“The speeches began at one o’clock; they were ended at three, and about 200 went to dine at the ‘Spread Eagle.’ Here Dr. Arnold gained a complete triumph over Litchfield and Boughton Leigh, who wanted to prevent his health being drunk on account of his politics, or their private malice. I have not much more to say now. Give my love to cousins, uncle, grandmama, and everybody.
“I remain, your affectionate Son,
“G. E. Hughes.”
[1] Now Dean of Durham.
[2] A. H. Clough, the poet.
[3] The Rev. C. Arnold, of Rugby.
He writes home of everything, in these first years, except of what he knew would only give pain, and be quite useless—the exceedingly rough side of school life as it then existed. A small boy might be, and very frequently was, fagged for every moment of his play hours day after day; and there was a good deal of a bad kind of bullying. But these things he took as a matter of course, making the best of what was inevitable. He used often afterwards to declare, that the boys of that generation made the best fields at cricket he had ever seen, and to set it down to the unmerciful amount of fagging they had to go through. Escape out of bounds before you were caught by a sixth form boy, was the only remedy; and, once out of bounds, there was the river for amusement, and the railway, upon which large gangs of navigators had just been put to work. George became a skilful fisherman, and a most interested watcher of the earthworks, and duly chronicles how he has caught a big eel in one letter; in another, how “the railway is going on very fast: they have nearly filled up one valley, and carried it over a stream;” in a third how “Mr. Wombwell’s show of wild beasts has come in, I believe the finest in England,” and including “four elephants, a black tiger and tigress, and two lions, one of which was the famous Wallace who fought the dogs.”
Before the end of the second year he had got through three forms, and was nearly the head of the fags, and anxious to try his hand for the single scholarship, which was then offered at Rugby for boys under fourteen. As there was only one, of course the competition was a very severe one. But his first letter of that year contains a passage too characteristic to pass over. So I must leave the scholarship for a moment. We, with other boys who lived in Berkshire and Hampshire, were often obliged to post, or hire a coach to ourselves, as there was only one regular coach a day on those cross-country roads. We used to make up parties accordingly, and appoint one boy to manage the whole business, who had rather a hard time of it, while all the rest enjoyed themselves in the most uproarious manner. George was soon selected as the victim, and bearer of the common purse; and his conscientious struggles with postboys and hostlers, landlords and waiters, cost him, I am sure, more pain and anxiety than all the scholarship examinations he ever went in for. Thus he writes in February 1836, to tell of our safe arrival, and then goes on:—
“We had just enough money to pay our journey. The worst of it is, that every postboy, when they see that they are driving boys, at the end of the stage, when you pay them their money, are never contented, and say, ‘never given less than so and so;’ and, ‘shall be kept up all night;’ ‘roads bad,’ &c. &c., and keep on bothering you till you really don’t know what to do. However, that is over now, and we are fairly settled again at Rugby, and very comfortable.”
And then, at the end of the half, when he has to begin arranging for the return journey, “the Doctor will not take any account of these plaguey postboys, and so always allows us too little journey money.”