While I Remember

by Stephen McKenna

II

There would be a smaller public-school literature if the privilege of describing or criticising public schools were restricted to those who had seen them from both the form-room and the common room.[28] "Ian Hay" speaks somewhere of the schoolmaster's life as being the worst paid and the most richly rewarded; and, if no remuneration compensates the damage to nerves, temper and faith when a man tries simultaneously to maintain order, to excite interest and to impart instruction to fifty or sixty boys of fourteen to seventeen, reward comes from contact with the minds of boys first stirring to wakefulness and with the characters of boys who, for all their mischief and resourcefulness of attack, are lovable in their ingenuousness, their humour, their chivalry, their conservatism, their strict and strictly-circumscribed honour.

And, if faith is sometimes tried, faith in public-school education was justified in the years from 1914 to 1918. If it be granted hypothetically that the war was won for England and, further, that it was won by soldiers in the field rather than by ministers, munition-makers, bankers and military correspondents, it was won by the leadership of the officers and by the fighting quality of the men; and the leaders were supplied first to the old army and then to the new, for the first years of the war, almost wholly by the public schools. When, at the end, the net was thrown more widely, the quality of the officers deteriorated; though they lacked nothing of courage, they could furnish no substitute for something indefinable but recognisable—never so quickly recognised as by the men they led—which only a public school provides.

Apart from its training in character, public-school education was justified in that, if the aim of education be to teach a man how to learn, the versatility of the old public-schoolboy was a rare tribute to his education; and versatility is not confined to knowing the commercial or even the scientific jargon of half-a-dozen languages. Hardly a man was not in some degree uprooted; and all took to their new work and to their new responsibilities as lightheartedly as they would to a new game. It is in this sense that the British may fairly claim to be an imperial people: the empire, since the days of Warren Hastings (an Old Westminster), has been administered by public-school boys with public-school methods and the public-school tradition of responsibility; if the empire disintegrate, it will be because the time has come for the administration to pass into native hands or because the work of the public schools abroad is stultified at home. It was the public-schoolboy who officered the new armies, the new civil service, the whole of a new nation organising itself for war.

Though outward forms change little in a school so old as Westminster, the war had brought a new spirit and a new vent for enthusiasm: all but a handful were in the uniform of the officers' training corps; most of the time out of school was given up to parades and drills, shooting-practise, lectures and instruction in map-reading; and war was the one subject that competed with the narrower interests of the school.

Neither in 1914 nor ten years before the testing of war would an unbiased observer have suggested that English public schools were incapable of improvement; at both times, however, he might have insisted that the improvement must come from the homes of the boys. In effect, English parents try to get their sons, who are destined for a controlling position in the life of the nation, educated for half-a-dozen of their most critical years at a price which is less than they would pay for an equal time at a moderate hotel. The emoluments of a schoolmaster, as of a soldier or a clergyman, would tempt no one who had the assurance or the contrivance to support himself in commerce, in the civil service or at the bar; and for that reason a fellow of All Souls is not commonly found in the army, on the staff of a school or in holy orders. The vaunted long holidays give a schoolmaster the leisure to keep his mind fresh with travel; they do not supply the means. To marry on his salary is to look forward to years of sordid economies, rewarded at length by the grant of a house and of the right to make money as an inn-keeper.

The establishment fees like those for tuition and board are so insufficient that most schools are hampered for want of money to build, to rebuild, to equip and to replenish; the sanitary accommodation is usually inadequate and sometimes scandalous. This cannot be remedied until parents are willing to pay more; and the mental attitude of many parents is one of irresponsible relief at getting rid of their sons for three-quarters of the year and, with them, of the educational and moral problems that they have artfully shelved until their sons reach school age. Between that which a parent expects a boy to learn at school and that which the school expects him to have learned at home, many unnecessary lessons are taught and many necessary lessons are left untaught.

If, in care and training, a boy were regarded as not less important than a race-horse, the public schools would need to ask nothing more. An adequate payment for the responsibility of education would attract the best scholars in the country and would enable them to retire in affluence after ten years' service and before their hearts were broken by routine. The schoolmaster could dictate to the parent not less than a trainer dictates to an owner, and in this way the gaps in public-school education might be filled; if music, French and German were taught abroad during the school holidays, if the rudiments of divinity and English had been imparted at home in the first twelve years of a boy's life, if the intellectual atmosphere in which a boy is brought up were less fog-infested, the foundations on which the schoolmaster has to build would be more secure.

Amateur and professional schoolmasters, temporary and permanent civil servants, with those who were over age or unfit for the army, met to the number of many thousands in these days on one field of war activity which deserves a few words of commemoration. To relieve the regular police, already depleted, in their normal duties and to furnish an additional force to guard railway-bridges, power-stations and similar vital parts from enemy attack, the government authorized the enrolment of special constables; for those who were engaged by day, a separate unit with distinctive duties was established in the headquarters central detachment. Divided into sections manned from the clubs and government offices,[29] this detachment was entrusted with the task of patrolling the grounds of Buckingham Palace nightly from 9.0 until 5.0; in addition, its members were required to report at Scotland House at every alarm of air-raid or riot and to hold themselves in readiness to be sent whithersoever required. Organised under a commandant, inspectors, sub-inspectors and sergeants, arrayed in a uniform of its own, equipped with truncheons, whistles, brassards and torches and drilled—whenever it could be collected—in the gardens of the Temple, the headquarters detachment watched and waited through four years.

The spirit of the men was better than the use that was made of them. It would be consoling to think that the mere existence of such a force discouraged enemy agents from their work of destruction; certainly moral influence was seldom backed by a successful trial of strength; and, when the truncheons were surrendered, very few had been drawn and fewer still blooded. Once or twice, when German shops were being looted, the headquarters detachment was sent to Limehouse or Shoreditch, there as a rule to be mewed up in reserve at the local police-station while the necessary work was done by the ordinary constables; once or twice a cordon would be made round a shattered building or a fallen aeroplane; but for the most part the detachment sat in Scotland House from the summons until the dismissal or patrolled Buckingham Palace gardens through the night, waiting for a conflict which never took place. Before the end, each constable must have sat in the guardroom for one or two hundred hours and patrolled the grounds for one or two thousand miles; the biscuits and tobacco that he consumed are to be reckoned by scores of pounds, the coffee that he drank by tens of gallons; and, though some at least had seen the sun rise more often in the summers before the war, none ever fancied that he could see it with such weariness and loathing. For men who were already overworked by day, the additional fatigue was mistaken patriotism; and many dropped out before the armistice. If, however, few members of the detachment can look back on their service with much sense of pleasure or profit, some can at least hold themselves indebted for new friendships.