Seventy Years Among Savages

by Henry S. Salt

Apart from the Adventurer, the literary ambition of some of the Collegers sought irregular expression, in those far-off days, by supplying the Windsor press, when opportunity occurred, with exaggerated and absurdly inflated accounts of any exciting incident such as the outbreak of a fire. Nor was it only the local papers that allured us; for I remember how G. C. Macaulay and I once had a daring wager as to which of us should more egregiously hoax the Field with some story of a rare bird. He tried a too highly coloured anecdote of a bee-eater, and failed to win credence; while I, with a modest narrative of a supposed stork in Windsor Park (“can it have been a stork? I shall indeed feel myself lucky if my supposition be correct”), not only saw my letter inserted, but drew the gratifying editorial comment: “Most probably it was a stork.” Thus we made natural history and beguiled the idle hours.

To look upon a group photograph of the Collegers of fifty years ago brings many memories to the mind. E. C. Selwyn, before we met at Eton, had been my schoolfellow at Blackheath Proprietary School, of which his father was headmaster; and our friendly relations were renewed from time to time till his death in 1919. As I once reminded him, we had but two quarrels—the first when we were freshmen at Cambridge, about Moses, in whom I had been rash enough to say that I “did not believe”; and the second, at a later period, because I did believe in Mr. H. M. Hyndman, of whose socialist doctrines Selwyn as vehemently disapproved. Long years afterwards I made what I thought was a fair proposal to him—that if he would give up Moses, I would give up the other patriarch, and so our two small disagreements would be mutually adjusted; but his answer was that, though Moses need no longer delay a settlement, he could not agree to Mr. Hyndman being given up, because his patriotic conduct during the Great War had shown him in a new light.

We used to call Selwyn “bishop” in those days, either because of a distant relationship to Dr. G. A. Selwyn, the well-known Bishop of Lichfield, or because we thought him almost certainly destined to attain to episcopal rank: his scholarship, not to mention his defence of Moses, seemed to warrant no less. J. E. C. Welldon, who did become a bishop, was another most genial schoolfellow, famous in the football field no less than in the examination room. I remember running second to him in a handicap quarter-mile race, in which he was allowed a good many yards’ start, and with that advantage just managed to keep the rest of us in the rear. Herbert Paul, unlike Welldon or Selwyn, was by no means designated for a bishopric. I recall him, a sceptic even in boyhood, standing in Upper Passage, where Collegers often held informal discussion, as, with thumbs in waistcoat pockets, he would hold forth, already a fearless disputant, on matters human and divine.

Among other figures in the group are Dr. Ryle, Dean of Westminster; Sir Richmond Ritchie; Mr. George Campbell Macaulay; Mr. C. Lowry, head of Tonbridge School; Dr. Burrows, Bishop of Chichester, Dr. Harmer, Bishop of Rochester; Sir E. Ruggles-Brise, Chairman of the Prison Commission; Mr. E. C. Tennyson-d’Eyncourt; Rev. J. H. J. Ellison, late Vicar of Windsor; Sir Lionel Carden, of Mexican fame; and others who in various ways have become distinguished.

Very provocative of reminiscence, too, are the illustrations, printed in books about Eton, of the College servants, the College buildings, and many well-remembered faces and scenes. Take, for example, a picture of “Old College Servants” in Mr. Ralph Nevill’s Floreat Etona.

There stands the old College porter, Harry Atkins, whom, to our disgrace, we used to bombard on dark winter nights in his little lodge at the gateway into School Yard, hurling missiles at his door from behind the pillars of the cloisters under Upper School, and trusting to our superior fleetness of foot when he was goaded into a desperate charge. There, too, are Culliford, the butler, and Westbrook, the cook, who were treated by us with far greater respect than the equally respectable Atkins, as presiding over departments in which our own personal comforts were more closely concerned, and from whose hands, on the occasion of banquets in the College Hall, the smaller Collegers would try to beg or snatch dainties as they carried them up from the kitchen. Among the least prominent members of the group is one Wagstaffe, designated “scullion”; yet, humble though he was in appearance, his name had become a household word among the boys; for the somewhat unappetizing dough which formed the base of the puddings served to the Collegers was then known as “the Wagstaffe,” on the supposition, presumably, that the under part of the pudding was the creation of the under-cook. I do not think I could eat that pudding now; but looking on the worthy Wagstaffe’s image again, I feel that we wronged him in identifying him, as we did, with an unsavoury composition for which he, a mere subordinate, was not personally to blame.

To the College Hall there came daily, for the remnants of bread and other victuals, a number of poor old alms-women; and if any further proof be needed of the exceeding thinness of the veneer by which our youthful savagery was overlaid, it will be found in our treatment of those humble folk, who were of much more use in the world than ourselves. We named them “the hags”; and one of our amusements was to construct for them what was called a “hag-trap.” A large square piece of bread was hollowed out in the centre through a hole bored in the side, and when the cavity had been filled up with mustard, pepper, salt, etc., the opening was plugged, and the bread left lying on the table as a bait for some unwary victim who should carry it to her home. Whether the Eton Mission in Hackney Wick has so ameliorated the hearts of later generations of Etonians that a “hag-trap” would now be an impossibility, I do not know; but in those days we certainly had not the smallest atom of sympathy with the working classes, except perhaps with those College servants who were known to us personally, and who ministered to our wants.

We did not pretend to regard the working man as a brother. Once, when I was travelling with some Eton friends, a sweep who was standing on the platform tried to enter our carriage just as the train was about to start. Instantly we seized the door, and held it closed from the inside; and after a short struggle (the black man’s anxious eyes still haunt me), the victory remained with us, for the train begun to move, and the sweep was left behind. That was our idea of Fraternity. Was it Waterloo that was won in the Eton Playing Fields? I have sometimes thought it must have been Peterloo.

But let me turn from the recollection of childish deeds done by those who were but “scugs,” or “lower boys,” to that of the immense self-importance of which we were conscious when we had reached the eminence of sixth form. Surely nowhere on earth is there such a tremendous personage as a sixth-form Eton boy; he acts continually with that “full sense of responsibility” so dear to the occupants of the Parliamentary front-bench. No visitor to Eton College Chapel can have failed to be impressed by the pompous entry of those twenty immaculately attired young men as they precede the Headmaster and the Provost in a sort of triumphal procession, thinking of anything rather than the religious service to which their arrival is the prelude. On speech-days, too, when, arrayed in dress-coat and knee-breeches, we declaimed passages from the great writers of antiquity or of modern times, we felt to the full the colossal seriousness of our position—serious also it was in another sense, for our self-satisfaction was then sobered by the possibility of breaking down. To keep order in the passages at night; to say the Latin grace in Hall; to note the names at “Absence” in the school-yard, standing by the headmaster’s side—even to read prayers in the Houses on occasions—these were but a few of the many duties and dignities of sixth form. No young feathered “bloods” in red Indian tribe could have had greater reason to be proud.

Even in the holidays our grave responsibilities did not wholly cease; for it was a custom for sixth-form youths to be sent as tutors to lower boys who needed “coaching” at their homes. On two occasions it fell to my lot to perform that service for a lively but very backward boy at Evans’s House, Charley Selwyn, nephew of the Bishop of Lichfield; and the awe which I felt at sojourning in a bishop’s palace helped to fix more firmly in my memory some of the impressions which I got there.