The great public school tradition of suffering

To complain about a beating used to be bad form. Those who were officially beaten had to remember an elaborate etiquette. Jeremy Brett, the actor, was regularly beaten at Eton, a practice abandoned years ago. “You had to wait until after the beating when they asked, ‘Do you have anything to say?’ and you would say ‘No’.” The prefects would then say, “You may leave” upon which the boy would say, “Thank you”. “The first time I got up, and out of panic I said thank you,” said Mr Brett. “They said, ‘he likes it, bend over’, and I got another five.” – the Daily Telegraph reported in 2000 on changes to boarding school life.

Bitter memories of a brutal tradition

THE great public school tradition that suffering forms the character seems likely to be brought to an end by the first national code of boarding standards.

Generations of expensively-educated black sheep - including Darius Guppy and Jonathan Aitken - have said prison held no fears or surprises after a boarding school education.

School hardships have inspired many writers. Graham Greene was subjected to so much emotional bullying because his father was headmaster at Berkhamsted that he developed suicidal tendencies, once eating an entire tin of hair pomade, and later trying to poison himself with eye drops. His tormentors, and his pain, gave him an insight which he was to use in his fiction.

The anarchic humour of Private Eye owes its roots to Shrewsbury, where Richard Ingrams was forced on cross country runs in driving rain. “Sometimes there were men with whips at the back,” he recalled later. He was so frightened at age 13 when his classics master ordered boys to post any cribs through his letterbox or be punished that he sleep-walked out of the window in an attempt to do so, breaking his arm. He was then tied to his bed every night by a monitor.

Winston Churchill used to be called out by his form master, who told the class to “look at the stupidest boy at Harrow”, and the boys would swipe at him with wet towels. In later years he returned to the school in triumph, unlike Lord Salisbury who, when Prime Minister, refused to preside at an Eton dinner because his school days were so bitter.

He was possibly wise. Stephen Fry, the actor, who was expelled from Uppingham where he had been a “sensitive young weed struggling to grow up in a robust thicket”, returned for a reunion in 1994, aged 37. He was accused by other old boys of being anti-monarchist, anti-public school, communist and homosexual. Another former pupil who came to his aid was attacked. Two Uppingham old boys ended up in court fined for assault and affray, showing that the old school spirit never dies.

To complain about a beating used to be bad form. Those who were officially beaten had to remember an elaborate etiquette. Jeremy Brett, the actor, was regularly beaten at Eton, a practice abandoned years ago. “You had to wait until after the beating when they asked, ‘Do you have anything to say?’ and you would say ‘No’.” The prefects would then say, “You may leave” upon which the boy would say, “Thank you”. “The first time I got up, and out of panic I said thank you,” said Mr Brett. “They said, ‘he likes it, bend over’, and I got another five.”

Hugh Laurie, the comedian and another old Etonian, said he grew up so repressed that he couldn't cry when his mother died. At the same school Winston Churchill, the former MP and grandson of the Prime Minister, was also heir to the family tradition of being bullied. He used to be surrounded by boys who “would strip one and get a rubber-soled slipper and say ‘Take that for being a shit! Take that for being a son of a bitch! Take that for being Winston Bloody Churchill’.” .

But the regime in public schools began to soften long ago. In 1992 a former pupil at Brighton College who had been beaten by the headmaster for alleged bullying sued for damages before the Court of Human Rights. He received an out-of-court settlement of £8,000 from the government. What would Tom Brown have made of that?

As published in Daily Telegraph, 12 July 2000.

Picture credit: Unknown.

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