Besides being exposed to physical violence, small boys, especially if they were clever, were sometimes made to do work for stupid big ones. A certain lazy lout, however, was once well served out by his victim. In difficulties as to the composition of a set of verses, the bully one day got hold of a smaller schoolmate, and under the threat of a severe licking got him to do the verses for him. When, however, the bully came to showing up the lines which he had not done, and which he had not even troubled to read, they were found to be so grossly indecent and outrageous in tone that the master who looked at them at once declared the writer should be flogged. At first the bully did not dare admit that they were not of his own making, but eventually at the block he admitted the fraud, with the result that the boy who had played him the trick was also punished. It is to be hoped, however, that the bully received the more severe thrashing of the two.

When the celebrated Porson was a Colleger, one of his contemporaries was Charles Simeon, known as “Snowball” Simeon, the ugliest boy in College, who afterwards became an earnest Evangelical preacher. In after life he looked back upon the doings in Long Chamber and its lawless rowdyism with horror, and once told a friend that he would be tempted even to murder his own son sooner than let him see in College the sights he had seen.

A RUNAWAY

Under such circumstances it is not surprising that small Collegers, if they were sensitive boys, occasionally made determined attempts to run away. One did so more than thirteen times, and became so well known on the road that he was almost sure to be stopped before he got far. Nevertheless he once got up to town in a very curious manner. He slunk early, before morning school, into the yard of the Christopher; the London coach was standing outside, and no one by, so he was able unobserved to creep into the boot, trusting to luck, which befriended him, for there chanced to be that morning no passengers, and consequently no luggage to be stowed away. The runaway was therefore driven without disturbance in his uneasy berth, which he only vacated on the arrival of the coach at the White Horse cellars in Piccadilly.

The general tone in College was somewhat rough and irreverent, as may be judged from the following. Every Sunday morning at nine o’clock the Collegers assembled in Lower School for prayers, the headmaster sitting in the desk, and a praepostor standing up repeating the Confession and a prayer or two out of the Winchester Prayer-Book. All joined in the 100th Psalm, which sometimes, more especially towards the end of the Half, was made the occasion of a not very seemly demonstration. During the last Sunday the order went round that every one was to sing his loudest, and on one occasion the noise was so terrific that it could almost be heard in the playing fields. Keate, who was at that time in the desk, did not, however, take any notice of this irreverent outburst. He had been a youthful Colleger himself, and probably considered that the whole thing was merely a too enthusiastic performance of an old Eton tradition, which in his eyes excused a good deal.

In school work the Collegers then, as now, easily maintained an almost unchallenged supremacy. Almost without exception the sons of poor parents, accurately grounded and imbued with the idea that education was a real preparation for life, they knew that they would have to make their way in the world by their own exertions, for which reason to be “a sap” in College was quite an ordinary thing. Besides this, sixty or seventy years ago the very traditional customs which excluded a King’s scholar from comparatively expensive amusements, such as the boats, and made him a member of a separate football and cricket club, served to protect a boy from drifting into various forms of fashionable idleness.

At one time few boys went into College who had not previously been Oppidans, and, till Provost Hodgson’s reforms made it possible for every boy to have a separate cubicle room, Collegers used to have rooms down town or in their tutor’s houses, where they could escape from fag masters and the disorder of Long Chamber. In such rooms they could work, wash, and eat in peace.

TRONE’S

Up to 1864 King’s scholars had to wear their gowns out of school, though they abandoned them before passing over Barnes Pool Bridge. A sock shop in the High Street called Trone’s was almost exclusively frequented by King’s scholars because they were allowed to leave their gowns there when going into Windsor. Oppidans never frequented it, and, curiously enough, as showing the persistence of traditional usage, years later, when the shop had changed owners, though no one could give any particular reason, it was supposed to be “scuggish” to pass its doors.

Whilst Long Chamber could never have been called an abode of bliss, it had its pleasures, one of the chief of which was the rat-hunting, in which Porson is said to have taken so much delight. If the Colleges lacked food they never lacked game in the shape of rats, which fairly swarmed about the ancient dormitory. Some of these animals which defied capture became well known to the boys, who in a sort of way felt a respect for one veteran—an immense, perfectly gray old rat, which was supposed to be the ghost of King Henry VI., or at any rate to have been in being from the very first foundation of the College.