What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

The affair passed somewhat in this wise. It is ten o’clock; the morning school is over; and we are all in a hurry to get out to breakfast. There are probably about a dozen or a score of boys to be scourged. Dr. Williams, as well beloved a master as ever presided over any school in the world, has come down from his seat, elevated three steps above the floor of the school, putting on his great cocked hat as he does so. He steps to the form where the scourging is to be done; the list of those to be scourged, with the reasons why, is handed to him by the prefect, charged for the week with this duty, together with the rod. He calls “Jones” ... swish, swish, swish!... “Brown” ... swish, swish, swish!... “Robinson” ... swish, swish, swish! as rapidly as it can be done. Each operation takes perhaps twenty seconds. Having got through the list, he flings the rod on the ground, makes a demi-volte so as to face the whole school, taking off his hat as he does so, and the “prefect of school” who has been waiting on the steps of the master’s seat, with the prayer-book open in his hand, instantly reads the short prayer with which the school concludes, while those who have been scourged stand in the background hurriedly readjusting their brace buttons so as not to be behind hand at the buttery hatch for breakfast. Of any disgrace attached to the reception of a scourging, no one had any smallest conception.

Of the cruelty of the infliction the reader may judge for himself. Of the indecent talk about indecency he may also know from the above accurate account what to think. The degree of “moral degradation” inflicted on the sufferers may perhaps be estimated by a reference to the roll of those whom Winchester has supplied to serve their country in Church and State.

The real and unanswerable objection to the infliction of “corporal punishment,” as it was used in my day at Winchester, was that it was a mere form and farce. It caused neither pain nor disgrace, and assuredly morally degraded nobody. I have been scourged five times in the day; not because, as might be supposed, I was so incorrigible that the master found it necessary to go on scourging me, but simply because it so chanced. I had, say, come into chapel “tardè,” i.e. after the service had commenced; I had omitted to send in duly my “vulgus”; I had been “floored” in my Horace; I had missed duly answering “sum,” when on returning from “hills” “Gaffer” had met the procession on his grey horse and caused the “prefect of hall” “to call names,” the reason being that I had been far away over the downs to Twyford, and had not been able to run back in time; and an unlucky simultaneousness of these or of a dozen other such sins of omission or commission had occurred, which had to be wiped off by a scourging by the “hostiarius” at the morning school, and another by the “informator;” by a third from the former at “middle school,” when the head master did not attend; by a fourth from the “hostiarius” at evening school, and a fifth from the “informator” the last thing before going out to dinner at six. But this was a rare tour de force, scarcely likely to occur again. I was rather proud of it, and wholly unconscious of any “moral degradation.”

I have spoken of the “informator” putting on his cocked hat when about to commence his work of scourging. I am at a loss to account for his having worn this very unacademical costume. It was a huge three-cornered cocked hat very much like that of a coachman on state occasions; and must, I take it, have been a survival from about the time of Charles the Second. It has, I believe, been since discarded.

The mention above of a “vulgus” requires some explanation. Every “inferior,” i.e. non-prefect, in the school was required every night to produce a copy of verses of from two to six lines on a given theme; four or six lines for the upper classes, two for the lowest. This was independent of a weekly “verse task” of greater length, and was called a “vulgus,” I suppose, because everybody—the vulgus—had to do it. The prefects were exercised in the same manner but with a difference. Immediately before going out from morning or from evening school, at the conclusion of the day’s lesson, the “informator” would give a theme, and each boy was expected then and there without the assistance of pen, paper, or any book, to compose a couple, or two couple, of lines, and give them vivâ voce. He got up, and scraped with his foot to call the master’s attention when he was ready; and as not above five or ten minutes were available for the business, a considerable degree of promptitude was requisite. The theory was that these compositions—“varying” was the term in the case of the prefects, as “vulgus” in that of the inferiors—should be epigrammatic in their nature, and that Martial rather than Ovid should be the model. Of course but little of an epigrammatic nature was for the most part achieved; but great readiness was made habitual by the practice. And sometimes the result was creditable to something more than readiness.

I am tempted to give one instance of such a “varying.” It belonged to an earlier time than mine—the time when Decus et tutamen was adopted as the motto cut on the rim of the five-shilling pieces. The author of the “varying” in question had been ill with fever, and his head had been shaved, causing him to wear a wig. Decus et tutamen was the theme given. In a minute or two he was ready, stood up, and taking off his wig, said, “Aspicite hos crines! duplicem servantur in usum! Hi mihi tutamen nocte”—putting the wig on wrong side outwards; “Dieque decus,” reversing it as he spoke the words. The memory of this “varying” lives—or lived!—at Winchester. But I do not think it has ever been published, and really it deserves preservation. I wish I could give the author’s name.

When at the end of the summer holidays in that year, 1820, I returned to college, again brought down to Winchester by my father in his gig, I confess to having felt for some short time a very desolate little waif. As I, at the time a child barely out of the nursery, look back upon it, it seems to my recollection that the strongest sense of being shoved off from shore without guidance, help, or protection, arose from never seeing or speaking to a female human being. To be sure there was at the sick-house the presiding “mother”—Gumbrell her name was, usually pronounced “Grumble”—but she was not a fascinating representative of the sex. An aged woman once nearly six feet high, then much bent by rheumatism, rather grim and somewhat stern, she very conscientiously administered the prescribed “black-dose and calomel pill” to those under her care at the sick-house. To be there was called being “continent;” to leave it was “going abroad”—intelligibly enough. Tea was provided there for those “continent” instead of the usual breakfast of bread and butter and beer; and I remember overhearing Mother Gumbrell, oppressed by an unusual number of inmates, say, “Talk of Job indeed! Job never had to cut crusty loaves into bread and butter!”

I saw the old woman die! I was by chance in the sick-house kitchen—in after years, when a prefect—and “Dicky Gumbrell,” the old woman’s husband, who had been butler to Dean Ogle, and who by special and exceptional favour was allowed to live with his wife in the sick-house, was reading to her the story of Joseph and his Brethren, while she was knitting a stocking, and sipping occasionally from a jug of college beer which stood between them, when quite suddenly her hands fell on to her lap and her head on to her bosom, and she was dead! while poor old Dicky quite unconsciously went on with his reading.

But I mentioned Mother Gumbrell only to observe that she, the only petticoated creature whom we ever saw or spoke with, was scarcely calculated to supply, even to the imagination, the feminine element which had till then made so large a part of the lives of ten-year-old children fresh from their mother’s knee.

Perhaps the most markedly distinctive feature of the school life was the degree in which we were uninterfered with by any personal superintendence. The two masters came into the school-room to hear the different classes at the hours which have been mentioned, also, when we were “in chambers” in the evening, either during the hour of study which intervened between the six o’clock dinner and the eight o’clock prayers in the chapel, or during the subsequent hour between that and nine o’clock, when all went, or ought to have gone, to bed; and subsequently to that, when all were supposed to be in bed and asleep, we were at any moment liable to the sudden unannounced visit of the “hostiarius” or second master. The visit was a mere “going round.” If all was in order, it passed in silence, and was over in a minute. If any tea-things were surprised, they were broken, as before mentioned. If beer, or traces of the consumption of beer, were apparent, that was all right. The supply of a provision of that refreshment was recognised, it being a part of the duty of the bedmakers to carry every evening into each of the seven “chambers” a huge “nipperkin” of beer, “to last,” as I remember one of the bedmakers telling me when I first went into college, “for all night.” The supply, as far as my recollection goes, was always considerably in excess of the consumption. If all was not in order, “the prefect in course”—i.e. the prefect who in each chamber was responsible for due order during the current week—was briefly told to speak with the master next morning. And this comprises about all the personal intercourse that took place between us and the masters.