Author's Note 6: Rule Britannia

The British Public School

Amongst those men who were trained at public school to ‘administer the machinery of empire’ was my great-grandfather (third standing on the left) 1889

The central mission of the Victorian public school was to train the leadership class that would administer the machinery of the empire[1]

The appellation public school is still used for those fee-paying independent boarding schools that look like Hogwarts and are steeped in the traditions that date back to teaching the ruling classes how to rule.

By the time my parents were born in the 1920s, the British Empire covered a quarter of our planet’s land surface and Britain ruled over more than 458 million people.

As the British Empire burgeoned in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so did boys public schools and their feeder preparatory (prep) schools.

Amongst those ex-public-school boys who were trained to ‘administer the machinery of empire’ were several members of my family. A line up of men with medals and moustaches whose stained sepia images are now literally mothballed in an old school trunk in my spare room. My father wrote this about the men in his family:

From the late eighteenth century onwards, the relatively impecunious sons of Anglo-Irish families provided many of the vertebrae of the backbone of what George Orwell described as the Imperial Middle Class. My great-great-grandfather was part of this tradition. He left Ireland at the age of eighteen and died in India sixty years later… Virtually all my senior relations passed their lives in the service of the Empire. I am the last of my direct line to serve the state.

Like his forefathers, my father, a diplomat, was also educated at a public school. I think it’s no coincidence that he quotes George Orwell, as, like Orwell[2], my father experienced intense misery and draconian punishments at school. I have never forgotten him saying that if his housemaster (the equivalent of Cruel Matron in my memoir The Drying Rooms) walked into the room, he wouldn’t be able to shake hands with him. This, coming from my personable and never discourteous father, was quite something to hear.

Boarding schools may no longer be training people to run the empire, but despite only being attended by 0.1% of the population, they — along with other private schools (7% of the population) — still produce the vast majority of people in the so-called establishment: senior judiciary, senior members of the armed forces, corporate and economic institutions, BBC executives, and, of course, government.

Since the first British Prime Minister Robert Walpole in 1721, the cabinet has been dominated by boarding school alumni: Eton alone has produced twenty prime ministers.

Recent British Prime Ministers David Cameron and Boris Johnson both went to Eton. They feature loud and clear in Richard Beard’s book Sad Little Men: How Public Schools Failed Britain.

Founded in 1440 by King Henry VI, Eton was one of the earliest public schools. The earliest was Winchester (where the last Conservative prime minister, Rishi Sunak, was head boy). Winchester was founded in 1382 by the Bishop of Winchester, William of Wykeham. Even today, any member of the Toff Boarding School Tribe (which includes me) would know that Winchester alumni describe themselves as Old Wykehamists. When I tested the word Wykehamist on my children, who don’t belong to the tribe, they had no idea what it meant.

So what’s public about a school that costs a fortune to attend? In the case of Eton, the fees are over sixty-three thousand pounds a year. The Eton College website states ‘From January 2025 Eton will be £21,099.60 per Half’. This is a rise of about £3,000 from the current fees, thanks to the Labour government’s announcement in the recent budget that independent fee-paying schools will now have to pay VAT.

A ‘half’, by the way, is a full term. For those who can’t do the maths, there are three halves per academic year. And, just in case you didn’t know, only the Summer half has the same name as that term in state schools. The Autumn and Spring terms are called Michaelmas and Lent.

Eton is not alone in using this arcane Christian-based language. In the case of the oldest public schools like Eton and Winchester, it dates back to when these schools were connected to the church and the word ‘public’ is from their practice of providing free education to the public – to the poor and to novice clerics who needed to be taught Latin and the liturgy. Harrow was founded in the sixteenth century by a local landowning farmer purely to educate the poor in his parish. Winston Churchill was an ‘Old Harrovian’ and was very unhappy there. His correspondence with his mother while at school is a disturbing read.

Apart from the money, what sets public schools apart, is their reputation for age-old traditions and values. On the Harrow College website it states:

From the boys’ distinctive dress and the carving of their names onto boards in the Houses, to our own unusual form of football, archaic slang and the communal singing of Harrow Songs, these customs develop a strong corporate spirit and a sense of belonging to something bigger than oneself.

Like so much of the cliquish language still attached to public schools (teachers at Eton and Harrow aren’t teachers, they’re ‘beaks’), the ages and entrance system don’t align with the state system either. Public School applicants don’t take the 11 Plus (used for selective entry state grammar schools); they sit the Common Entrance Exam, which dates back to 1904, and is for children entering the school aged 13, not 11, as in the state system.

To this day many public schools are still charitable trusts (a status that benefits them through tax exemptions). The welcome page on Eton’s website starts with this sentence:

Eton College is a charity dedicated to the advancement of education.

It’s true that Eton offers a number of cost-reducing initiatives, including 14 free places under their King’s Scholar scheme (the original poor boys at Eton in 1440 were known as King’s Scholars).

By astonishing coincidence, I recently discovered that the state comprehensive in Tottenham, North London, where I started my own teaching career, now has a partnership scheme going with the prestigious boarding school I attended!

It’s easy to sneer and poke fun at Eton and schools like it. But, given that such institutions still exist, some of them (including Eton) offer an enriching education which encompasses music and arts that the state sector (strangled by the strictures of the National Curriculum, the fear of Ofsted and lack of funding) often struggles to match. But that’s another subject, not for this post. I’m not having a go at individuals who have either attended a private school (like me) or send their children to one (like me); one of my own children went to a private secondary school. But having been a teacher in state schools for over twenty years, I am becoming more and more convinced that the state system would benefit from the demise of private schooling.

What public schools really offer is upward social mobility, or rather, membership (actual and tacit) of the old boys’ club.

In his book, Gilded Youth: Privilege, Rebellion and the British Public School, James Brooke-Smith reports on the findings of a 2014 report produced by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission. He was struck by the following:

The standout phrase from what was otherwise a bland and bureaucratic report was the assertion that Britain suffers from a ‘closed shop at the top’, an unrepresentative elite that is disproportionately composed of the privately educated, the Oxbridge educated, the wealthy, the white and the upper-middle class.

At least the current prime minister’s Cabinet has bucked the trend. It is the first Cabinet in history to be no longer dominated by ex-public school boys. Only one went to a private school. Keir Starmer himself went to a state grammar school and 23 cabinet members went to non-selective state Comprehensive schools.

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[1] James Brooke-Smith, Gilded Youth: Privilege, Rebellion and the British Public School

[2] Orwell was purportedly quite happy at Eton, but miserable at his prep school. See my Author’s Note: George Orwell wet the bed