The national sorrow that turned to bitter recrimination at the end of the First World War defined the perspective for social change in Britain. Politicians recognised that what their war-weary citizens desired most was a kinder, fairer country where the prospects of all were improved. So the government, led by Liberal leader David Lloyd George, a son of a teacher who promised a country fit for heroes, turned its attention to housing, living standards, electoral franchise reform and, of course, education.
Britain had been recognised as a divided society before the start of hostilities, but the war had highlighted the acute disparities in education.1 Poor literacy levels were exposed during the processing and administration of a mass army. Health problems also became evident as large numbers of boys of military age were deemed unfit for service. The government responded with the 1918 Education Act, which raised the school leaving age to fourteen and linked the schools to medical inspections and further state support. It also abolished fees at all state-run elementary schools.2
At this time, any radical dismantling of or even tampering with the foundations of the English class system would have looked like some sort of defeat. Nevertheless, there remained a stubborn and persistent minority of dissident voices, mostly pacifists and socialists, who urged action against the system that had the power to take a whole nation to war. There was the Rugby-educated socialist reformer R.H. Tawney, who had refused a commission in the Manchester Regiment, choosing to join as a private soldier. Tawney fought in the Battle of the Somme, and was shot through the chest. For many years after the war he would wear his sergeant’s jacket around his Bloomsbury flat. In his seminal work Secondary Education for All he called for an end to the ‘vulgar inequalities’ of the class system by the establishment of a national system of education.
Then there was George Bernard Shaw, who was at the height of his fame when war was declared in 1914. His subsequent diagnosis of the conflict as a capitalist folly driven by economic greed found favour across the classes, not just among working families. Part of his proposed cure was a radical shake-up of the education system: ‘Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents.’3
In calling for expanded educational opportunities, Tawney and Shaw joined such notable reformers as Sidney Webb, Matthew Arnold, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, Jeremy Bentham and John Ruskin. Remembering his misery at the Central Dublin Model School, Shaw was wary of proposals to employ mass education to break down class distinctions, and he disapproved of plans to allow promising students from the lower classes to attend expensive private schools, fearing they would feel hopelessly out of place in an institution full of ‘toffs’. By 1923 he was convinced that the only way to end the ‘Diabolonian’ iniquities of government by a privileged class was to ‘raze’ the public schools and ‘sow their foundations with salt’.4
His contemporary, John Galsworthy (Harrow), determined that British society was based on a strict caste system supported by the public schools. He described the schools as ‘great caste factories’ where the sense of superiority was ‘set and hard as iron’.5 At the same time Alec Waugh published his non-fiction account of private education Public School Life: Boys, Parents, Masters, arguing that there was a ‘conspiracy of silence’ and a ‘policy of evasion’ between headmasters and parents when confronting the failings of public schools, which he deemed in ‘drastic need of repair’.6 In another, perhaps even more radical move, Cyril Norwood, headmaster at Harrow until 1929, called for state control of all public schools in order to bridge the ‘deepening fissure’ between the private and state education systems, which left pupils like ‘strange dogs’ when they met at university.7
Despite such vigorous public debate, parliament remained focused only on state education. Grammar schools, which formed the bedrock of the non-public school system, received a huge state cash injection while still being allowed to continue to charge fees to the wealthier parents.8 By the middle of the twentieth century the state-aided grammar schools had become the natural preserve of the middle classes who had settled on a schooling that was not only affordable but more in tune with the education of children in mainland Europe. Many of these schools even provided facilities, such as science laboratories and art studios, which bettered or matched public schools – and all located in the local community.
One such school was Ripon Grammar School, refounded in 1555 with all the characteristics of a public school. Most of its pupils paid for their education and it followed the muscular Christian ethos developed by Thomas Arnold. There were fee-paying boarders; there was fagging; senior boys administered punishments; and the school structure was based on a house system with a great emphasis on sport. But in one vital respect it was different: all its pupils were taken from the community it served. In more recent times, reconstituted as a state grammar boarding school, its pupils have included Katharine Viner, editor of The Guardian, Richard Hammond of Top Gear fame, and the fashion designer Bruce Oldfield. Other notable resurgent grammar schools of the interwar period were King Edward’s School in Birmingham (where Theresa May’s former adviser, Nick Timothy, was educated) and Manchester Grammar School.
The success of these hybrid grammars in attracting wealthy middle-class families hit the public schools hard, leaving a number struggling to compete. There is no doubt that the scandals and horror stories that had beset the great English public schools had left them with a serious public relations problem, forcing relatively well-off families to think twice about sending their offspring to what had been derided as an alien and brutal institution. Demand for places at top public schools started to plummet. Harrow had to close one of its boarding houses, leaving masters to ponder its future existence.9
When new state secondaries opened up in competition to public schools in Dulwich, Streatham and Shrewsbury, the governing council of the Girls’ Public Day School Trust, which ran a chain of private schools, protested to the Board of Education. The Trust had every reason to fear the competition as its accounts revealed it was £106,000 in the red (equivalent to £10 million today.)10 The financial stability of these schools became even more precarious with the passing of the School Teachers Superannuation Act 1918, which gave state school teachers pensions, and followed measures to impose minimum salaries.
In May 1919 the public schools met with the government to thrash out a deal that they hoped would ensure their survival. Frank Fletcher, headmaster of Charterhouse and chair of the Headmasters’ Conference, along with the heads of Eton and Marlborough, told the president of the Board of Education, Herbert Fisher (Winchester), they would accept free pupils from state elementary schools in return for government funding. Fisher politely but firmly rejected their overtures on the grounds that it appeared that the public schools wanted to be paid for skimming the cream of the state elementary school pupils. Fletcher recalled in his memoirs: ‘We were told at the time there was no demand for places in our schools for ex-elementary schoolboys.’11
A century later history repeated itself when in 2016 public schools were threatened by Theresa May with the removal of their charitable status. It would have led to the schools being treated as income-generating businesses, making them liable for millions of pounds in corporation tax. At the same time Labour said it was planning to make parents pay VAT on their school fees.
Facing this two-fronted attack, the schools tried to placate the politicians by making exactly the same offer as Frank Fletcher had made to the Board of Education. And just like the Lloyd George coalition government of 1919 the Conservatives under Theresa May refused to entertain the idea.
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The schools and the state were badly hit by the Great Depression. Many private schools were brought back from the brink by taking advantage of more restrictive state grants provided for in the 1902 Education Act. But these were only made available12 on the strict terms dictated by the government, not by the schools. In return for taking in poor students from the community on a fee-free basis, the state pledged to pay the schools a grant. In 1926 secondary schools controlled by voluntary bodies could receive a grant from either the Board of Education or their local authority, or both. But they were required to meet the Board’s regulations, and were subject to the same system of inspections as state-funded schools. The Board drove a fair bargain, expecting these ‘grant maintained’ schools to take no more than 25 per cent of their pupils free of charge from state elementary schools. Suitable pupils were selected using a scholarship examination.13
The social impact on the schools was immediate. ‘I am grateful to University College School for teaching me to understand the lives of those who were poorer than myself,’ wrote the poet Stephen Spender, who attended the school in the 1920s. ‘When I was a child I was never allowed to play with poor children because my mother regarded them as not only rough, but also as perpetual carriers of infectious diseases… However, some of the boys I most liked were of working-class parents and lived in very poor districts.’14
Those public schools that remained untouched by the state system were able to continue educating the nation’s elite. Britain’s aristocracy and upper classes had developed a dependency on schools that valued eccentricity and promoted amateurism over professionalism. Amateurism meant the pursuit of noble causes in themselves, whereas professionalism tainted life because it encouraged greed.15 For Cyril Norwood, however, what parents were actually paying for was ‘a social badge, and… rights of entry to circles which people do very much desire to enter’.16
In the time before the Second World War, governments remained resolutely concerned with providing schools for those who were excluded from the education system rather than curbing the education of the upper classes. Critical voices of the post-war era also softened their tone. Among those who’d become reconciled to wealth-based education for the privileged was Alec Waugh. Sherborne forgave him his ‘libellous’ attack on the school in The Loom of Youth and the Old Shirburnian Society reversed its decision to expel him from its ranks. Most tellingly of all, Waugh ended up sending his two sons to Sherborne as boarders.17 Perhaps his brother Evelyn was right after all when he wrote: ‘One goes through four or five years of perfect hell at an age when life is bound to be hell anyway, and after that the social system never lets one down.’18
The public schools took full advantage of this more benign political climate, and pupil rolls rose to record numbers.19 Greater demand for places even triggered a building programme, ushering in a new breed of public school which included Stowe, Canford and Bryanston, founded on very different charitable statutes. Gone was the promise so fundamental to the ancient statutes of Winchester and Eton which had pledged to serve the community by providing education for the poor. In their stead was a much more businesslike assessment of what a public school endowment should be: a modern schooling for those who could afford it. The fagging and blooding of the Victorian period were cast aside in favour of a humane religious education for the professional classes. Sadly, many of these pupils would not join the professions immediately, as another war was looming.