Old school ties

There was a time when the public school ethos was rather dismissive of "trade" and the institutions themselves would have hautily rejected any idea that they were businesses. No more; now the places are busily turning themselves into franchises and opening branches — in many places replicating the full public school experience down to the silly uniforms and school songs across the Far East.

Since Harrow first took the plunge back in 1998 by opening a branch in Thailand, other English public schools have either followed suit or been seriously tempted. The famous Harrovian boaters may have looked out of place in downtown Bangkok but, educationally, the model worked.

Many East Asian countries are, rather like the schools themselves, endlessly fascinating to outsiders, but much stereotyped - in some cases even rather unfairly. So in that spirit, one might observe that it is unclear whether that part of the world really needs more institutions that love hierarchies, deference, arcane and bizarre rituals, cruelty and recherché sexual habits.

But there is another curious aspect to it; as the Telegraph article linked to notes, that while these institutions might be widely admired by the super-wealthy, the English education system as a whole is not widely regarded as a great model for everyone else to follow.

In this there is a curious parallel with the American health care system. I can't claim to have followed every twist in the current debate there, but I have noted that many defenders of the status quo in the US cite the fact that wealthy foreigners are often willing to pay for the best facilities America can offer proves the superiority of their own system.

I'm not sure many people in Britain would use a similar logic to resist changes to the educational system - we can all the absurdity of that logic, right? And yet a great many people who can spot the unfairness in the American health system from their vantage point on the other side of the Atlantic are quite happy to encourage a divisive and inequitable education system back home.

Trollied Tuesday: a bad role model

James Bond is, according to quite a few people.

Paul Johnson: "the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude snob-cravings of a suburban adult".

Bidisha: "The Bond films are generally sexist. I don't like anything that descends from a sewer of misogyny."

Theo Hobson: James Bond's sexual career does real harm to the male psyche. Heroism, British boys learn from the age of five or six, involves treating women like toys, thrilling and dangerous toys. Women will admire, even worship you, if you are a cool philanderer. We must resist the urge to titter here: I seriously believe that Bond is a big factor in the sexual malfunction of our times; the difficulty we have finding life-long partners, and the normalisation of pornography.

It's easy to mock this sort of nonsense and quite rightly when it derives from people who have that meta-priggishness of the truly humourless: the inability to spot things that are not intended to be take too seriously; come on, it's not as if Bond is Flashman (more's the pity, Flashy is far more fun).

I'm surprised that this self-righteous attitude hasn't been more directed towards Bond's drinking; this is after all a character who has to be packed off to a health farm to dry out on occasions. Admittedly this aspect is toned down in the later films lest American sensibilities be offended – but you can't have Bond without the martinis and other drinks.

And yet herein lies the problem with Bond's character: his fastidious but promiscuous taste for drinks closely mirrors his creator's (one might say the same about women, I suppose). We might raise an eyebrow at the fact that this supposed Scotsman shows such a fondness for bourbon, but consider the signature martini (taken from Flemming's own favourite recipe).

Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?'...

(The passage is reproduced in full here).

Shaking the stuff weakens it by diluting it with ice-water, lemon peel is a bit effete compared with the sharp salt snap from an olive, and the prissy affectation of insisting on a mass-produced gin (NB: in strict fairness Gordon's was at least a bit stronger in those days, they've watered it down since) indicates a real problem with Bond and drinking. Showy bad taste. As the BBC article linked to at the top notes:

The third major charge against our superspy is harder to excuse - excessive brand usage. Fleming's novels were full of name checks for products. Bond drank Smirnoff vodka and Dom Perignon champagne and wore a Rolex. But the film franchise has taken this to even greater lengths... In Die Another Day he changed his mind on the vodka issue and preferred Finlandia.

… the purpose these brand adverts served in the Fleming novels wasn't as a generator of filthy lucre, but rather as an indicator of class.

How vulgar. Champagne, as I have noted before, is fine at breakfast and lunchtime, but a discreet and constant consumption of claret and brandy bespeaks a far great sophistication. As it is Bond seems like the sort of fellow who would insist one can never drink red wine with fish.

Bond, again like his creator, was an Etonian. One should not be surprised that a man who was schooled there should be a cold-hearted psychopath, a snob and have a brutish attitude to women. But that they should show such poor form with regard to drinks is a grave disappointment. It is, to use the adjective for the second time in successive days, Widmerpoolian; and his gravest failing in Powell's eyes was trying too hard.

It's one reason why I wouldn't even think to ask whether Bond is a good role model: how could he be?

Where the Guardian keeps getting it wrong

Or rather that whole stratum of the British left that can't face the prospect of an Old Etonian becoming Prime Minister. Here's Jackie Ashley:

Yet even without difficult decisions to be made, Cameron has to explain what the new Tories stand for. Do they have distinctive, properly thought out policies? Or are they content to kick a deeply unpopular government in hard times? So far, they still seem more Flashman than Gladstone.

Oh come off it. If ever there were a boy who was tossed in a blanket, roasted in front of a fire and had his head shoved down the bog in the dorms it is Cameron minor. He is no more a Flashman figure than Nick Clegg is Gladstone come again.

More generally, the obsession with the Old Etonian = Tory Toff!!! OMG!!!! line of argument, which does not work in the slightest, misses the real reason why we should be worried about a cabinet of Old Etonians. It is that the school is England's academy of darkness, the greatest nursery of vice, brutality and degradation known to man.

Of course, this experience can give a valuable insight into human nature and it's no surprise that Eton has produced some fine writers: Orwell and Powell, for instance. But let's remember the words of another Old Etonian writer (and pornographer, confidence trickster and minicab driver): Robin Cook (aka Derek Raymond). He said of his schooling "An Eton background is essential if you are at all into vice".

It is a fairly good rule of thumb that one should never trust an Etonian - certainly not when matters of money or honour are at stake. Really: one would expect the Guardian, as a newspaper written by people who were bullied at public school for people who were bullied at public school, to know this.

The clot thickens

A quick update to what's below. The Mail's headline: "Labour's Tory-baiting 'toff' exposed... as a toff" pretty much sums it up.

Alex Norris, 23, one of two Labour supporters who posed in "toff" gear, went to Manchester Grammar, a £9,000-a-year private school that has some of the best academic results in the country.

He has been the public face of a Labour drive to portray Tory candidate Edward Timpson, 34, as privileged because of his wealth and his education at Uppingham public school in Rutland.

However, Mr Norris's own private school – founded in 1515 – is older than Uppingham (1584) and ranks substantially higher in academic league tables.

(Ah, how I appreciate the Mail's effortless talent for gleeful malevolence as shown in that final paragraph).

If you wish to read the full story be warned that you will see deeply unpleasant pictures of a rather smug-looking public school boy in a cheap and nasty shirt and a tie of almost indescribable tastelessness (insert own connection between that and Labour's sub-BNP tactics here). I would suggest this stunt is letting the old school down somewhat, but there is also something about young Norris's consciously unfastened collar, carefully dishevelled tie (you'll note he is careful to avoid the distressingly commonplace "footballer's Windsor knot) and cocksure expression that evokes (rather too strongly for my tastes) the eternal public school sixth former.

I suspect we'll be hearing from this fellow again in the future.

EDW: Politicians in morning dress

Have you seen the two twerps who have been following the 'Tory toff' Edward Timpson around Crewe in tail coats in a bid to undermine his attempt to convince the electors that the Conservative party is less contemptible than Labour? Their attempts to embarrass the Tory are horribly undermined by the fact that they can not carry off the outfits they have affected: cheap, button-down shirts, ill-fitting, off-the-peg clothes and grey top hats, all of which make them look very foolish indeed.

In truth, Timpson doesn't quite cut it as a toff. It was with some amusement mingled with horror that I learned he attended Uppingham school for a time; while I was there in fact. He would have been a year or two above me, but I cannot for the life of me remember him. I don't think he would have displayed any interest in politics*, anyhow, which makes him an ideal fit for the Cameron Conservatives.

In any case, Uppingham is not an especially grand or prestigious school. It prides itself in helping the more bovine members of the middle classes to succeed in their exams, making sure the bright ones aren't too full of themselves and in turning out dutiful, dull and decent types (again, perfect for the Cameron Conservatives), rather than the type who has the insouciance, certitude and born-to-rule manner which morning dress demands.

It is a form of clothing which makes particular demands on the wearer. You have to make yourself worthy of it. It's not simply a matter of class - as this picture of the aristocratic Churchill and the lower middle class, Welsh-speaking Lloyd George shows. They do, however, have the command of the conventions and clothing of the Edwardian ruling elite.

You need not approve of many of their views or actions (I don't, although I hope you share my view that standing up to Hitler was a good thing), but both these great statesmen of the last century offer a sartorial example to today's politicians.

Few modern politicians could carry it off. Regardless of their social background, they tend - with honourable exceptions - to have the souls of management consultants, spivs, solicitors and PR 'executives'; as such they dress accordingly.

* I do remember Jenny Willott, now a Lib Dem MP. She struck me as earnest, well-intentioned and rather dull. Ideal for being a prefect or a Lib Dem. Although, to be honest, her only memorable contribution to the 6th form debating society was to begin a speech with the phrase 'I'd like to expand on Mr Dornan's point.' The rest was lost in the puerile, public school sniggering that followed. Good training, for the Commons.

Traditions Under Threat

Shrove Tuesday isn't what it used to be. You may have spotted several hundred media outlets lamenting the fact that people aren't so bothered with making pancakes these days. It seems that the fact no one is making a cheap but enjoyable snack is a sad mark of a country in irretrivable decline.

Since the story is based on a poll conducted by a flour manufacturer (and what's their methodology, hey? Does it use the proper psephological techniques? I rather doubt it) we might just dismiss it as a PR puff lazily lifted by news desks trying to fill their pages on the cheap. The trouble is that the pancake is just about last the last vestige of what was once a rich tradition of Shrove Tuesday festivities – mostly revolving around random acts of violence and cruelty to vulnerable people or animals.

Some villages do still enjoy the traditional football matches – the sort of violent, disorganised mêlée in which scoring a goal is regarded as unsporting and which even people who have an enduring hatred of all team sports would pay good money to see David Beckham pitched into.
The villagers of Ashbourne in Derbyshire, for instance, still enjoy nothing better than hours of wrestling and stamping each other into the mire but there is now an aura of quaintness about these events.

For in the past

Shrove Tuesday, or as we know it to-day, "Pancake Tuesday" seems in the olden times to have been a season of merriment, horseplay, and cruelty, as if the participants were determined to have their fling ere Lent set in with its sombre feelings and proscription of joy. Prostitutes were hounded out of their dwellings with a view to segregation during the Lenten term; "cock-throwing" was indulged in, a cock being tied to a stake and pelted by the onlookers; and all kinds of rough games were played, the women and the men joining in the "fun."

The Cornish used to enjoy a more utilitarian form of cruelty.

It was customary in Cornwall to take any one which had not laid eggs before Shrove-Tuesday, and lay it on a barn-floor to be thrashed to death. A man hit at her with a flail; and if he succeeded in killing her therewith, he got her for his pains. It was customary for a fellow to get a hen tied to his back, with some horse-bells hung beside it.

Of course, the true devotee of pointless acts of violence dressed in a veneer of tradition will always look to the oldest public schools of England to set the tone. The young gentlemen of Westminster School, for instance, have elevated the of tossing the pancake into an excuse for a good bit of character-building violence by fighting over a pancake which is hurled into a mass of boys. Wimpishly, the ritual has been sanitised somewhat "Due to the number of deaths, the ritual now only involves boys (and girls) selected from each house."

Other schools preferred to concentrate on the aforementioned cock throwing and were one of the last places to mark the start of day by ritually stoning a tethered fowl to death. As the Gentleman's Magazine noted, killing the bird with a carefully aimed broomstick is not as easy as it sounds and it could be dangerous to get too close to the bird. Lord Tebbit would, I'm sure, approve of the discipline and skill a revival of this custom would instill in youngsters.

But these Shrove Tuesday traditions are properly brought together by, inevitably, Eton College where a crow was wrapped in a pancake and nailed to the college door.

"The manuscript in the British Museum, 'Status Scholae Etonensis, A.D. 1560,' mentions a custom of that school on Shrove Tuesday, of the boys being allowed to play from eight o'clock for the whole day; and of the cook's coming in and fastening a pancake to a crow, which the young crows are calling upon, near it, at the school door. 'Die Martis Carnis-privii luditur ad horam octavam in totum diem: venit Coquus, affigit laganum Cornici, juxta illud pullis Corvorum invocantibus eum, ad ostium scholae.' The crows generally have hatched their young at this season."

If those lamenting the loss of ancient traditions are sincere in their concerns, I hope they will be agitating to revive these, and other related customs. After all, the start of Lent is far too solemn a matter to be given over solely to cheap and tasty snacks.

Public school man 'too common' for Today

The Telegraph has given it a slightly different slant, but that's the essence of it.

For the true toffs, of course, Brentwood – alma matter of Peter Allen, the presenter in questions – is rather infra dig. By contrast, the BBC's Today programme is unquestionably a top school type of show: so unshakably sure of its own merits and worth that it scarcely notices the ruthlessness and self-fulfilling arrogance that it employs to stay at the top.

You may be aware of one of the more popular lurid myths about the top (and top-ish) public schools: the existence of a clandestine daisy chain club (or some similar name) in which, at some time after lights out, the boys all reach out to the bed next to them, grab hold of their neigbour's bits and start to stimulate each other until they reach the climax. Anyhow, Today has always seemed a bit like that to me: a cliqueish circle jerk.

I say the daisy chain stuff is a myth, because I am not aware of it ever happening in real life, although there used to be a tacit toleration for some similar practices. To quote one Harrow housemaster, "I don't mind mutual masturbation, but I draw the line at buggery." Anyway, I try and remain equally unaware of the Today programme happening, partly because I try and avoid being awake during the hours at which it's broadcast (unless I'm just getting to bed), but also because I draw the line at John Humphrys if I do find myself conscious at that time.

I think far too many people take it's "this is the show that important people listen to, so therefore listen to his and feel important" shitck seriously and let it, and it alone, decide what is important and right. Certainly, given its particular and limited listenership, it shouldn't be allowed to dictate the media agenda to the extent it does.

One could continue the BBC Radio Four as metaphor for what's wrong with the British middle classes thing indefinitely – for all the self-regarding arrogance of Today, there's also, in various measures, tweeness, insularity, whimsy, reverence for idiotic institutions (the day you start listening to The Archers is the day your life has lost all worth) and so much boring smugness dotted around the schedules. Worse, all these things seem to have a particular, finely calibrated place within a definite hierarchy that outsiders struggle to grasp.

But too much of this class gradation stuff can drive you mad, so I think I'll stop there. Instead, let's return to Brentwood School as an illustration of why much of this status malarkey is over-rated. While the place may be expensive and have a certain public school cachet, really, it's not terribly good: an Eton for Britain's chavocracy (alumni include such classy characters as Jodie Marsh, Frank Lampard, Noel Edmonds and Keith Allen). Even more depressingly, an awareness of the school's third rateness has been known to induce a pathetic status anxiety and neurotic self-importance in some of its more snobbish former pupils to the extent that it renders them insufferable in real life.

Not that other public schools don't produce their own horrors, and I'm not just thinking of my own dear school chums here. As one former teacher in a Kentish public school has observed:

[A] young offender was far more polite towards her than many of those she taught whose parent’s pay between four and eight thousand pounds a term for the privilege of their offspring behaving like ignorant, spoiled brats. I am not in the least bit surprised.

Me neither. The solution, don't get obsessed with all the self-mythologising. Public schools don't represent some sort of gold standard, nor does the Today programme. And its presenters, no more than public school boys, really have no particular reason to swank. It's most un-gentlemanly behaviour, after all.