ABSTRACT
This document, relating to the connection between the public schools and Empire, records the tour of public school boys to Australia in the early 1930s. Between 1926 and 1939 the School Empire Tour Committee, an offshoot of the Church of England Council of Settlement, organised a series of Empire tours for British public-school boys. The first tour travelled to Australia; the last went to Canada. In between, the tours went to South Africa, New Zealand, East Africa and the West Indies. The purpose of the tours was to encourage Empire settlement, with the boys possibly becoming district officers in India or imperial governors of the Dominions. A significant figure in the organisation of the tours was Lord Hyde, the son of the 6th Earl of Clarendon, who was Under-Secretary of State for the Dominion Affairs and Governor-General of South Africa from 1931 to 1937. Most of the leading public schools had boys aboard the R.M.S. Corinthic when it departed from Britain.
