Bullies, Beatings, Battles and Bruises

Plus ça change … ? Well, perhaps:

The Michaelmas term begins, the football season gets under way, there is a nip in the evening air and the heart sinks as one reads those announcements posted by fee-paying schools in yesterday’s paper. Yes, the dreaded Y.K. Swotski is Head Boy, the Fourth of November will be held on Nov. 6, together with a performance of If in College Chapel. J.S.B. Outstanding-Greaser is Keeper of the Mixed Grill. What memories seem to rise within me as I look at those cryptic blocks of text.

Think of the smell of carbolic; the awful afflatus of the organ on that first Sunday evening, as hundreds of pupils, their mothers’ Mitsouko still on their cheeks, whimper their way through ‘Abide With Me’. Think of that little British microcosm, with nothing ahead but violent games and teasing and the howling of the school dog, and no girls save the Chaplain’s daughter. Think of the privations, think of the cabbage, think of what it felt like to have your head kicked as you lay face down in the mud of some far-flung playing field at four o-clock as darkness fell and the sleet intensified.

And what did it feel like, my friends? It felt absolutely marvellous, of course. Totally top-hole. It made me what I am. It was a first-rate preparation for life. ²

Another irreverent modem commentator has sent an equally satirical dart winging its way to a bull’s eye:

You can’t expect a boy to be vicious till he’s been to a good school. So wrote Saki, and, although he was joking, the joke was funny because it was also true. Schools have long been recognised, in our literature and by the man in the street, as dens of vice, distinguishable from prisons in their capacity to encourage bad behaviour. ³

In the second half of the nineteenth century ‘a good school’ meant ‘a good public school’, which meant more often than not bullies, beatings, battles and bruises. Marlborough College by the 1870s was ‘a good school’. The Schools Inquiry Commission of 1868 (the Taunton Commission) put Marlborough College and Rugby, with Marlborough College in first place, far ahead of all the other schools in terms of the number of open scholarship holders at Oxbridge. It also commented:

The kind of education given at Eton, at Rugby, at Marlborough, whatever may be its drawbacks, has at any rate received whatever stamp of public approval can be considered to be given by overflowing numbers. And it is not too much to say, that what chiefly wins this approval is not so much what these schools teach, as the training which is given by their school life. ⁴

In the same decade, the Oxford University cricket eleven included five Marlburians, and the 12th man was also a Marlburian. ⁵