Posh Boys

How the English Public Schools Ruin Britain

Robert Verkaik

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786073846
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

'The latest in the series of powerful books on the divisions in modern Britain, and will take its place on many bookshelves beside Reni Eddo-Lodge's Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race and Owen Jones's Chavs.' –Andrew Marr, Sunday Times 'In his fascinating, enraging polemic, Verkaik touches on one of the strangest aspects of the elite schools and their product's domination of public life for two and a half centuries: the acquiescence of everyone else.' – Observer In Britain today, the government, judiciary and military are all led by an elite who attended private school. Under their watch, our society has become increasingly divided and the gap between rich and poor is now greater than ever before. Is this the country we want to live in?If we care about inequality, we have to talk about public schools.Robert Verkaik issues a searing indictment of the system originally intended to educate the most underprivileged Britons, and outlines how, through meaningful reform, we can finally make society fairer for all.

PART ONE

SELLING EDUCATION BY THE POUND

1

POOR SCHOOLS

Private education was first established in the British Isles by wealthy Roman families who came here shortly after the imperial conquest. Where Greek children primarily received their education from the community, a Roman child’s first and most important educator was chosen by his or her family.1 In Rome the first private schools were populated by paying pupils from the less well-off Roman families who pooled the fees to secure cheaper rates.2

The Romans even wrote into law the link between fees and private schools. Emperor Diocletian’s edict on pay scales established set fees for each class of education. It meant that elementary schools could charge 10 denarii (around £50 today) per pupil per month, while schools that taught grammar and rhetoric charged up to five times more.3 Under this system the Roman conquest of Britain brought reading and writing to the British elites on a scale never seen before. But when the Romans departed in 410CE Britain sank into its Dark Ages and education was neglected.

It wasn’t until the arrival of St Augustine and Christianity in 597 that the torch of learning was reignited and an army of monks and clerics brought about a mass conversion of the heathen English.4 This was not a piecemeal undertaking but a systematic and professional operation directed by Pope Gregory in Rome. Where Augustine and his followers established a church, they would also found a school. For the British people it meant education would be forever synonymous with the practices of Christianity. And at the heart of the new religion was a new written language. As the Victorian historian Arthur Leach said: ‘To understand the rudiments of the new religion, to take part in the new religious worship, it was necessary for the English to learn Latin.’5

Local grammar schools were established to teach Latin to the novice priests while song schools educated children in singing the praises of God. One of the first was King’s School in Canterbury, an Augustinian grammar school which became the subject of a famous debate between Thomas Cranmer and Richard Rich about who deserves education.6 The other great Saxon churches of Rochester and York followed suit, founding their own grammar and song schools. These are England’s oldest schools, still in existence today.

Alfred the Great restored the place of schools in Britain after the Viking invasions of the ninth century, which had resulted in many monasteries being razed to the ground. At the heart of Alfred’s vision were strong community centres of learning organised by the local priests. And he helped make reading and writing more accessible to ordinary people by overseeing the translation of Latin texts into Anglo-Saxon. Nevertheless, by the early twelfth century, under Norman rule, these Christian schools had reverted to Latin. A Norman education remained focused on vocational training and most pupils were still aspiring monks or priests, though there are rare cases where members of the young nobility were sent to school.7 But the more typical apprentice came from the community and from the common stock.

St Paul’s Cathedral school was established in 1123, when eight needy children were given a home and education in return for singing in the cathedral. Indeed, in the twelfth century most cathedrals and collegiate churches had schools founded in the same vein. The schoolmaster was one of the country’s most important officers and teaching was one of the most important functions. Some schools – like those at Bedford, Christchurch and Waltham – were removed from monastic control and handed over to secular canons. Bury St Edmunds, for example, which had probably been founded as part of a collegiate church before Canute’s time, was given an endowment at the end of the twelfth century to convert it into a ‘free or partially free grammar school’.8

More than 300 years after the Norman Conquest only 5 per cent of the population could read or write. The lords and earls still regarded education as a threat to the feudal system of serfdom upon which they relied to run their estates. Some lords of the manor even enacted laws banning local serfs from attending school. Yet by the fourteenth century the English church had established a network of schools that served its own staffing needs as well as the wealthy ruling classes, who started to use them to educate their sons. Soon the grammar schools and song schools were joined by chantry schools. Established by wealthy benefactors or guilds, ‘chantries’, each with their own priest, were effectively independent of monastic rule and so offered individuals access to liturgy outside the controlling influence of the clerical elites. These schools allowed Christian philanthropists to personalise their dedication to Christ and mould schools in their own image. In this way the first independent or public schools were born.

The founders and patrons of the public schools set out with the intention to provide free education for the poor, hence the apparently oxymoronic use of the word ‘public’ today. At the time, these schools would have been revolutionary and arriviste. The first was Winchester College, founded by William of Wykeham in 1382. Wykeham came from a family of Hampshire farmers and was educated, for a few years at least, at the local grammar school. It was here that Wykeham acquired useful contacts which helped him secure a clerical position at Winchester Castle. By the mid-fourteenth century this farmer’s son had worked his way up to be King Edward III’s most trusted adviser. In 1363, the King was so well disposed to William that he described him as ‘his secretary, who stays by his side in constant attendance on his service and who with all his servants is under the king’s special protection’.9

Wykeham’s first foray into education reform was the establishment of New College at Oxford University in 1379 for the study of ‘theology, canon, civil law and the arts’. To support his institution, he also founded a new school in Winchester that acted as a feeder to the college. But he was determined this was not to be another vehicle for the aristocracy to foist their own scions on the government of England. Wykeham envisaged a fair admissions system that catered for boys from the same humble beginnings as his own.

Winchester welcomed its first pupils in 1382, less than a year after the Peasants’ Revolt, the country’s first mass socialist movement. The city, and no doubt Wykeham himself, had been profoundly affected by the national protests which included calls for a return to the social equality of Alfred the Great and the ‘laws of Winchester.’10

Under Wykeham’s enlightened reforms, the first public schools came to provide an ecclesiastical education for the community’s poorest and most needy children. Acutely aware of the necessity to exclude the sons of barons and aristocrats, he even capped parental income so that pupils could only take up a place at the school if their father earned less than £3,500 a year.

Wykeham’s school began with just seventy free scholars – the number of disciples sent out by Jesus to spread the word of God according to the Gospel of Luke. The central tenet of Winchester’s own charter proclaimed the rights of ‘the many poor scholars engaged in scholastic disciplines, who suffering from deficiency, penury and indigence, lack and will lack in the future the proper means for continuing and advancing in the aforesaid art of grammar’.11

Winchester’s system of professional schooling secured such strong ecclesiastical and academic results that many of Oxford’s brightest scholars were drawn from its ranks. Today Winchester College continues in this tradition of enrolling bright and influential students. Two of Jeremy Corbyn’s closest advisers, Seumas Milne and James Schneider, are Wykehamists who went on to Oxford.

The success at Winchester spurred on other medieval philanthropists. Education was suddenly the new charity of choice for independently minded movers and shakers of the medieval period. The establishment of the first public schools gathered pace with Eton (1440), St Paul’s (1509) and Westminster (1560). St Paul’s School was committed to providing education for 153 free scholars, this being the number of species of fish believed to exist in the world as told in St John’s Gospel. Its statute also envisaged an international dimension to its charity, promising to educate ‘all nations and countries indifferently’. Later, Harrow School’s foundation can be traced to an endowment bequeathed by John Lyon for a free grammar school in 1572.

Among the guilds and professions, City of London School was established in 1442, upon the bequest of John Carpenter, ‘for the finding and bringing up of four poor men’s children with meat, drink, apparel, learning at the schools, in the universities, etc., until they be preferred, and then others in their places for ever’.12 The charter of Merchant Taylors’ School, founded in the City in 1561 by the eponymous livery company, stipulated that it should cater for 250 pupils, of whom 100 must be ‘poor men’s sons’. The rest of the school was expected to pay, although only small sums.13 Meanwhile, City of London School’s endowment was so fecund that the governors’ time was mostly spent dreaming up ways to spend it.14

These were England’s first public schools and their statutes expressly barred the genuinely wealthy from entry. But alas, the Wykeham model of social and religious education quickly became a victim of its own success. The social advantage secured by entrusting a young heir to an institution that guaranteed a place at Oxford, even six centuries ago, was irresistible. And Wykeham and the other early benefactors, despite some reservations, were not blind to the monetary needs of their schools.

Soon the landowning aristocracy forced amendments to the public school charters to defeat the financial caps. Winchester’s revised charter now read: ‘We allow, however, the sons of noble and influential persons, special friends of the said college, up to the number of ten to be instructed and informed in Grammar within the same college, without burden [i.e. free] upon the aforesaid college.’15 It is hard to imagine a more eloquent yet shameful concession to the baronial class.

By the turn of the fifteenth century, these fee-paying scholars, confusingly called commoners, outnumbered the free scholars.16 In this way the home-tutored sons of nobles forced their way into the successful medieval grammar schools. The other public schools quickly succumbed to the twin temptations of cash and aristo connections. St Paul’s relaxed its rules on who could qualify as a scholar by stipulating that all pupils were expected to pay for their own wax candles, an essential (and expensive) part of Elizabethan liturgy. Following the dissolution of the monastery at Westminster Abbey, Henry VIII established a new foundation at Westminster School, stating that forty scholars should be taught grammar by two masters. In 1560 the school was refounded in Elizabeth I’s statutes, which poetically declared: ‘The scholars shall be forty in number, and we wish that in selecting them the greatest weight be given to gentleness of disposition, ability, learning, good character and poverty; and insofar as any one candidate excels in the possession of these qualities, he shall, as is proper, be preferred.’17 The founding fathers added the stipulation that no scholar should be ‘elected’ to the school who could expect more than £10 in inheritance. But such high ideals were undone by a further condition of entry which imposed mandatory fees on the first year, thus defeating with a stroke of the quill the philanthropic intention behind the Queen’s statute.

A Queen’s Scholarship is now one of the most prestigious competitive awards in public school education but it has little consideration for the local needy. At Westminster today there are forty-eight Queen’s Scholars, who pay half fees of £7,500 a year. They still enjoy great privileges, which in 2011 included an invitation to the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and an audience with the Dalai Lama.18

Eton College’s royal connections (it was founded by King Henry VI in 1440 located close to his favourite castle at Windsor) immediately bestowed a cachet, drawing in the ruling classes, which in turn also corrupted its charitable mission to educate ‘seventy poor and needy scholars’. The masters established houses in the town which they ran as going concerns charging commercial rates for board and lodging. Today the school has managed to advance the original foundation of seventy ‘poor scholars’ by just four pupils, although exactly what constitutes ‘poor’ is not always clearly defined, and these free pupils are heavily outnumbered by the intake of 1,230 fee-paying students.

Charterhouse School, founded in central London but relocated to Godalming, Surrey, was established in 1611 by the bequest of Thomas Sutton, a money lender who upon his death was described as the richest man in England. In an act of redemption Sutton ensured that the riches he had made out of the financial woes of others would, in part at least, go towards the education of forty ‘poor’ children. The school governors defined poverty as: ‘no children to be placed there whose parent have any estates of lands to leave unto them, but onlie the children of poore men that want means to bringe them up’.19

Charterhouse today insists that these were not ‘poor’ boys as we would know them, but the sons of the middle classes: ‘In this context the word “poor” merely meant those without the prosperity of substantial estates behind them. Thus Charterhouse was from the start the province of the professional classes – the sons of doctors, lawyers, clergy – rather than the landed gentry.’20

The implication is that Charterhouse was not and never has been a school for the poor. Yet the school’s first intake of ‘middle-class’ boys, aged between ten and fifteen years old, went on to take apprenticeships rather than go up to Oxbridge. These scholars, who became known as ‘gown-boys’, were soon supplemented by ‘town-boys’ – commoners accepted from outside the terms of the charitable foundation who applied to go to Charterhouse as its reputation grew. There can be no argument these ‘town-boys’, whose numbers quickly overtook that of the ‘gown-boys’, were indeed toffs drawn from the ranks of the wealthy.

*

It was under the guiding hand of Richard Mulcaster, headmaster at Merchant Taylors’ and later St Paul’s in the sixteenth century, that the first traces of the modern public school began to emerge with the teaching of English and sport at its heart. Indeed, Mulcaster was the first to coin a name for football (‘footeball’). Meanwhile, at Winchester, the first public school idioms or ‘notions’ started to take shape. Today the school still refers to sports as ekker and toytime as evening prep time. Some of the same words are used across the public school estate. For example, a div is a common slang for class or form and a don is a teacher. But there is a mutual respect for other school slang. A Wykehamist may, however, speak of ‘an Eton notion’ or ‘an Oxford notion’ in describing the vocabulary or traditions of another institution.

This special language bestowed an instant sense of be...