
Building on his lessons in earlier years in Belgium, Charles’ talents at sketching and drawing matured. This pleased Edwin, who had urged him early on to forgo carpentry or gymnastics and take drawing and painting instead. Jack Bean saw his brother as a keen and accurate observer who could ‘draw out of his head’ and kept a sketchbook handy for impromptu drawing. As often as not, it was battle scenes he drew. ‘The urge to illustrate was strong in him—I’ve even seen sketches made on blank leaves of his hymnbook or prayer book—made in church . . . I remember when we were schoolboys in our middle teens remarking to my brother: “Chas, you should be a War Correspondent—that’s the job you’re fitted for”.’ Jack Bean knew his brother well.
4
Moral stance
If ‘the terrible dilatoriness or dishonesty of some parents in paying accounts’ made life difficult for Edwin Bean, he still had reason to be pleased. He had been able to give his sons a fine education. ‘They are good boys: intelligent, industrious, modest and very homely . . . Charlie and Jack . . . are perfect leviathans now—nearly 6 ft high each—with great bass voices: full of spirit and fun, but also good workers.’
Edwin was proud of them, but he was feeling the cost of sending his two elder sons to university. Charles had entered Hertford College at Oxford, where he would read classics, and Jack was headed for Cambridge to study medicine. In November 1897 Charles won a five-year, £100 a year scholarship, which helped ease the pressure on the family’s finances.
At Oxford, Charles Bean studied under two young scholars who would greatly influence his thinking. Henry Williams was his philosophy lecturer, and for ancient history he had Abel Hendy Greenidge. Philosophy at Oxford brought him ‘face to face with the insoluble contradictions of infinity of space and time, cause and origin . . . those lines only brought one back to the same full stop.’ He realised the limits of his knowledge, and further probing seemed a waste of time. His inclination from then on was towards events that influenced history. He was also attracted to the law as a profession. On 17 November 1900, while continuing to read classics, he was admitted to Inner Temple to study law.
During his time at Oxford, the Victorian era ended with the death of Queen Victoria. As a member of the Oxford University Battalion, Bean attended the funeral at Windsor Castle, on 2 February 1901. He wrote to his mother, ‘I don’t remember hearing anything quite so wonderful as the snatches of Chopin’s Dead March as the procession wound up from the station around the hill beneath us and past us up to the gate above us where it entered the Castle . . . and you could have heard a pin drop.’ He described the funeral in great detail, clearly seeing himself not just as a participant in the military pomp and ceremony but also as an observer, recording the funeral much as a reporter would. As the late Queen’s coffin passed him on a gun carriage:
. . . my attention was immediately taken by three pair of feet in black and gold trousers. When they were past me I saw that the middle one was the King. I thought he was nice looking, and not fatter than most men of his age. He looked worn. I then looked at the men each side of him. I couldn’t tell who they were as they had passed, but the nearer was Wilhelm, the Kaiser, and the other the Duke of Connaught. I hear from others that the Kaiser looked ill, like the King; but for it all he was the finest figure in the procession, upright and soldierly.
Bean’s 1902 exam results were disappointing. He was not among the twenty-four who won first class honours in classics, but among the fifty or so who got seconds. Greenidge offered reassurance about his marks, explaining that he had been in the running for a first. In his oral exam, however, he had lost ground when he admitted that, because of time pressures, he had gained some of his knowledge of Greek fortifications not from the primary source, Xenophon, but from a secondary source. Bean was later philosophical: ‘It was just as well. With a first I should probably have taken up teaching in England.’
Bean had had a comprehensive classical education, and in the process simplified his prose style. ‘Partly in rebellion against some of the philosophers whose works we read, and partly because the practice interested me, I determined never, if possible, to write a sentence which could not be understood by, say, a housemaid of average intelligence.’
With Oxford behind him but still pursuing his legal studies at Inner Temple, Bean applied for a position in the civil service of the Transvaal and Orange Free State in May 1902, offering to work at half pay until he had learned the local pidgin language and, if necessary, Dutch. Greenidge offered a reference: ‘His recent work has shown me how much he has benefited by his course of reading at the University. Much of it quite first class in style and in the intellectual power which it displays. He is a man of wide interests and general culture, and his manners are such as to ensure him friendly relations with those with whom he is brought into contact.’ His application failed. Three months later, Bean sat for an exam hoping to win a job in the Indian Civil Service or a cadetship elsewhere in the colonial service. Again he missed out, finishing 118th out of 145 candidates.
These were troubled times for Britain’s colonial outposts, with nationalist unrest in India and the Boer War in South Africa. Bean had followed the war closely. Despite his certainty of the rightness of the British cause, he was troubled by what he read of conditions in the concentration camps the British established there. He was not alone in this: none other than John Percival had fiercely criticised the conditions and mortality rates in the camps.
Bean followed suit. In a letter to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette on 20 October 1901, he took up not only the alleged high death rates, particularly among children, but the Gazette’s manipulation of the figures involved. He argued that publishing the truth would not harm any good cause, though suppressing it certainly would:
I believe that it can do nothing but damage to our own cause to publish a paragraph so misleading as that in your yesterday’s issue. ‘The mortality,’ you say, ‘in London this time of the year is very serious. Thousands of people in the metropolis are stricken down with fever, diphtheria, and smallpox. But we don’t make a fuss about it. Why, then, all this outcry because the concentration camps in South Africa are not healthier than London at this time of the year?’
‘Not healthier!’ I do not suppose that the death-rate in London (especially if the death rate of London children is compared with that of Boer children) at any time reached one-eighth of that in the camps. A London child would not be pleased if you could only promise it twenty years of life. To the Boer children we cannot give more than two and a third years.
Bean had taken a strong moral stance, but Edwin took him to task—not so much for writing the letter as for not being clear about his target. He wrote to his son: ‘In your letter it wasn’t quite clear—certainly in the first part—what you were condemning—whether the Government for their want of management or the paper for its unwise partisanship. I think this tendency to obscurity in writing is an inherent quality for I certainly recognise myself in it.’ It was a lesson learned, though obscurity would continue occasionally to cloud his writing.
By the summer of 1902 Bean’s career was going nowhere. He sought refuge in a temporary teaching job at Brentwood. But with his health a concern, and being ‘very subject to severe colds,’ he sought a job in a warmer climate. Bean heard that a pupil at Rugby School, fifteen-year-old Herbert Sharp, was going to the warmth of subtropical Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, for the winter to help ease his asthma. With Bean as his tutor, they sailed on 6 November 1902. ‘He was a delicate but splendid
intelligent youngster, and I grew very fond of him,’ Bean remembered.
The move to the largest and most spectacular island of the Canary archipelago suited Bean. Tenerife was a favourite retreat of the British well-to-do, particularly during winter. He began learning Spanish and, fascinated by life on the island, he sketched avidly. As a personable and unattached young Oxford man, he was much in demand socially when the British matrons were preparing their invitation lists. In his quiet times alone, he began writing a novel of ancient times. The ‘Roman novel’, as he called it, remained an interest to which he periodically returned.
Bean’s main task was to tutor Herbert, but he became increasingly concerned about the boy’s health. Much to the appreciation of Herbert’s father, he meticulously reported his son’s progress and itemised the expenditure involved. But Herbert’s asthma continued to worsen and they left Tenerife on 25 April to return to England.
Bean resumed teaching at Brentwood as an assistant master, while Jack Bean completed his medical studies and began work at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. In the meantime, their younger brother Monty was studying engineering. Bean now focused on completing his legal studies. In his Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) examination, he achieved useful but academically unimpressive third class honours. Nonetheless, it was an additional qualification, and he was called to the Bar on 15 June 1904.
As he later put it, ‘I took the B.C.L. degree simply because I thought the letters might help me to get some coaching. I did not really know much law, but from the time I was a small boy I always knew what the examiners wanted; I could always, on a minimum of work, pass a good examination—it was a sort of a game which I always enjoyed.’ The conferral of the degree coincided with a major decision: following discussions with his father, he decided to return to Australia to try his luck at the Sydney Bar. No doubt the warmer climate would also be beneficial for his health. To ease his way while he established himself, Edwin’s old headmaster at Sydney Grammar, A.B. Weigall, offered him some work teaching Greek.