The Golden Age of the English public school corresponded with the triumph of the British Empire. Generations of diplomats, politicians and civil servants who ruled a quarter of the known world passed through the same school gates. Prime ministers Robert Peel, Lord Palmerston and Winston Churchill attended Harrow, while George Canning, William Gladstone and Arthur Balfour received their education at Eton. For 200 years, the Empire was the playground of the public schoolboy.
Cecil Rhodes, the architect of modern imperialism, neatly summed up the British perspective by claiming in 1902: ‘We are the finest race in the world and the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.’ Such unshakeable confidence was expressed by public school headmasters at morning prayers and echoed across the Empire. In this way, public schools were the ‘aggressive, bigoted and extreme’ propagandists of British imperialism.1
The essential foundation of a public school education was a hierarchical system governed by house loyalty and a blind faith in Queen, country and Empire. Strict, regimental discipline was drilled into pupils from the very first day of school and gave rise to the claim, wrongly attributed to the Duke of Wellington, that the Battle of Waterloo ‘was won on the playing fields of Eton’.
Public schooling was brutal and so were the means of suppression employed by the new English rulers of Asia and Africa. The massacres and capital punishments that characterised Britain’s suppression of national insurrection and native mutinies were applied with a dispassionate zeal by boys who had endured canings and a multitude of tortures during their formative years.
A superiority in British weaponry meant very few died at the hands of the enemy. This is an important point because even as late as 1861 there were fewer than 3,000 boys being educated at England’s leading public schools and the schools could not have survived high rates of battlefield attrition.2 At the Battle of Omdurman (1898) in Sudan, General Kitchener’s army massacred up to 12,000 Mahdists for the loss of just forty-eight men, of whom just three were British officers.3
Governance of the Empire was made more efficient by the fact that those in charge had gone to the same school. At Harrow, Admiral Sir Augustus Clifford, one of the longest serving Black Rods, had been a fag to Palmerston, Viscount Althorp, a former chancellor of the exchequer, and Viscount Duncannon, a lord lieutenant of Ireland.4
The minor public schools also trained hundreds of lesser men to become the essential bureaucratic workhorses of the Empire. Since Britain’s industries and trade were wholly dependent on the subjugation of large populations spread over vast lands there was no shortage of posts to fill. In The Invention of Tradition, historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger stress: ‘All this produced administrators who ruled their districts like lordly prefects inventing traditions to keep the fags on their toes.’ Attention to detail was essential so that, by imposing obedience on an individual, the British rulers were able to enslave villages, towns and cities. Hobsbawm and Ranger illustrate this point by telling the story of one district inspector who had the habit of taking long walks among the local community in his tall hat. Halfway out he would leave the hat on the tree and then expect the nearest villager to bring it back immediately. Anyone reported to be have ignored the inspector’s hat hanging on the tree could expect a harsh punishment.5
The governing ethos which shaped the men who ran the Empire was ‘muscular Christianity’; at its heart was the idea that participation in sport could contribute to the development of Christian morality, physical fitness and ‘manly’ character. This is how Thomas Hughes expressed it in Tom Brown’s School Days, published in 1857: ‘The least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man’s body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men.’
In pursuit of this ideal many of the public schools had developed their own games. Perhaps the most famous of all is Eton’s wall game, a full-contact ball game still played today, although not the brutal version of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in which it was not uncommon for players to be literally left for dead on the field. However, it was the game of rugby that lent true physicality to muscular Christianity at public school.
The historian Brian Dobbs summed up the appeal of the game: ‘If the Muscular Christians and their disciples in the public schools, given sufficient wit, had been asked to invent a game that exhausted boys before they could fall victims to vice and idleness, which at the same time instilled the manly virtues of absorbing and inflicting pain in about equal proportions, which elevated the team above the individual, which bred courage, loyalty and discipline…it is probably something like rugby that they would have devised.’6 One of the reasons this appealed to public school headmasters and their boards of trustees in the late-nineteenth century was because of what they saw as the problem of homosexuality. They believed that adopting the ethos of muscular Christianity would in part serve to distract boys from exploring homosexual relationships.
Academic excellence and scientific inquiry were sidelined as rugby, cricket and football were employed to define physical and psychological character.
The legacy of this ethos lives on today – in 2012 and 2016 half the British Olympic teams came from private schools. As Britain embarked on its colonial adventures, muscular Christianity was the defining virtue wholly embraced by the British Army and the legions of missionaries who sallied forth across the Empire. Winning wars, crushing cultures and converting pagans was the best way a man could flex his Christian muscles.
The Victorian figure who best represents the ideal of muscular Christianity made his name in a number of famous military campaigns in defence and expansion of the British Empire. General Charles Gordon was a courageous commander and explorer whose adventures were avidly followed by the British public as he chased and fought Britain’s enemies to the very margins of the known world. Gordon did not attend one of the great English public schools but instead went to a minor private institution in Taunton, Devon, called Fullands House, before being sent on to the military academy in Woolwich, then as important as Sandhurst in training army officers. Here, religious teaching and physical instruction were as strict as at any of England’s great public schools. Even by Victorian standards Gordon’s religious conviction was feverishly impassioned. He was especially impressed with Philippians 1:21 where St Paul wrote: ‘For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain’, a passage he underlined in his Bible and often quoted. But Gordon, who once said to a Roman Catholic priest that ‘the church is like the British Army, one army but many regiments’, never allied himself to any church nor became a member of one. Instead he allowed his whole life to be defined by his muscular Christianity.7
Following the death of his father he undertook extensive social work in Kent including teaching at the local Ragged School. Before 1870, there was no universal education system in Britain, and the Ragged Schools were a network of privately funded schools that gave a free education to children whose parents were too poor to afford fees. Gordon even took in some of the children to live with him in his own home. His religious principles made him a leading opponent of slavery and throughout his African exploits he battled the slavers, often diverting military resources to help free slaves. Yet he was also a deeply flawed character. He frequently disobeyed orders, including those that came directly from Prime Minister Gladstone.
Gordon met his grisly end after the siege of Khartoum where he had been sent to evacuate the British garrison. It was here that his refusal to obey an order cost him his life. Instead of relieving the garrison he decided to stay on to fight the Islamist army led by Muhammad Ahmad. After holding out for months in hope of a relief column sent from London, Khartoum’s defences fell. Gordon was killed and his severed head paraded around the city. Ahmad proclaimed himself ruler of Sudan, and established a religious state, the Mahdiyah, which was governed by a harsh enforcement of Sharia law. Out of consideration for his Turkish, Egyptian and Sudanese troops, Gordon had refrained in public from describing his battle with the Mahdi as a religious war, but his diary showed he viewed himself as a Christian champion fighting just as much for God as for Queen and country. At the time, Gordon’s military campaigns had the full blessing of the British public. In August 1864, The Times wrote in support of Gordon: ‘The part of the soldier of fortune is in these days very difficult to play with honour… but if ever the actions of a soldier fighting in foreign service ought to be viewed with indulgence, and even with admiration, this exceptional tribute is due to Colonel Gordon.’
History has not been so kind. In Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey strongly implied that Gordon, who remained a confirmed bachelor all his life, was a paedophile who may have even preyed on the children he befriended in the Ragged Schools.
In many ways Gordon embodied the ideal of the privately educated Victorian adventurer so loved by proponents of muscular Christianity. He was a charismatic, insubordinate, repressed homosexual who was addicted to danger and, by the end of his life in 1885, had a strong death wish.
While Charles Gordon represented the overachievement of an Empire adventurer, the vast majority of England’s public schoolboys played much smaller and far less glamorous roles. The Barttelot family has lived at its ancestral seat at Stopham in West Sussex since 1372 and can trace its ancestry back to William the Conqueror.8 Since the 1820s the male Barttelots have been schooled at Rugby and Eton. Sir Brian Barttelot is the Fifth Baronet and the fourth in the line to be schooled at Eton. Sir Brian has served as military secretary to the major-general commanding London District and Household Division between 1978 and 1980 and regimental lieutenant colonel of the Coldstream Guards between 1987 and 1992. In 1989 he was appointed Officer, Order of the British Empire. Generations of Barttelots served in Britain’s Empire.
But in 1885 one of Sir Brian’s ancestors played such an infamous part in the Sudan campaign that his actions raised serious questions about the darker side of a muscular Christian education. In 1874 Major Edmund Musgrave Barttelot followed in his father’s footsteps and entered Rugby School. He then went to Sandhurst, again behind his father, where he was enrolled as an officer in the 7th Royal Fusiliers.
After the fall of Gordon at Khartoum the emboldened armies of Muhammad Ahmad, the self-proclaimed Muslim Mahdi, cut off Equatoria and threatened Cairo, key to Britain’s influence in the region. In 1885, Emin Pasha, the governor whom Gordon had personally appointed to office, withdrew further south, to Wadelai near Lake Albert, but was in imminent danger of capture by the Mahdi’s superior forces. The following year, Britain assembled the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, led by Henry Morton Stanley (of ‘Dr Livingstone I presume’ fame) and set about the rescue of Pasha.
Major Edmund Musgrave Barttelot was one of eight public school-educated officers and gentlemen explorers who volunteered for the mission. As Stanley’s second in command, he was in charge of the rear column together with an Anglo-Irish gentleman explorer, James Sligo Jameson, an ancestor of the Jameson whiskey family. While the main column pressed on to relieve Emin Pasha, Barttelot’s column was left in the jungle to wait for replacement slave porters to be brought upriver. Very quickly the stifling heat and infectious diseases took their toll on the column and the British officers struggled to keep control. Barttelot maintained discipline through floggings and executions. Officers reported that he repeatedly stabbed African workers with a steel-pointed cane and that he ‘had an intense hatred of anything in the shape of a black man’.9
Stranded in the jungle, Jameson and Barttelot looked for ways to entertain themselves. Curious about the practice of cannibalism, they paid six silk handkerchiefs to purchase a young slave so they could witness the act first hand. The ten-year-old girl they bought was tied to a tree, stabbed twice in the abdomen and bled to death. The cannibals then sliced meat from her. Jameson captured the ordeal in watercolours which he exhibited among the column.
Neither Barttelot nor Jameson survived the expedition, the latter dying from disease and the former being shot by a man whose wife he had threatened.
The fate of the column and the actions of the British officers were thought to have inspired Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, with Barttelot the basis for Kurtz. But Victorian society and the schools which produced such men took a rather different view. Barttelot’s entry in the 1901 Dictionary of National Biography says he ‘was a severe disciplinarian, had a somewhat hasty temper, and was unversed in dealing with orientals, but his character was freed of all serious reproach’. His brother Walter, who went to Eton and Sandhurst, later wrote a book defending his younger brother’s behaviour by launching a scathing attack on the self-educated Stanley.10 In the summer of 2017 I arranged to visit Sir Brian Barttelot at the family home in Stopham to try to understand more about his ancestor. Drinking tea in the country-house drawing room, Sir Brian happily discussed Edmund’s exploits: ‘The general view is that it was atrocious of Stanley to leave them there, and what happened after that was inevitable – they all went mad.’
Edmund was survived by his brother, Walter George Barttelot, who died in action on 23 July 1900 (aged forty-five) at Retief’s Nek, Orange Free State in South Africa, during the Second Boer War. He was shot and killed leading a charge against a Boer position. His son, Walter III, died in Iraq during the First World War. His brother, Lieutenant Commander Nigel Kenneth Walter Barttelot, was killed in the same war while commanding the destroyer HMS Liberty at the Battle of Heligoland Bight. Sir Brian’s father, another Walter, left Eton and joined the Coldstream Guards. ‘He did a short stint in China,’ says Sir Brian, ‘and then got married in 1937 and then World War Two broke out and he ended up in Normandy in 1944. Churchill decided that guardsmen were put into tanks, but the guardsmen are all tall men and tanks aren’t suitable for tall people.’ Walter died fighting in Normandy. ‘He was commanding his tank battalion in 1944 and arrived shortly after the first wave of the invasion and had a big success in a battle called Caumont. And then he was promoted and took over the 6th Guards Tank Brigade – so he was acting brigadier. He was rushing about on roads that hadn’t been cleared and took a wrong turning in a scout car and was blown up by a mine. So he and his driver were killed in August 1944.’
Sir Brian believes the English public schools must have had ‘quite a lot of impact’ on the making of the Empire. ‘You find boys turning up,’ he says, ‘who understood through their fathers how it works – my family people went into successive regiments, so you build up a bank of how things should be done.’ He says discipline was essential and laments that now it ‘has almost disappeared off the map – people don’t want to be shouted at, they don’t think they can cope with it. We’ve got a lot of floppy people now. And we used to get a clip across the ear in my day and that was quite normal – and you weren’t offended, you just thought I’ve done something wrong and I won’t do it again. That doesn’t happen now. People shoot their mouths off now, there’s no discipline. Today’s politicians have no discipline. I’m old-fashioned.’
He believes the public school system gave the Empire ‘continuity and cohesion’. And he says: ‘I’m sure this is true of other schools as well, but the fact is your really good friends go back to those days. You can make friends later in life but they’re never the same because you haven’t got the same traditions and memories.’
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The conventional and popular wisdom of the public schools triumphantly marching hand in hand with the Empire is only part of the story. Certainly, on the field of battle the officer classes were dominated by the privately educated gentlemen of the leading public schools. But whether the spark of military genius was struck at the great public schools is very much open to question. Indeed, the greatest military leader of them all, Wellington, hated his short time at Eton between 1781 and 1784, where he felt miserably lonely and socially adrift after his father’s death left the family bereft of funds. The idea that Wellington’s victories were ‘won on the playing fields of Eton’ is fatally undermined by the fact that Eton did not own any playing fields at that time.
A more likely influence on the young Wellington was the grammar school he attended in Dublin, where he was born. The school focused on the arts, literature and music. Among its most famous alumni was the nineteenth-century songwriter Thomas Moore. This may have accounted for the sensitive disposition that Wellington occasionally showed on the battlefield – he cried when he read the list of the dead after Waterloo and often took pains to avoid needless bloodshed.
In 1785, a lack of success at Eton, combined with a shortage of family funds due to his father’s death, forced the young man and his mother to move to Brussels. A year later, Arthur enrolled in the French Royal Academy of Equitation in Angers, where he blossomed as a horseman and linguist. So it is perhaps more accurate to say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Angers.
While Victorian prime ministers were usually products of the English public schools the same cannot be said of Benjamin Disraeli, the prime minister perhaps most associated with Empire.
Unlike his younger brothers, who were sent to Winchester College, Disraeli attended a much less prestigious school only to surpass all family expectations.11 Many other famous names popularly associated with the building of the British Empire were either educated outside the public school system or barely educated at all. Robert Clive, the statesman and general who founded British India, was sent to an ordinary grammar school in Market Drayton, Shropshire, before a fleeting attendance at Merchant Taylors’ School in London from where he was expelled after less than a year. Hardly the propitious start in life for the conqueror of India, yet there is no mention of the tenuous nature of his association on the Merchant Taylors’ website, which places him on a list of the ‘great men’ it has schooled.12
A little more can be said of the schooling of another imposing figure on British rule in India. Warren Hastings, the first governor general of India, attended a grammar school and then Westminster School, where he became the first King’s Scholar of his year in 1747. But two years later at the age of sixteen, the impoverished circumstances of his family forced him to leave the school to find work. His headmaster protested against the removal of so promising a scholar, but Hastings was sent to a private tutor. In October 1750 he landed at Calcutta.13
Cecil Rhodes, the guardian of the British Empire who extended its reach to the far corners of Africa, did not take one step inside a public school. While his older brothers went to Eton and Winchester, his family decided Cecil should attend Bishop’s Stortford Grammar School. He was a shy boy but excelled in study and sport, playing for the first eleven cricket team.14
David Livingstone, the most famous explorer of the Empire, was born in a Scottish tenement block and spent his youth working at the local cotton mill where he was employed as a piercer. But the philanthropic mill-owner furnished the children with a school and schoolmaster so that Livingstone and his fellow piercers could study for two hours after work.
Scotland provides us with a counter-example to England – a place with few public schools and a much greater commitment to a national education system. The high level of literacy in Scotland by the end of the eighteenth century could only be matched in Switzerland and New England. It was nearly one hundred years later that England finally got to grips with a national education system that could take pupils from primary school to university. In fact, the Scottish universities committed substantial resources to bursaries and scholarships so that they could offer free places to impoverished students who showed talent or aptitude for learning. It led higher-education historian Robert Anderson to observe that as a result they did not suffer from the social barriers imposed by Oxford and Cambridge.15 Proof of the success of the Scottish education system can be seen in how many working-class Scots used their schooling to improve their lives. For Livingstone it meant securing a place at Charing Cross Medical School.
To some extent the received wisdom holds true that Britain’s Empire was ruled and led by men educated at a small number of leading English public schools. Certainly, senior diplomatic and government posts were dominated by privately educated men. Yet the schools have also exaggerated their role and over-promoted key imperial figures who had tangential or unhappy relationships with their alma maters.
Too little attention has been paid to the vital and often overlooked contribution of the grammar schools and self-educated men. This is particularly true of the Royal Navy, which was the backbone of the Empire, securing our lifelines from the Napoleonic Wars to the Second World War. Lord Nelson began his education at a grammar school in Norfolk before transferring to a small boarding school. Officers serving in Nelson’s navy mostly came from humble beginnings. Indeed, in 1939 only 5 per cent of those in the position of rear admiral and above had been to a public school.16 The army too had far more ordinarily educated officers than the public school historians lead us to believe. A survey of ‘eminent men’ in Queen Victoria’s reign, published in 1900, reveals that only 16 per cent of the army officer corps had attended a public school.17
Yet the public school system gave the Empire a set of easily communicated values and, in muscular Christianity, a conquering ethos. This ethos was extended across the Empire through a colonial network of select schools based on the public school model. In this way the schools helped prop up the Empire by educating maharajas and princes. But the shameful massacres and abuses of power raise questions about the suitability of the schools as training grounds for leadership.
Herbert Branston Gray, former headmaster of Louth Grammar School and of the boarding school Bradfield College from 1880 to 1910, was a passionate believer in the British Empire. Yet he felt compelled to write an excoriating article in which he accused the public schools of ‘letting down the Empire’ by mirroring society at large, which he characterised by ‘lack of preparedness, insularity and complacency’. In ‘The Public Schools and the Empire’, published in The Spectator, he denounced the rigid conformism of the public schoolboy, ‘his public conduct and manners’ as well as the ‘mind-numbing unwholesome cult of games worship’. He argued that the Empire required ‘democratic and enlightened’ boys for the demands of ‘a new age’ and if they were not up to the task then they should be replaced.18
Public schools have helped to write British history. They have been cheerleaders for colonialism and controlled the narrative of Empire. In so doing, the excesses and abuses associated with this period were suppressed, while the positive values of muscular Christianity were promoted. The warning was sounded by Gray in 1913.