Seventy Years Among Savages

by Henry S. Salt

Among Dr. Hornby’s assistant masters were several others whose eccentricities have been a fruitful subject of anecdote and legend. Russell Day, a quiet and insignificant-looking little man, had a mordant wit and gift of ready epigram, which caused him to be dreaded alike by master and boys. “Friend, thou hast learned this lesson with a crib: a crib is a thing in which thou liest,” was his remark in the course of a Theocritus lesson to a member of his Division, from whom I heard the story full forty years later. There were two boys of the name of Bankes, one known afterwards as a distinguished K.C., the other a lazy youth who never knew his lessons and was wont to mumble the Greek or Latin very slowly in order to postpone the moment of discovery. On one of these occasions Day leaned back in his chair and said in his drawling tones: “Bankes, Bankes, you remind me of the banks where the bees suck and with their murmuring make me sleep.” I remember how a friend and schoolfellow of mine named Swan, who was a pupil of Day’s, showed me a copy of his Latin verses which had drawn the following annotation: “Olor! You cycnus.” Not less characteristic was Day’s curt dismissal of a youth named Cole (report says it was the future director of the Bank of England): “Then, Cole, you may scuttle.” Nor did he hesitate to turn his wit against his colleagues or himself. He called his pony “Lucifer,” because, as he said, “When you see him coming, it announces the approach of Day.”

A still more remarkable teacher was William Johnson, author of “Ionica,” who afterwards took the name of Cory, a man of real genius, whose enforced departure from Eton (for he did not leave, as was currently supposed, from some sudden whim of his own) was the tragedy of his lifetime, a “strange wounding,” as he calls it in one of his published letters. Of “Billy Johnson” many descriptions have been written. Here is a passage from one of them:

“In appearance, as in everything else, he was unlike the typical schoolmaster: his thoughtful, handsome, somewhat sensuous features were altogether out of the common; and owing to his short sight he had a dreamy, mystic, inquiring way of looking at you which was sometimes a little disquieting to the schoolboy mind. There were occasions, too, when we dreaded his tart sayings (the very school books written by him bristled with epigrams), and listened with some anxiety to his sharp, staccato utterances, or watched him during those ‘accusing silences’ by which, hardly less than by his barbed speeches, he could awe the most unruly class. His blindness led to a prevalent story (apocryphal, I believe, as it was told also of other persons at different times) that he had been seen pursuing a hen down Windsor Hill, and making futile grabs at her, under the belief that she was his hat; but it is certain that he was sometimes seen standing stock-still in School Yard, or some open space, apparently unconscious of all observers or passers-by, and wrapt in a profound daydream. Singular he undoubtedly was, to a degree that was inconvenient to a schoolmaster; and there were queer anecdotes of certain too generous suppers that he gave to his favourites among the boys, when he began by politely overlooking that they were getting drunk, and ended by unceremoniously kicking them downstairs.”[4]

“Formerly wise men used to grow beards. Now other persons do so.” This sentence in Nuces, an exercise-book of William Johnson’s compilation, was supposed by us to be aimed at another assistant master, a bearded clergyman, bluff, honest, mannerless, and universally disliked, who went by the name of “Stiggins.” He had a detestable habit of standing at right angles to any one with whom he was conversing, while he looked straight away in front of him, his long red beard streaming down to his waist, and when he spoke, he jerked his words at you, as it were, from round the corner. His rudeness was a by-word; and the attempt sometimes made to excuse it, on the ground that it “was not intended,” did not appeal very strongly I think, either to masters or to boys: and justly, for surely the only sort of rudeness which can be pardoned is that which is intended. There are occasions, rare, but real, when it is necessary and wholesome to be rude; but to be rude without knowing it is the very acme of ill manners, and that was precisely the kind of discourtesy in which “Stiggins” was unequalled.

The story of how “Stiggins” was once nearly thrown into Barnes Pool, a by-water of the Thames, by a riotous troop of boys, has been told in more than one of the books about Eton; it was a curious coincidence that he should have almost shared the fate of his reverend predecessor in Pickwick, who was dipped in a horse-trough by the infuriated Mr. Weller. This incident was, perhaps, the greatest of the many scandals that occurred at Eton during Dr. Hornby’s headmastership.

It has often struck me as strange that I should owe to such a plain and unadorned barbarian as “Stiggins” my first introduction to Keats’s poems: he gave me, as a prize, Moxon’s edition of the works. He also “sent me up for good” (for Latin verses), an honour of which I was rather unpleasantly reminded, some twenty or more years afterwards, when he had retired from Eton to a country parsonage; for in order to raise funds for a proposed “restoration” of his church, he conceived the idea of soliciting “for the glory of God,” as he expressed it, a subscription from every Old Etonian who in bygone days had been “sent up for good” in his Division. There was a naïve effrontery about this proposal which was quite characteristic of its author.

The writing of Latin verse, so highly regarded at Eton, was a curious accomplishment. It was said by Coleridge in his Table Talk that Etonians acquired the art “by conning Ovid and Tibullus”: my recollection is that we read Ovid but rarely, and Tibullus not at all. Some of us certainly became proficient in making Latin verses of a kind; but our models were the renderings of English poems in such collections as the Arundines Cami or the Sabrinæ Corolla, rather than any Latin originals; and though we could turn out “longs and shorts” with facility, and even with neatness, I hardly think our productions would have passed muster in the Augustan age. Still, the versifier’s art, such as it was, brought us a certain gratification; and in the summer, when, as we all felt, the time of the leading cricketers was of inestimable value to the school, we were glad to turn our skill to good account by composing for them their weekly copy of verses, and so releasing them, as it were, from a frivolous for a serious task. On “verse days” members of the Eleven would often come up into College, where each would find for himself a poet; and thus valuable time would be saved for practice at the nets. It was but little we could do in so great a cause, but we did it with willingness; and I remember the honest pride which I felt when dictating to the Captain of the Eleven a copy of verses, made up largely of old tags and stock phrases, which he copied down with much satisfaction and without the least understanding. His ignorance of the meaning of what purported to be his own composition would lead to no trouble; for tutors and division-masters alike were aware that they must not press a good cricketer too hard. A blue cap covered a multitude of sins.

But that we were savages, who, looking back on those bygone times, can doubt? Non angeli, sed Angli. “It was an era,” as Mr. Ralph Nevill has well remarked in his Floreat Etona, “when the sickening cant of humanitarianism, born of luxury and weakness, had not yet arisen, to emasculate and enfeeble the British race.” The hunting and breaking up of hares then, as now, was one of the recognized pastimes; indeed, even as late as the headmastership of Dr. Balston (1857-68), it had been permitted to the boys, as a variation from the hare-hunt, to pursue with beagles a mutilated fox deprived of one of his pads.[5] In the hundreds of sermons which I have heard preached in Eton College Chapel, never was a word spoken on the subject of cruelty. And no wonder; for Eton had always been a home of cruel sports.

There was the less excuse for these miserable practices, because an abundance and superabundance of the nobler sports was within reach of the Eton boy: nowhere else could river and playing-field offer such attractions. Thrilling beyond all else, and crowning the glories of the summer school-time, was the great annual cricket match between Eton and Harrow at “Lord’s,” a drama of such excitement as nothing in mature life could ever equal. Who, for example, that witnessed the match of 1869—C. J. Ottaway’s year, when Eton broke a long series of defeats by a single-innings victory—can have forgotten the delirious scene at the close? I can still see Dr. Goodford, the venerable Provost of Eton, dancing ecstatically, hat in hand, before the pavilion, and looking very much as “Spy” once pictured him in a famous cartoon in Vanity Fair.

Athletics, of course, took precedence of all intellectual pursuits. The Etonian, in our time, was but a dim legend of the past, and the genius of Praed and Moultrie had left no direct line of succession; nevertheless among the upper boys there was not an entire dearth of literary aspiration, and we had a school magazine, the Adventurer, which existed from the later ’sixties for about five years. One of its editors, a Colleger named C. C. Thornton, was the author of some extremely good verse; and among other contributors, towards the latter part of the Adventurer’s career, were Arthur A. Tilley, now a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge; E. C. Selwyn, afterwards headmaster of Uppingham School; J. E. C. Welldon, the popular Dean of Durham; Herbert W. Paul; George Campbell Macaulay; J. C. Tarver; and Sir Melville Macnaghten, who wrote as M²; also, if I mistake not, the nom de plume of “Tom” covered some early poems of Mr. F. B. Money-Coutts, now known as Baron Latymer. One of the best essays in the Adventurer was that on “Arbitration as a Substitute for War,”[6] by Mr. Herbert Paul. Another noteworthy contribution, which has some historical interest for Etonians of that period, was a poem by Bishop Welldon, entitled “Adventurer Loquitur”[7] in which the Magazine was represented as giving some description of the several members of its “staff,” whether in recognition of their services or in reproof of their remissness. Among those clearly indicated, though unnamed, were A. A. Tilley, R. C. Radcliffe, G. R. Murray, Bernard Coleridge (now Lord Coleridge), H. G. Wintle, G. C. Macaulay, C. C. Lacaita, J. E. C. Welldon, E. C. Selwyn, and the writer of these reminiscences. The cause of the Adventurer’s decease was that it ran counter to Etonian sentiment, in acting on the perilous principle that “it is only those who truly love Eton that dare to show her her faults.”[8]