Dressed for Success

Eton College students at the annual Wall Game, akin to a perpetual rugby scrum; the first recorded game was played in 1766. By Patrick Ward/Corbis.

The Eton Empire

It looked as if the 60s had ended Etons centuries-long dominance over British life. Yet the fabled school, training ground for 18 prime ministers, countless literary greats, and fictional icons such as James Bond and Bertie Wooster, is once again center stage. With a fresh crop of O.E.s (Old Etonians) including London mayor Boris Johnson, Tory leader David Cameron, and Prince Williamon deck, the author heads for the playing fields (and museum, and war memorials) to take a fresh look at this bastion of privilege, which may have rebrandeditself just in time.
by Christopher Hitchens WEB EXCLUSIVE October 2, 2008 We have no Eton to create the self-consciousness of a governing class, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920 in This Side of Paradise. We have, instead, clean, flaccid and

innocuous preparatory schools. The remarkable thing, perhaps, is that he quite expected his readers to recognize the name. Indeed, when the education of the books hero, Amory Blaine, is being discussed, his mother, Beatrice, rather languidly says, Id have preferred you to have gone to Eton, and then to Christ Church, Oxford. Ah, what an assumption of privilege is being breathed in that sentence. There are a number of reasons why America does not have an Eton. In order to evolve such a school, you have to start with a monarchical foundation in the mid-15th century. (King Henry VI simultaneously founded Kings College, Cambridge.) A few hundred years of feudalism and empire are then required, during which time 18 of the countrys prime ministers attend the school, as do countless generals, ambassadors, and colonial governors. A vivid legend of the three Bsbullying, beating, and buggerymust spring up, imprinting itself thoroughly on the formative years of a ruling caste. The national poetry must show the schools influence, from Thomas Gray to Shelley to Swinburne. Eton is not just where George Orwell went to school, there to be taught by Aldous Huxley, so that the future authors of 1984 and Brave New World could be in the same classroom. It is where Evelyn Waugh sends Sebastian Flyte and Anthony Blanche, the two most flamboyant figures of Brideshead Revisited. It is where J. M. Barrie sends Captain Hook. It is where P. G. Wodehouse sends Bertie Wooster and Psmith. It is where Anthony Powell, another Etonian, sends Nick Jenkins, the narrator of A Dance to the Music of Time. It is where Ian Fleming sends James Bond (expelled, unusually enough, for heterosexuality). It is where John le Carr evolved the concept of the honorable schoolboy. Its impossible to overstate the effect that the Eton mystique can exert on the most improbable people. All through the spring and summer of this year, a capacity crowd went every night to the National Theatre to see Jeremy Irons playing an elder statesman in Howard Brentons Never So Good. Brenton is a renowned ultra-leftist, but his moving play, which is about the life and times of the Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan, is unashamedly evocative of the double-distilled Eton legend. Macmillans early career is nearly blighted by the rumor of a love affair with another boy at the school. The strains of Etons famous Boating Song come wafting across the footlights. Lying wounded in the trenches of the First World War, Macmillan for distraction relies on the Eton reading list, starting with Aeschylus and Homer. (Brenton doesnt mention it, but Hitler was obsessed with Eton, believing that the public-school system was a paramilitary training ground for the British ruling class, and refusing to accept the blandly Etonian denials of Sir Anthony Eden, Neville Chamberlains foreign secretary and Macmillans predecessor.) On the night I walked across the bridge to the South Bank of the Thames and took my seat in the stalls, I could guess from the average age of the crowd that this was a major nostalgia trip. Macmillan, that mustachioed and shambling relic of the Edwardian era, was at the helm in the early 1960s (which is to say before the Sixties proper). Under him, Britain was still hierarchical, deferential, and pre-post-imperial. After his government collapsed amid the scandal of Christine Keeler and John Profumo, to be succeeded very briefly by yet another Old Etonian prime minister, named Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Britain was overtaken by a tsunami of modernism and egalitarianism and irreverence, from the Beatles to Private Eye magazine to the classless tones of the new generation of politicians. Even when a more traditional Toryism was restored by Mrs. Thatcher, meritocracy more than aristocracy was the keynote. It was none other than

Macmillan himself who, in a remark criticized for its Jew-consciousness, drawlingly observed that her Cabinet had more old Estonians than old Etonians. If I was sure of one thing in the Sixties, it was that the grip of Eton College, at least on the political establishment, had been broken and could never be restored. But while I was in London this past August, the pundits were all agreed that the Labour government of Gordon Brown is already almost a thing of the past, and that the next prime minister will be David Cameron, who was at Eton in the 1980s. Today, no fewer than 12 members of his parliamentary leadership team are Old Etonians also, while the countrys best-known political character, Londons new Tory mayor, Boris Johnson, was a contemporary of Camerons at the very same school. So was Dominic West (Jimmy McNulty on The Wire). Cameron dresses according to the dictates of Johnnie Boden, the beyondsuccessful mail-order-catalogue king who dominates British middle-class taste and was also at Eton. How can this comeback possibly have happened? My first speculation is that even Howard Brenton would probably confess that there isnt a great deal left of the old 60s radical spirit, and that much about British politics and society over the last three or four decades has been sordid and tawdry. In retrospect, the laconic style of a classics-trained war hero and aristocrat like Macmillan doesnt look so contemptible after all. It comes back to me that, when we both worked on the same magazine, I once had cocktails with Julian Barnes, and we happened to touch on the subject of the public school, as the private sector of British education so cunningly calls itself. I mentioned the rather minor establishment in Cambridge where Id been exposed to my own years of the three Bs, and Julian looked mildly astonished. But I always thought, he said, that you had been to Eton. I was at that time farther to the left than Howard Brenton, so felt slightly ashamed of the flush of guilty pleasure that went through me. How come? Well, if I take my own profession and justwithout rehearsingsay the names of people I know who were there, I come up at once with William Shawcross, James Fox, Edward Mortimer, Craig Brown, Alexander Chancellor, Charles Moore, Perry Anderson, Quintin Hoare, Ferdinand Mount, Nicholas Coleridge, Xan Smileynot all of them necessarily uppercrust but all first-rate. And not one of them any sort of a snob.

Prince Harry at Eton, May 2003. By Kirsty Wigglesworth/ Reuters/Corbis.

One summer morning I took myself off to have a look round the old place. Its not hard to find, on the outskirts of London and just in the shadow of the Queens largest and ugliest palace, Windsor Castle. (Her Majestys grandson William, son of the current heir to her throne, went conveniently to Eton, as did his brother, Harry, and the job of provost of Eton is an appointment that is within the royal gift.) Walking along High Street, which joins the college to the castle, one passes a succession of discreet tailors, ancient timbered inns and tea shops, a Victorian-era mailbox, a photographer with a display of young Rupert Everett and Hugh Grant look-alikes in his window, before coming to a stretch of the Thames where Sir Christopher Wren had his house and where there is the largest flock of white swans I have ever seen. Big drooping willows and painted barges and boathouses complete the scene: I am always amazed at how much of old Britain still survives. Only the gruesome flight path of Heathrow Airport, planes grinding through the sky overhead, provides a reminder of the encroachments of modernity. Entering the quadrangle and following the signs for the Museum of Eton Life, I am plunged into all the school lore that, rather as in the more populist case of Hogwarts School and its houses, so many English people sort of know without having experienced it directly. We know that until quite recently smaller boys were made to act

as servants to bigger boys, and that this system was known as fagging. We know that a school term is called a half and that an Eton school year thus consists of three halves. We know that the school plays a gamebut only against itselfthat is played by no other school and is known as the Wall Game. We know that the arcane rules of this game are impenetrable to the outsider, and I happen to know that George Orwell was rather keen on it. We know that the Duke of Wellington said that the Battle of Waterloo was really won on the playing fields of Eton, and I also happen to know that he never said any such thing. We know that the women who minister to the boys domestic needs are called Dames. We know that there used to be a flogging block over which boys were stretched to be thrashed with a birch rod until they streamed with blood, and here in the museum is an actual block, complete with birch. (Algernon Charles Swinburne never got over his obsession with this ritual of punishment, and produced reams of flagellomaniac verse under the pseudonym Etoniensis.) We know that there are two kinds of Etonian, Oppidan (those pedigreed lads who pay their own way) and Colleger (scholarship students, whose endowment carries over from King Henrys original desire that the place be devoted to the education of the poor)

2003 Fourth of June celebrations, at which oarsmen will stand in their rowing shells on the river Thames to salute the schools parents. By Patrick Ward/Corbis.

That may seem like a laugh now, when the fees including extras come to about 30,000 a year (at current exchange rates about what it costs me to send my daughter to a day school in Washington), but the fact remains that Eton provides a number of scholarships and that, mad sports and bizarre practices to one side, it has long been celebrated for its academic rigor alone, and has had some famously fine teachers, not just Aldous Huxley, as above mentioned, but (as a visitor) Lionel Trilling. There is a legend that boys have their names put down for Eton at birth, but such a process is no guarantee of admission, and, for example, it seems improbable that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose son Yermolai attended the school, went through any such paternal ritual. If it had produced only sportsmen and soldiers and imperial proconsuls, like some other famous schools, it would not be so celebrated. But here is where one of the great reforming Liberal prime ministers, William Ewart Gladstone, received his grounding in the Greek and Latin classics, at which he so excelled. And here is where John Maynard Keynes, who revolutionized political and economic theory, acquired his academic sinews while, according to contemporary reports, doing some very serious sleeping around. The Etonian system is not designed to turn out a uniform product, in other words. It also has one great virtue, wrote the austere egalitarian George Orwell in 1948, and that is a tolerant and civilized atmosphere which gives each boy a chance of developing a fair individuality. Boys have their own rooms rather than sharing. Thus, though John le Carrwho taught there under his real name, David Cornwellclaims to be able to detect an Etonian in a crowded room 80 percent of the time, he told my Etonian friend Nick Fraser (author of The Importance of Being Eton) that the salient characteristic of his pupils was cool impertinence. The

boys were adult, funny, a little removed from life even as they evolved effortlessly into the shrewdest operators. They were at once innocent and worldly. This cultivated affect dovetails perfectly with the Niven-ish image of the deceptively polite and modest Englishman, outwardly unflappable and possessed of steely inward ruthlessness. And steely understatement is the mark of the man here. The very first plaque I saw on my stroll through the schools chapel, to Captain Lawrence Oates, bore witness to it. When I was a boy, all schoolchildren were taught about his self-sacrificial action as a member of Robert Falcon Scotts doomed expedition to the South Pole in 1912. Unwilling to slow down his exhausted companions after he became lame and ill, Oates stumbled out of the tent into the howling blizzard with the throwaway words I am just going outside and may be some time. He meant to say forever. My wretched Latin was enough to help me decipher his lonely death inter nives Antarcticas: among the Antarctic snows. As for the regimental war memorials in the cloisters, I can say for the first and only time in my life that I feel Hitler may have been right about something. The endless chiseled and illuminated lists of the fallen amount, in the case of the First World War, to the equivalent of the entire student body in one year. Those wounded and maimed come to the same number. In the subsequent battle against Hitler himself, the toll was only slightly less. And the aching, agonizing roll call goes on, right up to Lieutenant Colonel H. Jones, posthumous hero of the British retaking of the Falkland Islands, in 1982. No doubt when I go back, there will be plaques from Afghanistan and Iraq, but the point will be the same: there was once a time when the ruling elite thought it morally important to volunteer in their own nations wars, and to be on the front line, and to fall with their wounds in the front as well.

Etonians in 1939 wearing traditional tails and striped trousers study in the schools library, which is a memorial to alumni who died in the Boer War. By Margaret BourkeWhite/Getty Images.

Of course, one must never take anything too seriously. Did you see the memorial for the Crimean War? inquired Wodehouses biographer Robert McCrum, who lived on the school grounds when his father was Etons Head Master. It mentions those who died from over-exertion in the field, which we used to think very funny. Lets agree that things mustnt be too strenuous either: one aims at the coolly effortless effect because anything else would run the appalling risk of seeming boring. This generalized diffidence extends to a number of O.E.s, as alumni of Eton are called, who fail to mention the school on the dust jackets of their books. Perhaps it might seem like trying too hard. Accused of this suspiciously populist tactic are my friend Jonathan Aitken, perhaps the only former Tory minister now to be running a prison ministry, James Fox, Nicholas Mosley, and Michael Holroyd. Hugh Laurie also used to be shy about telling people on the set where he had been. But whom can these under-the-radar Etonians possibly think they are fooling? Sir Osbert Sitwell, invited to fill in the bit about education for his entry in Whos Who, put during the holidays from Eton. Thats more like it. This might locate the elusive Etonian charisma somewhere between selfconfidence and stoicism, somewhere between understatement and irony, and somewhere between extreme idiosyncrasy and a firm sense of duty to ones country. (The haunting

and fated character of Charles Stringham, the only one in my experience who engages female readers of Anthony Powells magnificent 12-volume novel sequence, might be definitive here.) From Captain Oates to Captain Hook true Etonians will also warn one not to leave out the host of bullies and shits and creeps and chancers who have attended the school, from the Communist traitor and defector Guy Burgess (subject of Alan Bennetts astonishing play An Englishman Abroad) to the murderous Lord Lucan and his bored, cruel Clermont Club cronies, to the shiftless King Birendra of Nepal and the son (called Dippy at Eton) who murdered him before committing suicide, to the louche Simon Mann, Mark Thatchers greedy accomplice in the bungled mercenary coup in Equatorial Guinea. Julian Mitchells play (and film) Another Country, also set at Eton, and also about the formative years of the treasonous Guy Burgess, discusses the importance of the self-electing elite society of the boys known as Pop (the gods in the film). I have heard of grown men who never quite got over their disappointment at being left out of this club of clubs. The agony and ecstasy are both beautifully caught in Cyril Connollys timeless book about Eton, Enemies of Promise. In his superb recent memoir, Cold Cream (marvelously subtitled My Early Life and Other Mistakes), Mrs. Thatchers former adviser Ferdinand Mountwhose cousin Mary is somehow David Camerons mother and whose uncle by marriage was in a highly and somehow Etonian way Anthony Powelldismisses his own Eton years as an inferno of corporal punishment. The beating and birching have been abolished now, as has the fag system and some of the more absurd bits of the dress code. Co-education will probably never come, but the atmosphere is less, shall we say, monastic. In an interview with the progressive Head Master, Anthony Little, Nick Fraser found that the school had recently hosted a delegation from Canton, inquiring how the Etonian system might best be adapted for the new go-ahead China. A video loop playing in the Eton bookstore made the whole place seem cutting-edge, market-smart, and technological. No doubt this fits with Camerons user-friendly Toryismhe says he wants his own children to be educated by the state but I had the odd sensation as I wandered away that I would be somewhat more inclined to praise Eton for remaining unchanged than for trying to emulate everybody else.