We should not overlook the role the public schools are playing and will play in the absorption into the middle class of the new groups that have entered it from industry, science, communications, and management in the last decade. Many men in these groups had no public-school education. In fact, a decade ago many of them were among the severest critics of the system. But a surprisingly large number today are sending their sons to public schools. The desire to keep up with the Joneses—the Joneses in this case being the old middle class that sent its sons to public schools as a matter of course—is one reason for this. Another is the recognition that the public schools endow their graduates with certain social advantages.
When change occurs in Britain it often takes place behind a façade that appears unchanged. The battle over the public schools is certain to take place, and, whichever group wins, the schools themselves will be altered by it. It is inconceivable that they will be eliminated from the British scene. It is equally inconceivable that they will not change under the pressure of the times.
In the spring of 1956 I lunched with a wartime friend who said he had given up smoking in order to save money to send young Nigel through Winchester. Someone else at the table muttered that "this public-school business" was a lot of damned nonsense. My friend smiled. "Damn it," he said, "you [the mutterer] are always talking about how well the Russians do things. Well, I read in The Times this morning that Khrushchev says they're going to start schools to train leaders. What's good enough for old Khrush ought to be good enough for you pinks down at the London School of Economics!"
THE ARMY, THE NAVY, THE AIR FORCE
"The Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, they always play the game." So sang the girls and boys of careless, complacent Britain in the thirties. The verse symbolizes the middle-class public-school atmosphere of the services' place in British society. Prior to World War II the three services enjoyed a more honored place in British society than did the Army and the Navy in American society.
The commanding officer of a battalion on home service thought himself socially superior to the leading industrialist of the neighborhood, and, in most cases, the industrialist agreed. The retired Navy commander or Army major was a recognized figure in the life of the village or town in which he lived—a figure of fun, perhaps, to the bright young people down from Oxford or Cambridge, and an easy mark for social caricaturists and cartoonists, but also a man of importance in the affairs of the community.
He was also, in many cases, a man of means. Pay in the pre-war Army was ridiculously small, and an officer in a "good" regiment needed a private income if he were to live comfortably. Again, the retired officer and the serving officer knew a good deal about the world, a circumstance forced upon him (for he was never especially cordial to foreigners) by the necessity of garrisoning the Empire. He had lived in India or China or Egypt and fought in South Africa or France or Mesopotamia, and he had formed firm conclusions about these countries and their people. These conclusions, often delivered with the certainty of an order on the parade ground, raised the hackles of his juniors and were derided as the reactionary ideas of relics from Poona, the citadel of conservatism in India. There is an old service verse about the "Poona attitude":
There's a regiment from Poona
That would infinitely sooner
Play single-handed polo,
A sort of solo polo,
Than play a single chukker
With a chap who isn't pukka.
After the Second World War had burst on Britain in all its fury and in its aftermath, it occurred to many who had fumed while the ex-officers talked that the Blimps had known what they were talking about. Earlier I noted that the retired officers were right in their predictions about what would happen in India once the British withdrew, and that the politicians and publicists of the left were wrong. I do not suggest that the British should or could have remained. But several hundred thousand lives might have been saved if the withdrawal had been slower.