It is testimony to the resilience of the public schools that a select group of men from a handful of schools were able to dictate the terms of Britain’s involvement in the Second World War. The appeasement policy of one public schoolboy, Neville Chamberlain (Rugby), helped create the conditions for conflict with Germany, and set the scene for another, Winston Churchill (Harrow), to come to the nation’s rescue in its hour of peril.
The type of privately educated senior officer who had led the BEF to a bloody stalemate in France in 1914 was easily recognisable among the next generation of commanders who were once again drawing up plans to defeat the Germans across the Channel. So we should not be surprised that the war got off to exactly the same disastrous start as the previous one, with a series of morale-sapping defeats.
The first of these calamitous setbacks was orchestrated by John Vereker, an aristocrat career officer who also took the title 6th Viscount Gort. Like Churchill, he had been educated at Harrow from where he was expected to take a commission in the army. His reputation had suffered a severe blow in 1908 when, on a moose hunt in Canada, he accidentally shot and killed his guide. Nevertheless, Vereker went on to distinguish himself in the First World War and was awarded the Victoria Cross.
His experience of bogged-down trench warfare poorly served him in the next conflict. Surprised by the Germans’ Blitzkrieg tactics, Vereker very nearly lost Britain its entire army. As it was, he was forced to leave behind 68,000 soldiers and abandon all the BEF’s heavy equipment in northern France. Hitler’s failure to give the order to chase the British into the sea gifted the Royal Navy precious time to perform a small miracle and rescue 224,000 soldiers off the beaches of Dunkirk, with the help of the flotilla of ‘little ships’ from the south coast of England.
While Vereker could claim some kind of victory (he had at least brought home most of the army) the same could not be said of another British general who also attended ‘a very famous’ English public school and was also decorated for bravery in the First World War. Arthur Ernest Percival did not come from the same aristocratic stock as Gort, but his father was a sufficiently successful land agent to send Arthur and his brother to Rugby. There, Percival excelled in the school’s Volunteer Rifle Corps but left in 1906 with a single higher school certificate. In 1914 he enlisted as a private in the Officer Training Corps of the Inns of Court but, like so many public school soldiers, was rapidly promoted through the ranks. He was awarded the Military Cross following the Somme offensive when he was badly wounded by shrapnel. After the war he was sent to Ireland where he was accused by the Irish Republican Army of being responsible for brutally torturing detainees, including pulling out fingernails with pliers. He later survived an attempt on his life at Liverpool Street Station in 1921.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Percival was sent to the Far East to command British Empire forces against the Japanese. Like Vereker, he too was surprised by the speed and strength of the enemy. In the face of a series of bold Japanese offensives he beat a hasty retreat to the naval base of Singapore, Britain’s crucial military foothold in the region. As the Japanese began their assault on the city, Churchill sent orders to Percival to hold at all costs. But in February 1942, with his supplies and ammunition running low, the British general agreed to an unconditional surrender.
It was the biggest capitulation in British military history, involving the surrender of 140,000 Allied personnel to fewer than 30,000 Japanese soldiers. The defeat looked even worse when it emerged that the Japanese were also running low on ammunition and may not have been able to carry out a decisive assault against the British-led forces.
Such failures of command and leadership were symptomatic of a much deeper malaise facing the British Empire. Its rulers were schooled and fought in a bygone age characterised by a noblesse oblige, which in the interwar years had engendered a blind complacency. George Orwell said: ‘The higher commanders, drawn from the aristocracy, could never prepare for modern war, because in order to do so they would have had to admit to themselves that the world was changing.’ The senior officers in the British Army spent as much time engaged in a narrow class war with one another as they did fighting the real enemy. In Singapore, for instance, Percival was undermined by his second in command Lieutenant General Sir Lewis ‘Piggy’ Macclesfield Heath (Wellington), who believed he had the better credentials for Percival’s job. He came from a military family that had served the Empire in Africa and Asia for many years. Before Percival was promoted to general officer commanding (Malaya), Heath had been his senior officer.
The local populations, governed for so many years by the British, had mixed feelings about the defeat of their masters. They may have feared the Japanese but under British rule they had experienced racism and cruelty and so ‘could not suppress a spurt of glee at the humbling of the sahibs’.1 The rubber and oil barons, public school expats of J.G. Farrell’s The Singapore Grip, had enjoyed decadent lives on the backs of the local people and had never given a thought to it coming to an end. My grandfather, who went to Sedbergh School in Cumbria, was one of them and he never got over the shock of the loss of Burma, which ultimately sent him to the bottle and an early grave.
These defeats, and others in Crete and North Africa under the Wykehamist General Wavell, exposed the Empire’s soft underbelly and also fuelled a public debate about the inadequacies of the men in command. At the outbreak of war, 54 per cent of major generals and above had attended one of twenty-six leading public schools, while most of the rest were privately educated with very few coming through the ranks.2 Yet the government’s reaction to a seemingly endless stream of defeats merely resulted in a gentle reshuffling of the pack so that by the end of the war the schooling of Britain’s war leaders remained exactly the same.3 Few historians believe that the Nazis or Japanese would have been defeated if the Americans had left Britain to fight on alone with its depleted resources marshalled by an out-of-touch officer class.
As the country faced its darkest hour, British society underwent something of a collective mental breakdown. The shortcomings of the education system were blamed for what looked like imminent defeat. Terence Cuthbert Worsley (Marlborough), a former Wellington master, laid the blame firmly at the door of the public schools: ‘If public schools are national assets because of their leadership and training qualities, what are we to think of those qualities when we survey the mess into which their leadership has brought us?’ It seemed a fair question and an echo of George Orwell’s famous observation: ‘Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.’4
In 1941, Worsley, who saw action with Stephen Spender in the Spanish Civil War, made his case for urgent reform of public schools in a book called The End of the ‘Old School Tie’. Worsley expressed a widely felt pessimism about the country’s predicament. Remarkably, such criticism was considered neither unpatriotic nor defeatist, mainly because so many were angry at Britain’s leaders for allowing a second war to take place so soon after ‘the war to end all wars’.
Orwell wrote a foreword for Worsley’s book, saying that the question of education must be dealt with ‘as soon as the war is over’. He said Worsley’s book ‘will not please the defenders of the existing system’, but neither will it please the ‘more “advanced” experimentalists or the people who imagine that nothing can be achieved in England unless we rip down the whole social structure and build again from the bottom’.
Setting out the purpose behind Worsley’s ideas, Orwell explained: ‘The subjects he deals with in most detail are the need for some kind of uniform education system for all children up to the age of eleven, as a basis for a genuine democracy, and the special position of Public Schools… Part of his theme is the importance of not simply attacking the Public Schools, but of trying to incorporate what is good in them in a new system set free from class privilege.’ But he warned: ‘The one thing certain about the British education system is that if we do not ourselves change it after the war, it will be because Hitler is changing it for us.’ And he cautioned against resistance from vested interests: ‘It is in our power to decide whether the change shall be made consciously, as part of a movement towards full democracy, or haphazardly, with vested interests of all kinds fighting rearguard actions and holding up the course of history. This is, therefore, a book for those who want to see the notorious “two nations” of England made into one, and with as short a transition stage as possible.’
Orwell and Worsley were by no means lone voices calling for radical reform during the war. The BBC gave J.B. Priestley a prime slot on the radio which he used to proclaim the urgent need for a more equal society. Summing up the collective mood David Turner says: ‘The barbs of Worsley, Orwell and others constituted a serious, potentially fatal charge against the boys’ public schools: the role of the schools in creating leaders capable of defending and governing empires had, in the speeches of hundreds of headmasters up and down the land, been one of the chief justifications for their existence.’5
Even Winston Churchill had something to say on the subject when he addressed pupils and staff on a return visit to Harrow in December 1940: ‘When this war is won, as it surely will be, it must be one of our aims to work to establish a state of society where the advantages and privileges which hitherto have been enjoyed by only the few shall be far more widely shared by the many, and by the youth of the nation as a whole.’6 A year later Churchill told Rab Butler, president of the Board of Education, that he wanted 60–70 per cent of places at public schools to be filled by bursary boys on the recommendation of the ‘counties and the great cities’. Butler, in public at least, conceded that ‘some of the public schools would go.’7
What is sometimes framed today as a Trotskyite plot by a lunatic fringe of the Labour Party was once considered plain, old-fashioned Conservative common sense. By not tackling the malignant complacency which had allowed the promotion and advancement of a narrow class of leaders, politicians were now reaping the whirlwinds that threatened to blow down the Empire and enslave its peoples to fascism.
*
There was more bad news for public schools on the home front. While army leaders were being pummelled in Europe, Africa and Asia, their alma maters were taking an economic beating. Even before Hitler had ordered the Luftwaffe to direct its efforts against London, public schools had begun a mass evacuation from the cities.
The future of some of the most famous English public schools looked bleak. Having abandoned their school buildings for country residences, they took on additional costs while the makeshift nature of their new facilities forced them to offer reduced fees. By the end of the Battle of Britain a chain of south London girls’ schools had reached the end of the financial road and handed staff their notices of termination.8
Even schools already safely ensconced in the countryside faced serious financial disruption during the early years of the war. Their buildings offered vital accommodation for British forces or could be affordably turned into research and development sites for the war effort. Most, however, were spared the intrusion of the war because they could still call upon support from government.
Given the existential threat facing the British people it seems extraordinary that Churchill’s Conservative-led coalition government should find time and resources to tackle such a trifling problem as public schools. Yet in 1943, Labour’s National Executive demanded ‘acceptance of the broad democratic principle that all children of school age shall be required to attend schools provided by the State’.9
Few would have argued that public schools were not ripe for reform. Masters and pupils alike appear to have accepted the inevitability of change. Nevertheless, public feeling must have been extraordinarily hostile for Britain’s wartime leader to do what he did next. Churchill, aware of how distracting the education reform question had become, frustratingly declared he didn’t want to spend the war ‘wiping children’s noses and smacking their behinds’.10 So the prime minister entrusted the task of settling the public school question to the Tory heavyweight, education minister Rab Butler.
Butler, a relative by marriage of the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, was by 1941 a wealthy aristocrat – the subsequent owner of his Gatcombe Park residence would be the Queen – who had ambitions of one day leading the Conservative Party. But his reputation had been badly damaged by his association with the policy of appeasement to Hitler.
The idea that Butler would oversee the abolition of, or even seriously reform, the public schools was risible. He had attended several preparatory schools before failing to win a scholarship to Eton and ended up plumping for Marlborough. If ever his allegiance to his old public school had been in doubt, it was firmly reasserted when he intervened to stop the Air Ministry from using Marlborough to house scientists working on the development of radar at the Telecommunications Research Establishment on the Dorset coast. They ended up finding accommodation at Malvern College.11
Yet despite all his public school baggage, it was Butler who set up the committee to report on how public schools could be brought to the aid of the national system of education. To ensure that nothing was done that would frighten the horses, Butler gave the job of chairing the committee to Lord David Pinkerton Fleming, an alumnus of the Glasgow High School, which through its links to the Choir School of Glasgow Cathedral, established in 1124, could claim to be the oldest public school in Scotland. Fleming ensured that his twenty-strong committee was overloaded with representatives of the public schools including the headmaster of Charterhouse and the headmistress of Roedean School.
Just like Clarendon in the previous century, Fleming sent representatives to the oldest and most prestigious schools in the country, and evidence was taken in the belief that everything was up for grabs. At its most radical, Fleming considered a proposal for public school ‘endowments and premises to be appropriated by public authorities and put to a number of uses quite different from those they now serve, e.g. short-term boarding establishments; schools for advanced studies for Secondary School pupils; Youth Centres; Junior Universities; schools of instruction in special subjects like music, art and handicraft; Adult Education Colleges; Training Colleges for Teachers and Youth Leaders; Summer Schools; holiday centres; or Day Schools for their local areas’.12 Although the thinking which underpinned abolition may seem radical today, in the war years it was part of a greater drive towards the creation of a welfare state. This was how the vast majority of Britons envisaged life in a post-war society.
And in its final report the committee conceded these were ‘admirable objects and accommodation for carrying them out may well have to be provided in the future’. But in the end the committee caved in to the powerful public school lobby, concluding it did not feel these goals could or should be achieved by ‘destroying schools that are doing good work’.
The report warned:
If the Public Schools were abolished, it would be necessary also to eliminate all Independent Schools and, even if this far reaching step were taken, it would be impossible, without dictatorial interference with personal freedom, to debar parents from sending their children out of the country… to be educated, possibly in schools newly established for the purpose. There would be a great demand for private tutors, and the resulting inequalities and abuses would almost certainly compel the extension of the ban on Independent Schools to cover private teaching generally.
It also raised practical problems to abolition, saying that if a ‘ban on Independent Schools were not made absolute’ there was nothing to stop new public schools being founded to replace the old ones. The committee also rejected the idea of bringing the public schools wholly under the control of local education authorities (LEAs), arguing that they must be allowed to continue to draw pupils from all over the country and abroad.13
Instead, Lord Fleming, a senior Scottish judge, recommended that the top boarding schools should devote one-quarter of their places to state-funded bursaries. This was a serious blow to those who thought real change was in the air. The report even rejected the abolition of fees at grant-maintained state schools, an idea which had enjoyed majority support from the committee. Instead, the force of Fleming’s recommendations addressed a national building programme for a raft of new boarding schools so that more children could benefit from a public school education.
When the Trades Union Congress, which had pushed hard for a radical solution, tried to meet with Butler to address the shortcomings of the report, the wily politician wrote: ‘They are of course too late. The Public Schools are saved and must now be made to do their bit. All this is whining.’14
At Winchester College, where they feared the worst after a visit by a delegation of Labour MPs, one former pupil wrote: ‘The Fleming report had little impact on us or the school – it wasn’t radical enough to survive or make a difference.’ Another said: ‘The school is so well established that I don’t foresee many changes. Schools like Winchester College will continue for many generations to come.’ This prediction was strongly borne out by a former pupil who had attended the school in the war years. After visiting Winchester thirty years later he remarked: ‘The school seemed to be a very similar place when my son went there in the 1970s.’15
Once again the public schools had used their influence and patronage to turn what appeared to be an attack on their independence into an opportunity to secure their financial future. What had started out as a bid to overcome the social divisions public schools were perceived to reinforce, had been turned into something very different.
Churchill and Butler had also calculated that the furore over education reform would wane as the fortunes of war turned in Britain’s favour. They were wrong. The public mood was crying out for fundamental social reform. Butler was quick to recognise this and skilfully opened up the debate, drawing the focus away from public schools, by promising free education for all and thus deflecting attention from the privileged, whose wealth and influence seemed undiminished by the war. His 1944 Act was a classic piece of ‘One Nation Conservatism’ in the finest tradition of Disraeli, which embodied the ideal of upper-class paternalism towards the working class. In one of the most radical education acts of parliament, Butler enshrined the right to a free state education for everyone from five to fifteen.
Building on the 1918 Education Act, the new legislation established a tripartite system of secondary schooling: grammar schools, secondary technical schools and secondary modern schools. Admission was controlled by a new selection criteria based on an exam called the 11-plus. But the small number of grammar schools meant most pupils went to secondary modern schools, whether they were suitable or not.16
*
If the Second World War was a time when the school system was subject to reform, albeit slight, it did nothing to temper the old boys themselves; indeed, the official account seems to suggest that it was public school bluster that pulled us through. In 1940, with Hitler’s invading armies camped on the other side of the English Channel, Britain’s prospects had looked bleak. Few had the self-belief to think only they possessed the personal qualities needed to overcome what to everyone else appeared insurmountable odds. But throughout his childhood, Winston Churchill had never doubted his abilities or his calling. The prep school thrashings had toughened him while Harrow had inculcated a sense of confidence and destiny that bordered on the reckless. As a young fag Churchill once told a senior boy who had severely beaten him for breaking house rules: ‘I will rise above you later on.’ The boy responded by handing him two more thrashings. Uncowed, Churchill said: ‘I am leaving now, but what I said stands.’ He returned to Harrow many times during the war and the friends he had made there remained life-long (he gave many of them prized jobs).
Churchill’s early career had been marked by risk-taking misadventure and military catastrophe. The 1915 offensive in the Dardanelles was typical of a Churchill military operation where the prospect of political glory blinded him to the military dangers. Indeed, his reckless decision-making during the early years of the Second World War very nearly cost Britain dearly. His campaign in Norway was an unmitigated disaster. Yet surely only a man of Churchill’s unquestioning entitlement to national and personal victory could have steered Britain through its greatest ever gamble.
Such an argument gives Churchill far too much credit. His leadership and morale-boosting oratory helped inject a steely purpose to Britain’s war effort but the outcome of the war was not decided by one man. Air Marshal Dowding (Winchester) proved to be a masterful tactician of the skies as he commanded Fighter Command against the Luftwaffe. And Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery (King’s Canterbury and St Paul’s) led Britain’s Eighth Army to its first decisive victory in the war. Neither was Britain’s survival secured by a narrow class of leader educated at public school. In the end salvation was delivered by the blood, sweat and ingenuity of millions of ordinary Britons who refused to surrender. While Dowding took all the plaudits, few heard of the work of state-educated Robert Watson-Watt, Edward George Bowen, John Randall and Bernard Lovell who helped to develop radar. Nor was proper recognition given to the Royal and Merchant navies, whose ships were captained by state-educated sailors. ‘The men who kept the convoys free in the Atlantic during the Second World War, starved Germany in the First, and kept the Empire’s maritime trading routes open for more than two centuries,’ says David Turner, ‘were rarely public schoolboys.’17
Even more decisive than the navy and radar in winning the war was the intervention of the Americans. The industrial weight of the United States of America kept Britain supplied with food and vital military equipment, including the Sherman tanks that were sent to help Montgomery chase Rommel out of the North African desert. Churchill and his generals made many tactical errors and only started winning after the Americans joined the war.
The reality is that public schools gave boys like Churchill an innate sense of entitlement and in some cases an almost pathological willingness to risk everything. In summer of 1940 his gamble paid off, but in the era of nuclear weapons, how should we feel about leaders with such traits?