Fatal Glamour (5 page)

On a straightforward economic calculus, prep school fees were an investment that was expected to pay off in future income and social status. Northcote and Trevelyan had taken a wider view, though. They wanted to entrust Britain's future to a meritocratic elite, rather than to a corrupt aristocracy and its hangers-on. This went further than just requiring intelligence and administrative skill in the country's rulers. A consultant to the report was Benjamin Jowett, the great Platonist and future master of Balliol. His dream was to create something like a modern corps of guardians, as described in the
Republic
. Boarding schools would separate boys from their families to make them into a disciplined and unselfish ruling class. Cutting them off from female influence was part of the design (Jowett spent his entire adult life at Balliol, and never married).
⁵

Like the guardians, prep and public school boys lived in something equivalent to barracks. They were under discipline every hour of the day; they lived in fear of their masters and older boys; they had drill sergeants to give them military values. They had to learn how to endure, without the physical or emotional comforts of home. Today, we have organisations like “Boarding School Survivors,” who condemn the system as institutional child abuse, producing adults with lifelong post-traumatic damage. Therapist Nick Duffell has described a “strategic survival personality,” the result of boarders “cutting off their feelings and constructing a defensively organised self that severely limits their later lives.”
⁶

Even if we agree with Duffell, we have to recognise two kinds of exceptions. Some boys, Rupert Brooke among them, believed that their school days were indeed the happiest days of their lives. Rupert told his beloved, Noel Olivier, that she should read St John Lucas's
The First Round
“if you want to know what boys feel like and are like.”
⁷
The hero is much happier at school than when he is home with his overbearing father. Other boys become creative rebels, like Orwell or Graves, though they may still retain large parts of the public school character. And family life has its own kinds of damage, so that a child might find at school a refuge from worse things at home.

It remains moot who Rupert might have become if the public school system had not held him so firmly in its grip. That grip may have been loosened by his starting Hillbrow as a day boy. But by April 1901, the census records him as a boarder. Probably his parents wanted him to have some experience of boarding before he entered Rugby in the autumn of that year (though he would be living in their own house). It is possible that Rupert himself wanted to board because day boys, at most schools, were looked down on. By the age of thirteen, then, Rupert was entirely in the hands of Thomas Bainbridge Eden, headmaster of Hillbrow, and of his wife Horatia Katherine, who was the power behind the throne.

Who were the Edens, and what kind of distinctive atmosphere did they create at Hillbrow? Mr Eden was forty-one in 1897, when Rupert arrived at the school. He was an Oxford graduate who had gone to Rugby as a boy, and Hillbrow's first priority was to be a feeder school for its greater neighbour. Eden had been married for seven years to Katherine Gatty, who was eleven years older than him. They had no children. Their marriage was partly one of convenience, because a schoolmaster was greatly helped by having a wife to share his duties, especially if he aspired to be a head of house. The Eden marriage seems to have had a good deal in common with that of the Brookes. Both wives were the daughters of clergymen, and treated their younger husbands with condescension, verging on contempt. Eden was a magistrate, but it was his wife who wielded the gavel. Mr Eden and Mr Brooke even looked alike, with bristling moustaches under receding foreheads above and receding chins below.

James Strachey remembered Mrs Eden as “an embittered martinet who intimidated her husband and the four assistant masters quite as
much as the boys.”
⁸
Her sister Juliana Ewing was a successful writer of children's books, and her mother had founded
Aunt Judy's Magazine
, the first magazine for children. Katherine became the editor when her mother died, giving it up before she married Mr Eden. He was “apologetic and easy-going,” according to Strachey. “Nothing that the boys could perpetrate was so vexing to Mrs Eden as her husband's mildness of temper.”
⁹
Orwell portrayed Mrs Wilkes as a similar termagant in “Such, Such Were the Joys,” though she could also be seductive with her favourites.

Hillbrow inflicted on Rupert the usual discomforts of drafty corridors and dubious food; but the emotional discomforts had a more lasting effect. Being bullied by Mrs Eden probably contributed to his later misogyny, and his conviction that if he married he would expect to be the absolute ruler of his household.
¹⁰
Yet he also absorbed the double standard that men were weak and willful, women the guardians of proper behaviour. His nickname at Hillbrow was “the Oyster”; he was a silent observer of the schoolboy world, but not a heretic or a rebel. He emerged from his shell enough to pass his exams with credit and excel on the playing field. When Rupert was thirteen, at the end of his Hillbrow career, he wrote in an album that his ambition was “to be top of the tree in everything,” and that his idea of misery was “Ignorance, poverty,
obscurity
.”
¹¹
The twig was bent, and the tree would grow accordingly.

The great consolation of school life was friendship, all the more intense for the cutting off of family ties. Rupert's great chum for his first two years at Hillbrow was James Strachey, younger brother of Lytton. James left to go to St Paul's. He and Rupert were both clever, a bit out of the common run, and inclined to make fun of school routines. At this time Rupert was still chubby-faced and wore his hair cut straight across in a fringe. James summed him up as “friendly and amusing but as yet decidedly not glamorous.”
¹²
Six years later, at Cambridge, things changed. Rupert had become startlingly good-looking; James fell abjectly in love with him, but had to settle for only friendship in return. They broke off irrevocably in 1912, when Rupert declared war on everyone and everything connected to Bloomsbury. Between 1905 and 1912, though, Rupert was closer to James than to anyone else. The deep structure of his character was to be a poser and a manipulator, without any firm sense of identity. James was the only person for whom he was willing to lay all his emotional cards on the table.

The intense bond between Rupert and James was really a design feature of the prep school system. Removing a boy from his family did not remove his need for affection; it just displaced it onto others who were suffering in the same way. Orwell claimed that at St Cyprian's he was “in an almost sexless state, which is normal, or at least common, in boys of that age.”
¹³
This may have been the case if puberty did not begin until age thirteen, just when boys were going on to a public school. Still, prep school boys certainly had intense friendships that were precursors to a later gay identification. At Hillbrow this was true of all four sensitive and artistic boys with whom we are concerned: Brooke, Strachey, Grant, and Graves. The first three all became actively, though not exclusively gay as adults. Graves fell in love with other boys or young men, but felt it wrong to give his love a physical expression. He believed that all-male schooling was bound to have this effect: “In English preparatory and public schools romance is necessarily homosexual. The opposite sex is despised and treated as something obscene. Many boys never recover from this perversion. For every one born homosexual, at least ten permanent pseudo-homosexuals are made by the public school system: nine of these ten as honourably chaste and sentimental as I was.”
¹⁴

If sexuality remained latent for Rupert at Hillbrow, it was not so for its headmaster, Mr Eden. Graves arrived at the school around the time that Rupert was going on from Rugby to Cambridge. He learned that “there was a secret about the headmaster which some of the older boys shared – a somehow sinister secret.”
¹⁵
Eden, it turned out, was in the habit of fondling his favorite pupils when they were having their baths. One day in 1906 or 1907, Eden “came into class beating his head with his fists and moaning, ‘Would to God I hadn't done it! Would to God I hadn't done it!'”
¹⁶
He fled to Liverpool where, according to Duncan Grant, Rupert “tracked him down; told him he must
not
be in this state of mind; he must go back to the school, pack up quietly and leave in decent order. Rupert saved him.”
¹⁷

Why would Rupert, a second-year student at Cambridge, come forward to save Mr Eden from disgrace and possible arrest? If his secret was known by the older boys, he must have been following his pedophile inclinations for some years. He broke down in public, one assumes, because some boy told his parents, or another teacher, what had been going on. Either Rupert wanted to show loyalty to his former teacher and family friend, or he did not see that Eden had done anything particularly
wrong. Had Rupert himself been one of Eden's targets? Whatever his motives, he did his bit to make sure that Eden's misdemeanors would be hushed up, rather than punished. By the 1911 census, Eden was living in West Hampstead with his wife and a servant, and describing himself as a “Retired Tutor.” He lived to be eighty-eight, dying in 1944.

Thomas Arnold was headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 to his death in 1842. When he came to Rugby it was not the most aristocratic or ancient or intellectually distinguished of the great public schools, but Arnold turned it into by far the most ideological one.
¹⁸
Largely because of Arnold, secondary schooling is a more divisive social issue in Britain than in any other country. Thanks to him, too, Cyril Connolly could become famous for his “Theory of Permanent Adolescence”: “the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.”
¹⁹
For many middle-class Englishmen, Connolly argued, school is such an intense experience that everything that happens afterwards is an anticlimax.

Like the rest of Lytton Strachey's “Eminent Victorians,” Thomas Arnold was a visionary, a gifted organiser, and a bit of a crank. As a young man he looked on his country and saw “a mass of evil a thousand times worse than all the idolatry of India.”
²⁰
The remedy for this terrible state was, to him, obvious. Anglicanism must become the living religion of everyone living in England. This was no small task, but in accepting the headmastership of Rugby, Arnold felt that he was tackling a manageable piece of it. A genuinely Christian school could be the model for a future Christian state, and the nursery for those who could build it. His first step was to clear the ground. The morals of Rugby were those of the country squires who sent their sons there; as Arnold saw it, no morals at all, mere paganism and disorder. “Evil being unavoidable,” he proclaimed, “we are not a jail to keep it in, but a place of education where we must cast it out to prevent the taint from spreading.” A storm of floggings and expulsions soon put Evil to flight. Now Arnold could set up his own ideals: “first religious and moral principle; secondly gentlemanly conduct; and thirdly intellectual ability.”
²¹
He broke with public
school tradition by making himself the school chaplain. Rugby would now be governed by a single, awesome head: king, prime minister, and acrchbishop of Canterbury rolled into one.

In 1835 Arnold's future biographer, A.P. Stanley, wrote an article for the
Rugby Magazine
called “School a Little World.” A public school was “not only a place where boys are receiving knowledge from masters,” he argued, “but a place also where they form a complete society among themselves – a society in its essential points similar, and therefore preparatory, to the society of men . . . The schoolhouse, the chapel, and the playground, forming as they do one united group, become a tangible focus, in which the whole of our school existence is, as it were, symbolically consecrated.”
²²
School life would become a sacred drama, in which the boys' life became one anxious struggle after another: to pass the exam, to resist evil, to win the game.

Arnold deliberately narrowed the range of age and class in his school. Though ancient statutes required Rugby to educate a certain number of boys from the town, he found ways to keep out the sons of tradesmen and farmers. But he also discouraged the aristocracy from sending their sons, fearing that these boys would be too arrogant and dissipated to bend to his yoke. His students would be drilled to become the future governors, warriors, and thinkers of Britain. Girls, of course, would continue to be excluded, as they were from all the other Victorian public schools. In the old days, schoolboys could roam freely in the town, and some even kept whores. The reformed schools, following Arnold's example, cut off their students from almost all feminine influence. At home there were mothers, sisters, and domestic servants – all of them posing threats to a boy's “manliness.” At school, only the housemaster's wife would give the boys any female affection or homely comfort.

Arnold's “little world” was actually far more single-minded, ideological, and ascetic than the world outside its gates. The main entrance to Rugby School – a little doorway set into a gate at the top of the town's bustling High Street – recalls the scriptural eye of the needle. After one passes through the School House quadrangle, the perspective opens out on “The Close,” with its great sweep of rugby pitches. On them the ritual contests of public school life are still re-enacted in games of rugby and cricket. School sports in the Victorian era became even more codified and symbolic than the pursuits from which they derived: hunting and warfare. When history called, the step from playing fields to Flanders fields had been taken already in imagination.