JONATHAN GATHORNE-HARDY: THE PUBLIC SCHOOL PHENOMENON 597-1977 (published 1977)
- See also my notes on Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy on
the story of nannies. The author seems to have looked into social history, but not as a vehicle for Jewish obsessions. RW 21 nov 2021
-(Sept 97. My copy bought in Lincoln, remaindered. Penguin book. I can just about remember perusing it while sitting in a tea-shop)
-Some b/w pix, inc Arnold, bellowing for fags, Miss Beale & Miss Buss, cavernous Upper Classroom at Westminster, with 'shell', top-hatted boys, rowing. No illustration pre-19th century. Favourable blurb only from C P Snow (why..??)
Map inc greater London separately.
-Unfortunately Gathorne-Hardy (b 1933) is a Freudian and therefore concerned with beatings, canings, schoolboy crushes, masturbation, penis size, sodomy &c, and 180 'subject homo-eroticism' watching tenderly over young boys having been 'unable to take the next stage of development'. Also guilt, fear, and religion. I think there are psychoanalytical comments on food.
Bit of a ragbag; much of the material seems determined by what he found in his reading, notably on Arnold & various flogging headmasters, on girls, on popular books, on progressive education, and famous people who went through the system, e.g. Anthony Blunt, Evelyn Waugh, Shelley, Aldous Huxley. So there are digressions in an unfocused wandering style.
He likes popular books which he treats perhaps a bit over-seriously. And e.g. books commenting on public schools and other institutions - eg T E Lawrence's The Mint. However he does allow himself some excursions into the actual and nominal purposes of education.
-28:
'.. Practically all histories.. say.. 'Public schools were founded to provide education for the poor'; they then.. [with] glib sarcasm .. point out .. they 'ended by being anything but public and being reserved.. for the very rich.'
This does not seem.. accurate. We have just seen that the main purpose of the grammar schools was to provide recruits for the new Church. .. it was the poor who were taught.. not out of charity, but because, until the Church grew powerful, there was no incentive to learn. The training.. of the rich and noble took place in their own houses.. .. This.. is the inference I draw from two .. crucial accounts in the early centuries: ‘Whatever youths he saw of remarkable intelligence, he got hold of them,’ it was said of Albert, headmaster of St Peter's. And King's, Canterbury, expelled them if they were '... fools..'
The cleverest boys were seized to fuel the Church. No doubt they were easily persuaded. .. primitive... As the centuries passed this did.. become an adjunct to the charitable activities of the Church: as education became a method of advancement this charity gained in weight. The origin was not charitable. This correction.. may seem trifling, but it is significant; it shows.. for almost the first time that process.. whereby anything that persisted gained.. the momentum of tradition. ..'
[Note: it occurs to me that they might have taught Hebrew or Aramaic or Syriac, or some such language more relevant to Jewish 'learning'. Instead, they preferred a Lingua Franca as in the 'British' Empire, French Empire Arab-speaking world, and so on. But of course Jews wanted their books kept secret. And preferred local groups of Jews connected linguistically. -RW]
-94ff: [Note: popular literature: long look at Eric or Little by Little. (He falls into sin - this sounds just like the idea of cannabis leading to hard drugs, or alcohol to ruin as in Hogarth]
-133-134: [Note: popular literature: public schools, prefect justice, and Bulldog Drummond, Berry by Dornford Yates, John Buchan's books; Gathorne-Hardy says in effect he's used Richard Usborne's Clubland Heroes for details. He also thinks these led to Mickey Spillane, Charteris, Ian Fleming & to US cop shows. Conan Doyle is mentioned in the book, but I think solely as a pupil]
-230: [Note: popular literature:] G A Henty and Boys Own Paper, more from Clubland Heroes
-217-8: [Games, and particularly WW1 as a game (cp idea it was like Homer). Gathorne-Hardy seems not to realise that previous wars were such a pushover that it's not surprising.
NB:
On fall of British Empire etc: 218 wonders whether the Somme was lost on the playing fields of Sherborne. 219ff Corelli Barnet is cited in 1972 as having written that the wartime failures of Britain were the fault of the public schools. Apparently this caused a considerable fuss. (Possibly related to abortive Labour Party report to get rid of these schools - in fact according to Ian Hislop they received a boost when the grammar schools started closing.) 222 has naive stuff on 'we' winning the war.
-223: Erving Goffman's 1961 book Asylums & 'total society' (not EG's phrase, says G-H).
-250ff: Chapter 10 on girls - evidently by its isolation a bit uncomfortable for G-H. (When in Lincoln I bought a 1934 copy of a school mag, the Penrhosian (in Colwyn Bay) but it's not on G-H's map). G-H has a lot on Angela Brazil and the Lesbianism in her books.
-295ff: Chapter on Progressive Schools. Includes Sanderson of Oundle - again we find G-H leans on Wells. Dartington. A S Neill. Rudolf Steiner. Russell.
I found this in https://www.big-lies.org/instauration/Instauration-1981-09-September-pt2.pdf
... a good quote from Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy: "Anyone studying the English class system will have noticed certain similarities between the
extreme upper and lower classes: toughness, xenophobia, indifference to public opinion, passion for racing and gambling, fondness for plain speaking and plain untampered food."
Writing about the British worker is admittedly not easy. I should explain that "worker" in England is a courtesy title, like "the Honourable" for prime ministers. It no more means that a man actually works than that a prime minister is honourable. Still, you can often tell a worker from his dress, which is more than one can say for many life peers. A worker wears a long greatcoat and a flat cap. He has a woebegone expression on his face, and keeps his hands in his pockets, except when receiving a hand-out. I see the type frequently.
On the other hand surely we ought to take into account that aspect of the English worker's character which makes him truly English, and which sometimes surfaces even nowadays.
This is best illustrated by a story from the time of the General Strike in 1926. A young member of the upper classes was driving a bus as a strike-breaker in the East End of London. At one point, a crowd of people gathered and turned nasty. A woman shouted, "You bastard son of a whore." Quick as a flash, our temporary bus driver answered, "Hullo, Mother, I never thought to see you here!" The crowd, being English, burst out laughing, and his bus was one of the few which did not have its windows smashed that day. If you want to know what English working people were like only seventy years ago, listen to the songs of the old-time music-hall: bawdy, violent,
sentimental, good-hearted. ... [I suspect most music-hall songs were in fact written or assembled by jews—RW]
Research, scanning, HTML, website © Rae West. Uploaded 21 November 2021. Written in about 1997. I thought it's of sufficient interest to be uploaded.