Public Schools and the Second World War

By David Walsh, Anthony Seldon and The Lord Bramall

A historical analysis of the contribution of Great Britain’s public schools to the conduct of World War II.

Following their ground-breaking book on Public Schools and the Great War, David Walsh and Anthony Seldon now examine how those same schools fared in the Second World War. They use eye-witness testimony to recount stories of resilience and improvisation in 1940 as the likelihood of invasion and the terrors of the Blitz threatened the very survival of public schools. They also assess the giant impact that public school alumni contributed to every aspect of the war effort.

The authors examine how the “People’s War” brought social cohesion, with the opportunity to end public school exclusiveness to the fore, encouraged by Winston Churchill among others. That opportunity was ironically squandered by the otherwise radical Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government, prolonging the “public school problem” right through to the present day.

The public schools shaped twentieth century history profoundly, never more so than in the conduct of both its world wars. The impact of the schools on both wars was very different, as were the legacies. Drawing widely on primary source material and personal accounts of inspiring courage and endurance, this book is full of profound historical reflection and is essential reading for all who want to understand the history of modern Britain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526750419

David Walsh

David Walsh, Ph.D., is one of the world’s leading authorities on children, teens, parenting, family life, and the impact of technology on children’s health and development. He founded the internationally renowned National Institute on Media and the Family. He is on the faculty of the University of Minnesota and lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Monica. They have three adult children and five grandchildren. 

Book preview

Introduction

Public Schools under Attack

Public schools have become a public enemy. Unloved by governments of both main parties, by the press and by commentators, they have sunk to perhaps the lowest level of public estimation in their history.

The perception that Britain has a public-school ‘problem’, with the schools enhancing a two-tier society embedding privilege, can be traced back to the Second World War. The 1960s, not least with the election of the Labour government in October 1964, saw the schools come under an even more intense spotlight. In that new age of egalitarianism and modernisation, these very traditional schools were regarded as holding Britain back and responsible for many of the failures of the past. This included the way in which indifferent public-school toffs contributed to the callous slaughter of hundreds of thousands of working-class soldiers in the First World War.

The last decade has seen an intensification in the criticism of public schools. Three of the most articulate books to have been published are: Alex Renton’s Stiff Upper Lip. Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class (2017); Posh Boys. How English Public Schools Ruin Britain, by Robert Verkaik (2018); and Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem, by Francis Green and David Kynaston (2019). These point to the entrenched privilege, sexual corruption, arrogance and sense of entitlement which have all been part of the public-school story, without always recognising the positive contribution that the schools have made to the country, and the values of public service that they have tried to instil.

Had Jeremy Corbyn won power in the December 2019 general election, Britain would have had a Labour government more committed to taking on public schools than any since the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s. His defeat, however, does not mean any reprieve for the schools. The Boris Johnson government is no friendlier to public schools than its recent Conservative predecessors. Johnson, like David Cameron before him (Prime Minister 2010–16) attended Eton College (as did nineteen of the fifty-five who have occupied that position), and defending privilege was the last thing its two most recent alumni PMs wanted to be seen to be doing. Margaret Thatcher, grammar-school educated, was the last Conservative Prime Minister to be well-disposed towards public schools.

Against this background, it has been hard, and remains so, to assess the contribution of public schools to the history of the twentieth century, most specifically the two world wars. Our two books, The Public Schools and the Great War (2013) and now this volume, are therefore works against the grain, attempting to assess the impact of those wars on public schools and their place within the education system, and at what public-school alumni contributed to both wars, in the hope of achieving a more rounded historical understanding.

The Influence of Public Schools on their Alumni

It is impossible to know definitively how the character, outlook and skills of alumni were forged by the public schools they attended. That the Battle of Waterloo was ‘won on the playing fields of Eton’, as the Duke of Wellington is alleged to have said, was of course a glib statement, referring not to games pitches but to the bare-knuckle fights which regularly took place in corners of College Field. The assumption rests unchallenged that the school forged the warlike qualities demanded by the battle. But many other factors were at play in shaping officers and soldiers in the Napoleonic wars, as in both world wars. One important influence in the twentieth century was Christianity, both in the schools but also independently of them. The universities that alumni attended also framed their outlooks, although the culture of Oxford and Cambridge, heavily dominated by public-school alumni, resembled that of their schools, at least until the 1960s. The ethos of the armed forces and other professions, as well as family background, played their part too. Even if one accepts the importance of the public-school ethos in shaping the character and outlooks of alumni, including such values as service and team spirit, the culture and influence of wider society cannot be disregarded.

Ultimately, all we can assert with confidence is the proportion of the key decision-makers in each war who attended public schools, remarkably high in both, and across every facet of war service. It was not surprising that the military leadership in all three services should have come almost exclusively from a public-school background, or that the Oxbridge-dominated higher ranks of the Civil Service also emanated from that stable. More surprising is the conclusion of the historian David Edgerton, that ‘most of the important Second World War scientists had been to public school’, since one of the strongest criticisms of those schools has been of their slavish commitment to a classical education.¹ Whatever the role of later university, career and other social influences on alumni, we conclude that the ethos and influence of their schools was significant, and all the more so because, in the first half of the twentieth century, their educational experience was far more likely than today to have been one of all-consuming, seven-day-a-week boarding schools.

Public Schools and the Great War

Our earlier book, published on the eve of the centenary of the Great War, was the first to be dedicated exclusively to the subject, perhaps surprisingly, since it has often been regarded as the ‘public-school war’. The social elites from the schools took the principal political and military decisions and were identified in its cultural legacy as responsible for callously sending so many to death in futile battles. The pointedly anonymous ‘old card’ of ‘The General’ in Siegfried Sassoon’s 1917 poem had, we assume, not attended his local state school. From here it was a short journey to the savage attack on the public-school officer class in Joan Littlewood’s seminal musical Oh! What a Lovely War! (1963), and later in the 1990s in Blackadder Goes Forth. The recently departed Michael Howard, in his foreword to our first book, qualified this criticism by pointing out that, for the military leadership, the new industrial war of 1914

demanded a new kind of professionalism that could master the complex interaction of weapons, many of which had only just been invented, and that professionalism could only be learned by a ghastly process of trial and error. Without it, the heroic courage instilled into the pupils of public schools was simply suicidal, and to demand it of troops under their command all too often murderous.²

It is that ‘murderous’ element which has prevailed in public perception.

It was also a ‘public-school war’ in the sense that the ethos schools imbued in their pupils of duty, endurance and sacrifice fitted the conditions in which the war was fought and explains at least some of the reasons for the eventual victory. We set out to examine whether the portrayal of the political and battlefield leadership as the villains of the piece was in fact justified by the facts. Were public-school alumni the cowards hiding behind the front line or the heartless red-tabbed incompetents portrayed in poetry and theatre?

We examined in detail for the first time, through research in individual school archives, the scale of public-school losses. We found that they stood at 19 per cent of those who served, just short of double the national average; so no shirking of responsibility can be asserted by examining that evidence. Courage and selfless duty were evident, we argued, in the battlefield leadership and sacrifice of the younger junior officers, who comprised 90 per cent of public-school casualties. Clearly there was military incompetence, so that charge holds, though this was not confined to Britain, and the most senior officers who were responsible for these flawed decisions were arguably conditioned far more by long years in the military than by the more recent experience of their schools.

The centenary events that ended in 2018 may not have changed wider cultural interpretations, but they have challenged perceptions of a ‘futile war’ and drawn attention to what the officer class, including the much maligned generals, contributed by their example and leadership to a crushing military victory in 1918, in which British troops took a more dominant role than in 1945.

The Public Schools’ Predicament in 1940

The Second World War was also a ‘public-school war’ in that the political and military leadership continued to come as significantly from that background, but it is more commonly labelled as the ‘People’s War’. It was first given that moniker by Winston Churchill in a broadcast on 14 July 1940. He called it ‘the war of the unknown warriors … not only soldiers but the entire population, men, women and children’.³ In the shocked Britain which faced defeat between 1940 and 1942, the ideology of the ‘People’s War’, with its mantra of a democratic and classless sense of community, was seriously at odds with the public-school claim to social exclusiveness and privilege.

At no point during the First World War had there been any comparable questioning of the ruling elites or the status of the schools which had educated them. But the spectre of defeat in 1940 brought political threats to public schools. They were too closely associated with those who had brought Britain to her knees in 1940, fingered in the anonymous polemic Guilty Men (written by three former public schoolboys, including Michael Foot). Their targets were the pre-war politicians of the Conservative Party, such as Neville Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin and Lord Halifax, educated almost exclusively at elite boarding schools like Eton and Harrow, who had not only failed to prevent war, but taken Britain into it so unprepared.

The start of the war caught the public schools at a particularly low ebb. The world outside their gates had witnessed rapid political and social change between the wars, but their ethos and traditions had remained redolent of the Victorian age. Their finances in the Depression years of the 1930s had been weakened by falling numbers, particularly in boarding schools. The leaders of the Headmasters’ Conference (HMC), the umbrella organisation for public-school heads, even opened negotiations with the Board of Education to see if government money could be provided to prop them up, in the form of either state scholarships or income tax relief on school fees. Only in their response to the plight of European Jewry, by offering education and shelter to refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe in the late 1930s, were there the beginnings of a greater sense of altruism, and this little-recognised aspect of their history has been researched for this book.

The events of 1939 and 1940 exacerbated the already precarious situation of many schools. Several were forced to evacuate their premises in September 1939 after military or civil authorities forcibly requisitioned them. Then came Dunkirk, the threat of invasion and the Blitz which not only rapidly increased the number of schools evacuating, but also saw pupil numbers drop further across the whole sector as taxation was raised. It would have been no surprise if more schools had closed, as Weymouth College did in 1940, although the Board of Education was prepared to go beyond its remit in looking for ways to alleviate the threat.

The Contribution of Public Schools to the Second World War

Research for this book shows similar conclusions emerging from the 1939–45 war as in our first book. Casualties among public-school alumni were again close to double the national average and, in numerical terms, not that far short of the 1914–18 figures; junior officers again provided the biggest element, and this in a war where overall British military casualties were less than half those of the First World War. School rolls of honour show large losses of alumni in the Royal Air Force, especially Bomber Command, and in front-line combat units in campaigns like Normandy, where the daily casualty rate was comparable to the Somme. Battlefield leadership by junior officers on the ground, at sea and in the air was just as crucial to success as it had been in 1914–18.

The Second World War was of course won by the courage and sacrifice of millions. There were crucial battlegrounds where public-school alumni played little part, such as service on the merchant ships bringing food across the Atlantic. There were also men in high office like Ernest Bevin, his education ending at the age of eleven, whose contribution to the work of the Wartime Coalition was as important as that of his public-school colleagues. The pioneer of radar, Robert Watson-Watt, found his ladder of opportunity to university and lasting distinction from a Scottish state school, Brechin HS. The contribution of men like Bevin and Watson-Watt begs the question of how many others there might have been from less privileged backgrounds who, with a more egalitarian educational system, could have taken on crucial wartime roles.

There were, however, certainly roles in which the public-school contribution can be said to be critical, and out of all proportion to the size of the sector, such as the military high command and officer corps, the intelligence services and government. Four out of five members of Winston Churchill’s War Cabinet appointed in May 1940 came from public-school backgrounds, while 84 out of 110 others who held ministerial roles during the war came from the same stable, twenty-eight from Eton alone. The top levels of the Civil Service were also dominated by public-school alumni, including Churchill’s two most important advisers, Edward Bridges (Eton), the Cabinet Secretary, and General ‘Pug’ Ismay (Charterhouse), his military assistant.

That contribution can be illustrated by identifying the key decision-makers present on 28 May 1940, when Churchill met with the War Cabinet and then with a wider group of ministers of Cabinet rank who supported him in his determination to reject any accommodation with Germany and to fight on. Over three-quarters of those present at these meetings came from a public-school background, as did the main spokesman for accommodation with Germany, Lord Halifax. Clement Attlee, the Labour leader educated at Haileybury, gave Churchill strong support, and it was another Labour minister, Hugh Dalton, himself an Etonian like Halifax and eleven others present, who recorded the way in which Churchill phrased the passion and moral right behind the critical decision: ‘If this long island story is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.’⁴

Max Hastings has observed that one of the main reasons for Allied success was that ‘they empowered many of the brightest people in their societies to deploy their talents, with an imagination which the dictatorships never matched.’⁵ Public-school alumni were significantly over-represented in roles like the intelligence services and scientific research and development, including medicine. Quantifying this contribution can only be imprecise, but Oxbridge, from where much of the intellectual galaxy came, was overwhelmingly dominated by public schools. At Lincoln College, Oxford, one of the less patrician colleges, Brian Harrison says that four-fifths of undergraduates between the wars came from this background.⁶

Intelligence operations contributed much to ultimate victory, in breaking German codes at Bletchley Park and in other clandestine organisations like the Special Operations Executive (SOE). By their very nature, and by the urgent demands of war, these relied for recruitment on familiar school and Oxbridge networks. When the first official history of SOE was published in 1966, some reviewers protested at the space taken up by the names of the schools and universities which key personnel had attended. M.R.D. Foot, the historian and himself at Winchester, defended this by explaining that England at the time was

run almost entirely by an educated governing class drawn from Headmasters’ Conference public schools. Among these schools there was a pecking order, endlessly contested in detail but well known in outline to everyone concerned; to know which school a man had been at was to know something about his probable competence and character.⁷

Not all agree. Dominic Sandbrook questioned this supposed link between school and character, saying that it ‘tends to matter only to insiders, the public at large finding such debates utterly baffling’.⁸

Character proved anyway to be a double-edged sword, since those same intelligence services recruited by these networks men from elite schools who betrayed their country. When Kim Philby (Westminster) was recruited to the Secret Intelligence Service in 1940, the deputy head of SIS, who had known Philby’s father when they were both colonial officials in India, vouched for him in these terms: ‘I was asked about him and said I knew his people.’⁹ Philby used his Cambridge networks in the 1930s to recruit to the Communist cause Guy Burgess (Eton), Donald Maclean (Gresham’s) and Anthony Blunt (Marlborough), the ‘Cambridge Spies’. Another product of a prestigious school, Oswald Mosley (Winchester), leader of the British Union of Fascists, spent half the war in prison after the Home Secretary reported to the War Cabinet in May 1940 that MI5 believed that ‘25 to 30 per cent of the BUF would be willing, if ordered, to go to any lengths on behalf of Germany’.¹⁰

The professional officer corps of all three services in 1939 were the products of military colleges also overwhelmingly dominated by public schools, comprising 85 per cent of entrants to Sandhurst and Woolwich between 1920 and 1939, and 90 per cent at RAF Cranwell. While the war’s demands of necessity diluted and, to a lesser extent, democratised officer selection, that public-school influence remained strong in the battlefield leadership of junior officers in all three services. This was not confined to men, for the expansion of the women’s uniformed services allowed alumnae from girls’ schools opportunities for vital roles from Bletchley Park to the Air Transport Auxiliary. Whereas the public-school contribution in 1914–18 is primarily remembered as leadership and sacrifice in the war of attrition on the Western Front, its contribution in 1939–45 is more diverse and reliant on intellect and imagination. In both world wars Britain was essentially led by a public-school-educated elite in the political and military spheres. The fact that victory came in both wars, and that Britain emerged from those wars in a better state than most other protagonists, with its democracy intact and its economy at least surviving, suggests that the public-school governing elite was at least competent. Whether a more open, meritocratic elite would have done better is an interesting counterfactual question.

The Opportunity Lost

The end of the war brought the opportunity for boarding public schools to end their social exclusiveness and open their doors to pupils paid for by the state. Public schools were excluded from the provisions of the 1944 Education Act which reformed state secondary education, but R.A. Butler (Marlborough), the President of the Board of Education, sought in another way to draw them into closer ties with the state system. In 1942 he set up the Fleming Committee, whose report in 1944 recommended a way in which public schools could be more closely integrated with state education, with schools allocating 25 per cent of boarding places to pupils paid for by the state, recommendations which were accepted at the first post-war HMC Annual Meeting in January 1946. Detractors suggested that schools were merely seeking to secure their financial future, but by 1945 their numbers and finances had begun markedly to improve, so they had less need of state help.

The landslide victory of Labour in the July 1945 General Election initially sparked fear in public schools. Labour’s National Executive in 1943 had resolved effectively to abolish them by requiring all children to attend state schools, but Labour in power, with other pressing priorities, showed no wish to abolish public schools or even coerce them. The key ministers were moderate social patriots, who had served alongside Churchill through the war and valued Britain’s institutions. Prime Minister Clement Attlee was fond of Haileybury and believed that not allowing schools to exist outside the state system was incompatible with his notion of freedom. His government allowed individual local authorities to pay for places at boarding schools along the lines of Fleming’s recommendations, but no national system emerged, causing the scheme to wither on the vine. The cost to the state of these places could not easily be justified in straitened times, while the difficulty of establishing criteria for selection of candidates also proved a stumbling-block.

The public schools themselves, sensing the dwindling interest from Labour in the Fleming scheme and no longer in need of state money, which had anyway threatened their independence, moved on to securing their own futures and prospered under the improved economic conditions of the 1950s. Fleming, coming as it did on a tide of popular wartime support for a more equal society never likely to be as strong again, represented the best opportunity since 1945 to make progress on the issue. Social historian Anthony Sampson, commenting in 1962 on the significance of the timing, wrote that the common danger of 1940 produced ‘an intense interest in the future … but the post-war years have had a tragic sense of bathos … the social ferment has subsided, the public schools have prospered as never before, and Oxford and Cambridge have re-fashioned their gilded cages.’¹¹

Public schools were helped to prosper by the comforting cultural memory of the Second World War and by perceptions that this time they had enjoyed a ‘good war’. The heroes in cultural terms came mainly from the officer class, now portrayed in lastingly popular 1950s war films like The Dam Busters. Their codes of honour, dismissed by First World War critics as anachronistic and sentimentalised, now provided admired leadership in moving films about the triumph of British arms and intellect, with more cerebral and complex heroes like Alan Turing (Sherborne) also later honoured. The star actors mostly came from public-school backgrounds and had fought in the war themselves, including Richard Todd (Shrewsbury), Anthony Quayle (Rugby) and Kenneth More (Victoria, Jersey). Contrast this with the cultural legacy of the First World War, when officers had been lampooned. Captain Edmund Blackadder and General Melchett in Blackadder Goes Forth were portrayed as the epitome of their decadent class. By contrast, in the most popular comedy series about the Second World War, Dad’s Army, it is the class-conscious Captain Mainwaring, from the local grammar school, who is the main butt of the humour, while the public-school educated Sergeant Wilson, an officer in the First World War, is kindly, effortlessly charming and more in touch with the needs of his men.

The survival and flourishing of public schools since 1945 owe much to the British experience in the war. Recollections of the war remained rose-tinted as the nation basked in the aura of a job well done. Churchill’s state funeral in 1965, one of the great public ceremonies of history, elevated him to certain immortality in the minds of millions of Britons for whom he was a heroic figure. The reputation and value of Clement Attlee in wartime and in shaping the peace has also been enhanced in more divisive political times. Nothing much has happened since to change perceptions of the war in general, and the year 1940 in particular, as the most sublime moment in the nation’s history. Among the beneficiaries of this comforting nostalgia have been our traditional institutions, including public schools, from where Churchill, Attlee and so many other war heroes came.

Public schools have moved on a long way since 1945. Rebranded in the 1980s as ‘independent schools’, they have improved the education they offer, now emphasising academic rigour, creativity and social responsibility as well as the more traditional training of character. ‘Broadening access’, along the lines Fleming recommended, may be the dominant strategy of many public schools today, although now largely with funds raised themselves, but the hopes raised by his report of bringing state and independent sectors of education closer together remain elusive. Boris Johnson’s drive since the 2019 General Election to ‘level up’ and increase social mobility in schools is a recognition of how little has changed since 1945. Post-war Britain would have been a very different place if the spirit of the ‘people’s war’ had translated into a ‘people’s peace’ in education. This book explains how far the Second World War was a ‘public-school war’ and why it was also followed by a ‘public-school peace’.

Postscript

When the writing of this book was already complete, coronavirus struck our nation and its educational system. Independent schools face greater challenges than at any time since 1940. Economic and social disruption, like wars, are history’s greatest impetus to change. This crisis provides an opportunity to re-think the relationship between the wider educational system and these schools, whose independence and excellence are so important in meeting the challenges ahead. An opportunity was lost in the wake of the Second World War to create a national scheme for opening independent schools to a wider social base. A new opportunity now presents itself to open up places at a cost to the state no greater than it pays for them in the maintained sector. Schools and government need both compromise and creative thinking to ensure that the opportunity is not again lost.

Part I

The Opportunity Opens

Twice within twenty-one years, public schools have found their existence and educational purpose, along with the lives of their pupils and alumni, dominated by world war. The Great War cast a long shadow over the schools in the 1920s and, as it passed from the living memory of schoolchildren in the 1930s, so the spectre of another war loomed. This war was to be very different, the Home Front as dangerous as the fighting front in its first two years, and public schools not only found their physical survival at stake but also experienced serious questioning of their privileged status.

Chapter 1

The Long Shadow of the Great War

The Great War cast a long shadow over public-school life. The schools emerged from it with a strong sense of pride in what their boys had achieved and sacrificed, along with clear expectations of the next generation. On Haileybury’s memorial was written:

In proud remembrance of 577 Haileyburians who served in the Great War and were found faithful unto death … Ye who come after them forget not their sacrifice, claim as your heritage a portion of their spirit and, in peace or in war, take up their sword of service. So shall the living and the dead be for all time bound in one fellowship.

The belief was strong in schools in the immediate aftermath of the war that continuity of tradition would validate what these Haileyburians and others had died for.

Such belief could not easily survive pressure for change from the world outside. The games-dominated rigour of the character training which had prepared young men to administer the Empire and lead their platoons over the top was less suitable for the very different cultural and political challenges of the post-war world. Already cracks had appeared in the edifice of the British Empire, which had been ‘the single greatest driver determining the character of the public schools between the 1870s and 1930s’.¹ Rampant nationalism and the rise of extremes on both right and left undermined democracy across Europe. In Britain, women had been given the vote, two inter-war Labour governments and the General Strike of 1926 bore witness to an upsurge in worker power and class consciousness, and the world of communication and entertainment was revolutionised by the wireless, popular music and mass cinema audiences.

For the first two decades of the twentieth century ‘the public schools were secure in their rural seclusion from the vulgar gaze of socialists and proletarians’.² Now they began to face accusations of social exclusiveness in a country where, despite Lloyd George’s promise to create a land fit for heroes, the education system continued to reinforce class divisions and predetermined chances in life. The toxic political issue which public schools were to become had its beginnings in these inter-war years, as Labour replaced the Liberals as the main opposition to Conservatives and criticism of class-based privilege sharpened.

Change did come to schools in the inter-war years, but it was slow and grudging. Public schools continued to look back too much to the models of the past, even to Victorian times. Although they were used to producing the leaders of the nation, they lacked, in the inter-war years, strong headmasters with the boldness to promote across the sector visionary new educational ideas and practice, although new schools founded in the inter-war years like Stowe and Bryanston could shed some of the baggage of the past. Alec Waugh’s 1917 accusation that tradition and convention had replaced ideals in public schools was still valid in 1939, for the inter-war years were a torpid era on which the sector cannot look back with much satisfaction.³

In the 1930s political and cultural criticism merged with serious financial pressures to threaten the future of public schools. The Depression brought a fall in pupil numbers and consequent financial problems, as schools were exposed to adverse market forces for the first time. Weymouth College closed in 1940, and other more famous schools came under threat, as the leaders of the sector went with a begging-bowl to government. None of these problems had been resolved by the time the next war started, the outbreak of which was broadly anticipated and provoked none of the jingoism of 1914. Tommy Macpherson, just leaving Fettes in 1939, wrote that ‘the politicians kept saying war would not happen, but every dog in the street knew it was coming and that there was very little we could do about it.’⁴

The Legacy of the Great War

Frank Fletcher was sixty-five years old in 1935 and had been headmaster of Charterhouse since 1911, having previously been headmaster of Marlborough. A distinguished classical scholar, notably formal in his approach, he was the leading head of his generation and had been Chairman of the Headmasters’ Conference (HMC) in eight separate years, including 1914 and 1915. His headmasterships were dominated by the Great War and its aftermath. In May 1915 a grieving parent wrote to him: ‘I have often thought of schoolmasters during this war and think that their sorrows must be next to the parents, as they know the boys so well.’⁵ The three schools at which Fletcher had taught – Rugby, Marlborough and Charterhouse – suffered the loss of over 2,000 boys in the war, mostly well known to him.

That memory of the Great War hung over public schools as the post-war generation grew up in the shadow of death. About one in every five public schoolboys who served was killed, double the national average. Casualties tended to be higher in the more socially exclusive boarding schools with strong Officer Training Corps (OTC) contingents, as a higher proportion of their pupils were commissioned in front-line infantry regiments as subalterns, the most dangerous rank in the army. Eton, the biggest school in 1914, lost 1,157 boys, followed by Marlborough with 749, 90 per cent of them junior army officers. Marlborough’s Senior Prefect in summer 1914, Harold Roseveare, left school on 30 July 1914 and was dead on the Aisne by mid-September. His successor, Sidney Woodroffe, left that December and won a posthumous Victoria Cross at Hooge in July 1915. Charles Douie wrote that of the fifty-six boys in his boarding house at Rugby in 1910, twenty-three died in the war, a figure of over 40 per cent. He wrote that ‘we who have lost our friends know well that much of the richness and beauty of life passed with them for ever’.⁶

Schools in the post-war years were physically and emotionally shaped by the war memorials which they built to commemorate their dead. These memorials represented ideals of duty, sacrifice and pride in the school’s contribution to the national cause. Few doubted that ‘public-school spirit’ had played an important part in the victory, the Dean of Canterbury telling his audience on speech day at King’s in 1920 that the public schools had ‘risen to the test in a manner which was to their lasting honour and the honour of the country’.⁷ The Harrow chapel was ‘virtually a mausoleum’, with almost every modern furnishing ‘a memento of a dead army or navy Harrovian’.⁸ When Stanley Baldwin opened the Harrow War Memorial building in 1926 he dedicated it to the fallen of the past. For him and so many others within the public-school system, victory ‘confirmed the superiority of the English way of educating its leaders’, Harrow’s self-image shaped by its experience of the war.⁹ At the unveiling of the statue of a dying Highland officer in the main quad at Fettes in 1921, General Macpherson told the assembled school that they should hold the memory of the dead and their gallant deeds in trust: ‘Duty and sacrifice are the foundations on which patriotism, justice and freedom, the birth-right of every citizen in our great empire, are firmly and everlastingly fixed.’¹⁰

At every school, teaching staff who returned from the war exerted a profound influence. The ranks of HMC headmasters in 1939 included eighteen who had been decorated with either the DSO or MC or both in the Great War and many others who had fought. Hugh Lyon, head of Edinburgh Academy and then Rugby, was a published war poet. When the Reverend Ernest Crosse left his teaching post at Marlborough to become head of Christ’s College in New Zealand, he took with him to hang in the chapel the Union flag he had used to cover the coffins of those whose burial services he had taken at the front.¹¹ At Sherborne in 1929 five out of six bachelor housemasters had served on the Western Front, with two MCs and a DSO between them; the sixth had been rejected on medical grounds and felt it deeply. Sherborne in the inter-war years was ‘a very monastic establishment and still deeply influenced by traditional values which had been reinforced by first-hand experience of the First World War on the part of many masters’.¹² Survivors’ guilt affected senior housemasters at Charterhouse who were ‘agonisingly aware of their own unworthiness, compared with friends who had fallen, and haunted by memories of a land of lost content’.¹³

Tragedy could easily follow. Ronald Gurner was one of twelve Marlborough masters who went to war in 1914; only five survived. Gurner was badly wounded at Arras, winning the MC, but his nerves were in a delicate state when he returned to Marlborough after the war. One friend recalled that ‘in the middle of a conversation, his florid face would go blank, his eyes would glaze over and he would appear to be far away.’¹⁴ He became headmaster of King Edward VII, Sheffield, and of Whitgift, and he had many qualities of educational leadership – a first class degree, an imposing physical presence and a reputation as a reformer – but his behaviour at Whitgift in the 1930s became increasingly erratic. Financial problems followed, and he killed himself in 1939 by drinking a bottle of corrosive disinfectant. Delayed war trauma contributed to this final, terrible act, according to his family, for he often felt that he had let down his friends by not dying with them on the battlefield. In an autobiographical novel, Pass Guard at Ypres, published in 1929, Gurner wrote of what haunted him:

Ypres rises mystic in the sunset glow,

The Menin Road winds where the waters flow,

And those strange ghosts that ever come and go

Speak to me sometime.¹⁵

Public-School System and Ethos

Public schools trace their history from the Middle Ages. In the three centuries following the Norman Conquest, advanced schooling available to the public was supervised by the Church or overseen by other bodies such as boroughs or by the local lord. From the 1380s new schools, endowed by patrons, spread education more widely and catered to a new rural gentry class. They included Winchester, founded in 1382, and Eton, in 1440. These schools were ‘public’ in the sense that places were not the preserve of trainees for the Church, and most pupils paid fees.

The term ‘public school’ emerged into common parlance in the early nineteenth century. This presaged a remarkable expansion in the Victorian era, fuelled by the growing prosperity of the business and professional classes who wanted a quality education for their sons which the state could not provide, and by the expansion of railways. What all these schools had in common was independence of state control and income from payment of fees. For boys and girls in state schools, education ended in their elementary schools at

Reviews for Public Schools and the Second World War

[robpalmer-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I will come straight to the point; this book is good and well worth reading. The authors have in-depth knowledge on the subject and have researched it well. Basically, the book charts the social change within education from the end of the First World War to the present day. Public Schools feature in the history of this country and also the military history of this nation, which makes this book an important element of the historiography of Second World War.The first two chapters examine the legacy of the First World War, and how the Public Schools prepared for the second war. Part II is Winning the War and comprises four chapters. The role of the Public Schools is assessed in the war in the air and sea, then on the land, and then the Secret War and Science and Innovation. I am pleased that coverage is wider that just the armed services as the role of technology and science is often overlooked. Part III covers the post-war period and Part IV takes us up to the present day.There are the usual sixteen pages of photographs in the centre of the book, which are interesting, but in my opinion, they add little as the value of this book is in the content of the text. There are two indexes, one of schools and the other general, which is useful and pleasing to see.In summary, an excellent book that added to my knowledge and understanding of the role of Public Schools in the Second World War.