Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (5 page)

Roxburgh nearly expelled him, which would have destroyed any chance of him going to Sandhurst, but Niv was one of his favourites and instead he gave him twelve strokes of the cane and this time there was no grinning upside down between the legs. Even worse than the pain – for a boy of sixteen who was already as big as a man and about to be made a prefect – must have been the indignity and the fact that the entire school, even the smallest thirteen-year-old, knew about it, and the knowledge that he had let Roxburgh down. Yet J. F. still made him a prefect when he returned to Stowe the next term, a brilliant psychological move that was finally to be the making of Niv because now he felt he owed Roxburgh everything and was determined to thank him by being the best monitor ever. ‘Although I say it myself I was the best in the school,’ he told Lionel Crane.

He was certainly the most popular prefect. Terence Prittie, who was a small thirteen-year-old in Grafton House, remembered that he and his fellows jostled to sit near David at meals because he was so friendly even to juniors and his conversation was always a delight. During the holidays at Bembridge he continued to take chances, most notably when
he, Cockburn and Mellor regularly borrowed a car at night, even though none of them had a driving licence or insurance, and drove six miles to the holiday-resort town of Shanklin in pursuit of girls. One whom David seduced when he was 17 was a naughty 15-year-old, Margaret Whigham, who holidayed regularly in the Isle of Wight and was to become the Duchess of Argyll and infamous thirty-six years later when the Duke divorced her, accusing her of committing adultery with eighty-eight men. Etta was such an easygoing mother that she built an extension to Rose Cottage so that Niv and his girlfriends could misbehave in private and give her a little peace. She called it The Sin Wing.

At Stowe he was as carefree as ever. ‘He was given his own study in Grafton,’ Reg Gadney said, ‘and enlisted a fashionable London decorator to furnish it in what was considered the modern style. He invited Roxburgh and Dad to tea – hot buttered crumpets and Gentleman’s Relish – and Roxburgh’s reaction was only to observe: “My dear Niven, I am bound to say that this room absolutely stinks of curtains.”

“Yes, headmaster,” said David, “but they’re terribly contemporary.” ’

That term the impresario Sir Oswald Stoll gave the school an expensive movie projector because he believed that it was the public schools that would provide educated producers to run the British film industry. Little did he dream that sitting in the audience at Stowe was a boy who would become one of the biggest British film stars of all.

At the end of December there was another two-week Stowe skiing expedition to Savognin in Switzerland, and at the start of the new year David was elected a member of the Debating Society, where the star was the future politician John Boyd-Carpenter. David soon became a regular speaker, beginning in March with a maiden speech supporting the motion that ‘This house approves the policy of His Majesty’s Government towards China’ – a bold task since a Chinese Nationalist army was about to capture Shanghai and endanger British interests
there, the Chinese Communists were about to launch a general strike, and the British consulate in Nanking was to be attacked and British properties looted.

In March too David wrote another article for
The Stoic
in which he described a sporty weekend that he and fifteen other boys had spent playing football, tennis, billiards, ping-pong and darts at the Hoxton Manor Club in London and he was nearly arrested for having travelled in a first-class railway carriage with a third-class ticket. He had never shone particularly at sport but in February 1927 he played in his first rugby house match for Grafton against Cobham and started to make a mark in the tennis and squash house matches. He swam for Grafton, won a hundred-yard race and was awarded a medallion after taking a life-saving exam in July, and was described by the examiner as ‘the best all-round competitor’. In May he was promoted to lance-corporal in the Officer Training Corps and that summer he started to play regularly for the school’s 2nd XI cricket team, and at the end of June he was awarded his 2nd XI colours. In
The Moon’s a Balloon
he claimed that he was ‘a frequent performer … in the 1st XI cricket, the 1st XV Rugby Football and in the fencing and boxing teams’, but in fact he never fenced or boxed for the school and played only once for the rugby 1st XV.

He played his first of many matches for the cricket 1st XI on 18 June against Trinity College, Oxford, and although he did not bat – he never went in higher than number 9 – his skill was as a fast opening bowler. He took two wickets for thirty-two before making his first Debating Society paper speech that evening, speaking second against the motion ‘That this House deplores the modern tendency to encourage education’.

According to Heckstall-Smith

At the end of July 1927 David took the School Certificate exams again and failed, and Roxburgh, Etta and Uncle Tommy began seriously to worry that he might never get into Sandhurst. The School Certificate was usually taken by boys of fifteen or sixteen, and David was now nearly seventeen and a half. With signs of desperation he was entered to sit the exams yet again at the end of the year.

During the winter he played rugby, as a hefty forward, just once for the 1st XV but regularly for the 2nd XV and was awarded his 2nd XV colours. His junior military career was progressing well, too, and in November he was promoted to corporal in the Officer Training Corps and awarded an ‘A’ Certificate. His School Certificate, however, was a very different matter. He sat the exams for a third time and failed yet again.

Roxburgh was worried. ‘I too am grieved about David, who failed with extraordinary completeness,’ he wrote to Etta. ‘He did not get a “Credit”, in any single subject! I have had a talk with him and we have together come to the conclusion that he and we must make a terrific effort to pass him through in
July … David has all the brains required to get a Certificate, but he has always found real application difficult. However, he did begin to work properly last term, and the feeling that he is now really “up against it” should provide the necessary spur. With reasonable luck he will pass in July, I feel pretty sure.’

He was right. Niv was almost eighteen and far too old to be struggling still with School Certificate exams, and to fail yet again would have been pathetic when boys two or three years younger were passing with ease. In February he played rugby again for the 2nd XV, which thrashed Eton 53–0, and in March he made a major speech in the Debating Society as the main speaker deploring a ban by the official censor of a controversial new war film,
Dawn
, in which Sybil Thorndike played the British nurse Edith Cavell, who had been shot by the Germans during the First World War, because the censor felt it was unfairly anti-German and against the spirit of the League of Nations. But otherwise David worked solidly that term.

At the start of his final term, in May, he was promoted to sergeant in the OTC and in June took part in a military field day during which squads of uniformed boy soldiers from Stowe, Rugby and Radley schools played a war game across the broad grounds of Stowe for an audience of 1000 spectators. At one stage of the battle, according to the subsequent report in
The Stoic
, ‘the platoon commander … took advantage of natural features … and drove a herd of cows into the enemy’.

David also played cricket regularly that summer for the 1st and 2nd XIs, though he never won his 1st XI colours, despite taking 5 wickets for 87 against the Crusaders.
The Stoic
singled him out as the 2nd XI’s star bowler thanks to some excellent performances when he took 5 for 36 against Eton, 5 for 42 against the Welsh Guards, and 6 for 69 against Bradfield. A week later, on a perfect summer’s day, he crowned his sporting career at Stowe by winning the senior backstroke event during
the swimming sports and came second in the senior breast-stroke. But the achievements that must have given him the greatest pleasure – and relief – came when he passed the army entrance exam for Sandhurst in June and then in July passed all the necessary School Certificate exams at last. On David’s army interview form Roxburgh wrote in his rough draft: ‘An excellent type of boy. Improved enormously since he came here. Not clever but … He will be popular wherever he goes and unless he gets in to bad company – which might be dangerous for him as he likes to get on with everybody – he would be a useful officer who would count for something … and do well with the men. I recommend him.’

The day before David left Stowe in July 1928 Roxburgh gave as always a talk to all the leavers. ‘He began with a mnemonic: the four Ls, Language, Letters, Love, L.s.d.,’ said Noel Annan in his biography of Roxburgh. ‘The wisdom of the mnemonic consisted in remembering the following rules for life: restrain your language; answer letters the same day; keep your financial resources in such good order that a wedding present can be despatched to whatever friend was about to commit the classic act of folly; and above all if you fell in love yourself before twenty-five, take a single ticket to the North Pole and
be very careful what you write to women
.’ Roxburgh was adamant. ‘Gentlemen,’ he begged them, ‘whatever else you may have to do with women – however great the temptation, whatever the provocation – never, gentlemen, I implore you, I entreat you, never write to them. Women always keep letters, never destroy them, always know when to produce them.’ Once when his Latin class was translating a passage about grasping Roman mistresses Roxburgh warned the boys, ‘Gentlemen, they’re not worth it: they’re like coffee – they smell better than they taste.’ Wrote Annan: ‘He had little experience of women and none of sex,’ and he was perhaps homosexual though there is no evidence that he ever indulged himself physically. His advice about women was probably the only topic on which David would disagree profoundly
since two of the greatest joys of Niv’s life were to be sex and the friendship of women. But on another question he agreed completely with Roxburgh: ‘When we left Stowe,’ said Steynor, ‘Roxburgh said, “people will tell you that your schooldays are the happiest in your life, but that’s all utter nonsense because the best time of your life is always ahead of you. Never forget that.” ’ It was a wonderfully optimistic, life-enhancing philosophy that David was to follow energetically all his life.

Niv’s final school report was affectionate but critical: ‘No society could say goodbye to David without a very real sense of loss but it is time he passed on. His eternal good humour, courtesy, and kindliness to all alike will win him friends everywhere he goes. Impulses will have to be curbed and more self-discipline learned. There is still that dangerous necessity of impressing his heroes and being the leading light in any company.’

In the Isle of Wight that summer, now that he was eighteen, he joined the adult Bembridge Sailing Club, enjoyed the sailing during Cowes Week and for another week kicked his heels as he waited nervously for his official acceptance by Sandhurst. Given his acting talent and popularity on stage it seems strange that he decided to go into the army rather than the theatre. He was not the only one in the family with a talent for acting: Grizel had it too and after being presented at court as a debutante (not something that a poor family could afford) she had gone to RADA – the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art – and would soon be touring in repertory theatre with another young student, Robert Morley, and appearing on the West End stage as Edith Evans’s maid. But soldiering was in the family blood and Niv told Lionel Crane in 1957: ‘It wasn’t that I was in love with the army. It was the best thing we could think of to get a job that paid nice and quick.’ In 1960 he complained to the
Daily Express
that ‘as soon as I was old enough I was pushed into the regular army’, but Tom Hutchinson did not think that he needed much pushing: ‘I
think he had an instinctive urge to join up because he had never had a proper family and the army would have been a huge family for him. It would give him comradeship and a sort of manly love.’

On 9 August he went for a second interview before a panel of seven generals and a clergyman, and was at last offered a place at Sandhurst. Delightedly he wrote to Roxburgh that weekend: ‘I want to thank you very very much for all you did in connection with getting me in.’ Then he added nervously, ‘I had had something that I have been wanting to say to you for a long time and I decided to say it to you at the end of term, but when the time came, I am afraid my heart failed me! You may think it a colossal piece of cheek, and indeed it is, but please forgive me as it certainly is sincere. I want to congratulate you personally, Sir, on your wonderful achievement in bringing Stowe to what it is. I think it is marvellous and so, I know, does everyone. And I always wish I could have done something to help. Once again very many thanks, Sir, for your help in getting me into Sandhurst. I do hope you are not offended by what I have written, but I could not leave Stowe without expressing my appreciation and admiration.’

It is easy to imagine a ripple of ghostly applause from David’s distinguished military ancestors:
The boy’s come good at last, thank God. He’s going to be all right
.