Great Men at Bad Moments

John Saunders

Description

Great Men at Bad Moments centres on the indignities and brutalities inflicted on young pupils during the reigns of some twenty-five headmasters, many of them Church of England clergymen. A major source for the book is the revelations of individual pupils who suffered under the cruel regimes. Many of these boys were later to achieve literary and other fame. So, for example, Leigh Hunt and Coleridge remember the unbridled behaviour of their headmaster, the Reverend Boyer of Christ's Hospital School, described by De Quincey as 'this horrid incarnation of whips and scourges'. Winston Churchill and the art critic, Roger Fry, provide vivid accounts of the atrocities committed by their prep school headmaster, the Revered Sneyd-Kynnersley. Roald Dahl ponders on the mix of sadism and Christianity which cast a shadow over his days at Repton. And A.N. Wilson tells how the brutality of his paedophile headmaster and his sadistic wife scarred him forever.Great Men at Bad Moments takes its form from John Aubrey's Brief Lives, mingling the anecdotal with the analytical.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: Brown Dog Books
• Date de parution: 19 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785452390
• Langue: English

Extrait

GREAT MEN AT BAD MOMENTS
GREAT MEN AT BAD MOMENTS
Brief lives of some aberrant headmasters
JOHN SAUNDERS
First published 2018
Copyright © John Saunders 2018
The right of John Saunders to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Published under licence by Brown Dog Books and The Self-Publishing Partnership, 7 Green Park Station, Bath BA1 1JB
www.selfpublishingpartnership.co.uk
ISBN printed book: 978-1-78545-238-3
ISBN e-book: 978-1-78545-239-0
Cover design by Kevin Rylands
O schoolmasters — if any of you read this book — bear in mind when any particularly timid drivelling urchin is brought by his papa into your study, and you treat him with the contempt which he deserves, and afterwards make his life a burden to him for years — bear in mind that it is exactly in the disguise of such a boy as this that your future chronicler will appear. Never see a wretched little heavy-eyed mite sitting on the edge of a chair against your study wall without saying to yourselves, ‘perhaps this boy is he who, if I am not careful, will one day tell the world what manner of man I was.’ If even two or three schoolmasters learn this lesson and remember it, the preceding chapters will not have been written in vain.
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
CONTENTS
Preamble
SECTION A:
FROM TUDOR TO VICTORIAN TIMES
Six of the Best from Eton
1. The Reverend Nicholas Udall
Spy, Burglar, Bungler and a Very Lucky Bugger
2. The Reverend William Malim
and the Tudor Debate about Flogging
3. The Reverend John Rosewell
a Sad Tale of Melancholy and Madness
4. The Reverend John Foster
the Man Who Mistook a Cow for an Eton Scholar
5. The Reverend Edward Craven Hawtrey
and ‘Etoniensis’, the Poet of Flagellation
6. The Reverend John Keate
the Lord of the Flagellators
Six of the Rest
1. The Reverend Alexander Gill, Snr
and the Divine Right of Beating
2. The Reverend Alexander Gill, Jnr
and How He Nearly Lost His Ears
3. The Reverend Richard Busby
Lord of the Dunces?
4. The Reverend James Boyer
‘This Horrid Incarnation of Whips and Scourges’
5. The Reverend William Vincent
Satan’s Heir
6. The Reverend Charles John Vaughan
and the Yahoos of Harrow
SECTION B:
REFORM AND AFTER
1. Reform 1855-1870
2. The Clarendon Commission
3. A French Eton: Matthew Arnold’s Vision
4. Sedbergh
5. The Taunton Commission
SECTION C:
THE ENEMIES OF CHANGE
1. The Reverend Edward Benson
and his Child Bride
2. The Reverend Edward Thring
and the Founding of the HMC
3. The Reverend John Bradley Dyne
of the ‘lightning and lashed rod’
SECTION D:
SOME MORE RECENT NOTABLES
1. Roald Dahl’s Headmasters
2. Anthony Chenevix-Trench
and the Laying on of Hands
3. Peter Hobson
Tragedy Comes to Godalming
SECTION E:
PREPARATORY SCHOOLS
1. The Reverend Herbert William Sneyd-Kynnersley
the Vampire of St George’s
2. The Barbour Simpsons
Social Polish and Porridge for the Lower-Middle Classes
3. Peter Wright
of Caldicott School: and its Paedophile Networks
4. Derek Slade
alias Dr Edward March: Truth Stranger than Fiction
5. Billy Williamson
of Ashdown House and his Prefects, Jesus, God and the Holy Ghost
6. Henry Collis
Colet Court and the Epidemics
CODA:
Revelations and the Cults of John Smyth QC
APPENDICES
A Sir Thomas Wriothesley and Anne Askew
B Bawdy Songs About the Gills
C Another View of Busby
D The Benson Family
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PREAMBLE
Why ‘Great’ Men?
The term is, of course, ironic – but only mildly ironic. In the early years of private boarding education, where this story begins, schools were little enclaves, not unlike Italian walled cities and headmasters ruled over their pupils with tyrannical power. They appointed staff, controlled the curriculum, made the laws, judged offenders and administered retribution. Looking back at his school experiences at St George’s Preparatory School and Harrow (many years after successive commissions had set out to reform and control private education) Winston Churchill was to remark that ‘Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime Ministers have never yet been invested’.
Given the power of the headmaster and his freedoms, it might seem strange that until relatively recently the leading public and private schools in England were almost clones – remarkably similar in their ethoses and practices. The history of what Gathorne-Hardy called the ‘Public School Phenomenon’ shows that, although there were a few remarkable men who set out to break the mould, the cross-fertilisation (or infection) within and between schools ensured that collectively there was much conformity and little change. This phenomenon is well illustrated through an account of Eton and some of its more notable or notorious headmasters.
Eton, with its long history of flogging and its influence on the curriculum and the politics of the past and the present and the future, might be seen as the viral centre of the book. From its foundation in 1440 to the present day, the majority of Eton’s headmasters were educated at Eton. And many Old Etonians went on to become headmasters of other public schools. Some modern critics have come to see this influence as detrimental to the quality of life not just of children, but of the state itself. And despite many attempts to reform the system, the ‘virus’ continues to infect the nation. Consider the role of Old Etonians as the nation confronts its latest dilemma: Brexit.
……….
There is something bordering on comedy in looking at the lives and follies of many of the early headmasters in this book. The general mania for flagellation and flogathons was viewed, even by some of the victims, with amusement. Headmasters like Keate, Busby and Boyer now inhabit a cartoon world. But as we enter the twentieth century, propinquity gives the individual lives of them and their victims a darker, deeper psychological colouring. And this is particularly true of some of the terrible regimes ruled over by recent preparatory school headmasters. Here it is Churchill, again, whose anguish introduces a new note of suffering and an awareness of the enormity of a system where very young children were sent to board under psychologically disturbed men.
SECTION A:
FROM TUDOR TO VICTORIAN TIMES
Six of the Best from Eton
1. THE REVEREND NICHOLAS UDALL
Headmaster 1534-1541: Spy, Burglar, Bungler and a Very Lucky Bugger
The Reverend Udall’s worst moment happened on 14th March 1542 when, following an appearance before the Privy Council, he was found guilty of having committed buggery with one of his Eton pupils. Udall was committed to the Marshalsea. Things were looking very bleak. Some ten years before Udall’s conviction, Thomas Cromwell had passed through parliament an ‘Acte for the punysshement of the vice of Buggerie’. According to this act, Udall’s punishment should have been death by hanging.
Early Tudor spelling was lacking in consistency, and in contemporary documents Udall is referred to as Yevedale, Uvedale, Owdall, Woodall, and Oovedale. So it is, perhaps, not surprising that the great and good of Eton College have repeatedly suggested that the records had been misread and that Udall had been convicted of ‘burglary’ not ‘buggerie’. For many years biographies of Udall had relied on the introduction to an 1869 edition of his best-known play, Ralph Roister Doister . The author of this ‘Introduction’ was a Dr Goodford who was the Provost of Eton at the time of the printing. It was Goodford who established the myth that behind Udall’s sentencing was the theft from Eton of a quantity of Eton silver and plate. The perpetrators were two pupils, Thomas Cheney and John Horde, and they had been assisted by one of Udall’s servants, Gregory. Gregory’s part in the theft had, according to Dr Goodford, implicated his master, Nicholas Udall. And in 2001, in a book written by Tim Card ( Eton Established: A History from 1440 to 1860 ), the notion of Udall as a burglar, not a bugger, was recycled. Tim Card had been a long-serving master at Eton, so he should have known the truth, and his arguing that from what we now know of Udall’s financial situation in 1542, burglary was more probable than buggery is strained.
A close examination of the Privy Council records shows that both Goodford and Card (and others in between them) were guilty either of deception or of very lax scholarship. The Privy Council’s records reveal that initially Udall was suspected of complicity in a burglary but, under interrogation, eventually confessed to the more heinous crime – buggery. The exact words of the Privy Council’s record read as follows: ‘Nicholas Uvedale did confess that he did commit buggery with the said Cheney sundry times heretofore and of late, the 6th day of this present month in this present year, at London whereupon he was committed to the Marshalsea’.
But Udall had friends in high places, the most notable being Thomas Cromwell himself. Following his sentence, Udall wrote a grovelling letter to two members of the Privy Council, Sir Thomas Wriothesley and Sir Ralph Sadler, both protégés of Cromwell and recently reborn in the fiction of Hilary Mantel. (See Appendix 1.) In his letter Udall promised to change ‘from vice to virtue, from prodigality to frugal living, from negligence of teaching to assiduity, from play to study’ and from ‘lightness to gravity’. The plea was successful and the sentence was reduced to a single year in the Marshalsea Prison.
It is now possible, through scrutinising moth-eaten and much-neglected traces of the Tudor past, to tell the story of