Public School Influence on British Character

PUBLIC SCHOOL INFLUENCE ON BRITISH CHARACTER AN ADDRESS BY R. W. LIVINGSTONE, M.A., D.Litt,. LL.D., PRESIDENT AND VICE-CHANCELLOR, QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY, BELFAST. (Links of Empire Series) 20th October, 1927.

DR. LIVINGSTONE was introduced by COLONEL FRASER and spoke as follows: Mr. President and Gentleman, I was asked to speak about Ireland, but when I went to, Ireland to Queen's University I realized from the first that there were two subjects I must not touch in public, and they were politics and religion. There is no subject I should like to speak about more, but really the only sort of speech I could make is one which would leave you doubtful whether I was' a member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians or the Black Preceptory. All I will say about Ireland is that we are just as peaceful in the north as you are here. I should say that political relations with the South are really quite good. I do not think myself that the majority in the North has altered its opinion about union, but I do think that practically everyone would be glad to see the South settle its own problems with prosperity and success to itself. Our own great difficulty in the North now, I think, is an industrial one. The linen trade, of course, is badly hit, and it has not yet revived, and that is reflected everywhere. Coming here, and going over the University, for instance, I envy them their resources, and the things which they can have, which we have to do without. But in spite of these difficult times, we have one great asset of a gilt edged nature-I can say this because I am not an Ulsterman by birth-we have the North Irish character (Applause). Personally I think there is a bigger proportion both of

ability and character in the North of Ireland than you will find in most places of the world (Applause).

Now I will give you what is my main speech, and that is, The English Public School and its Influence on the character of the nation. There are of course two main types of school apart from the elementary school in England. One is what we generally call the Secondary School, which is very much like your public schools here. The fees, I suppose, range from about $100 a year upwards, and perhaps downward. The teaching is very good, just as good as in the schools I am going to speak of, but they are not residential schools. The other schools are what we in England call Public Schools. They are essentially residential; most of them have no boarders at all. The fees there range-well I was looking at the fees of one rather ordinary Public School the other day, and the mere fees were $875 a year, whereas I suppose at places like Winchester and Eton, I do not suppose you could get through under much less than $1,250 or $1,500 a year. Of course I do not want to unduly praise them, but I do think they have had an immense influence on England in the last sixty years, and if I were asked what man had more influence in England than any other in the last seventy years, I should say it was Thomas Arnold of Rugby in the forties, who, I do not say created, but he practically made the English Public School (Applause). The school I happened to be at was in a beautiful country. It had beautiful buildings; and the boys who first lived in those rooms where we lived, were being trained to be priests in a Europe which was still under the undivided control of the Roman Catholic Church. Those boys had, generation after generation, seen all the great events of English history; the Wars of the Roses, the Reformation, the Civil Wars, the Reform Bill. I suppose the people living just where we were living, knew of Agincourt and the Armada and Naseby and Blenheim, and the taking of Quebec, and the loss of Yorkton, and Trafalgar, and Waterloo, all in turn. Well, that was a sort of unconscious education in what history is, and certainly it gave one some feeling of how

much error and wisdom, success and failure, effort, courage, self-sacrifice, as well as other less desirable qualities had gone to make the history of that small island which has played such a big part in the world, which has got its sons in every country of the earth, and whose history is your own Canadian heritage and ours.

I should say there were really two stages in one's school life. The first were one's early days as a boy. The part of the school I was in is called College, and it had seventy members. One had a fortnight there to learn the peculiar language of the place, and also to learn one's duties; and then one's duties began. They began at 6.15 a.m. when the school bell went, and I had to get up and call every boy of the eleven boys in our dormitory, and then I went and had a cold bath. You always had to have a cold bath all the year round, and a very good thing too. Then every five minutes I had to call all those eleven boys, till five minutes to seven, and tell them what the time was, and they got up in a-sort of hierarchy, the prefects, the oldest boys, last of all at a quarter to seven and dressed in a quarter of an hour. We did not have any fires; we had instead faggots made of brushwood, and they burned furiously for about five minutes. You were splendidly warm for five minutes, and you lived on the warmth of that for about two or three hours, and then had another. It was my business to light them. Then in the evening I had to go up to the dormitory again and sweep it out and light the fire and see whether there were enough mugs to clean people's teeth with, and if there were not enough mugs, you just had to go to another dormitory and, as we put it, make them. Another peculiar thing was I had to light the thing called functure. This was a candle made of very evil-smelling tallow, with a red wick in it, a mediaeval thing which burned all night in the room. The legend of the origin of the functure is a curious one. There was a boy who very much hated another boy in his dormitory, or was said to have done so, and he got up in the middle of the night to murder him, and there being no functure and no candle to give light in those days, he murdered his brother

by accident. And in future, in order that no such mistake should be made, we had the functure. I remember in 1894 we had a very bad winter and the water pipes all broke and the water supply failed, and I used to have to go down to the quadrangle and collect snow in a bigwhat we called a topan boiler-and I had to melt it down for the prefects to wash in. There was one other good rule; we were not allowed, when we were called junior, to think. What that meant was this: if you did something wrong and the prefect asked you why you had done it, you were not allowed to say I thought-that is, to make an excuse in that form. You were never allowed to say I thought, and I think that was not a bad rule (Laughter).,

That is what I should call the first stage of one's career; you begin, so to speak, as a small slave in your first year, and your duties gradually lighten. You were liable at any time, for at least two years, to be sent off on errands by prefects; many pounds of biscuits have I brought up from the school shop. And you had to do that sort of thing. Then in your fourth or fifth year you generally became a prefect. There were eighteen of them in College, where I lived, eighteen out of seventy boys. And then of course one could order the other people about. At anytime you just had to call "Junior," and any junior within call had to come, and the person who came last had to do what was required. And you had a special person assigned to you, called a valet, a small boy who carried your things up to your dormitory; and in the dormitory, while everyone else went to bed at a proper hour, you were allowed to sit up as late as you liked. The favorite drink was the very nice drink of cocoa, made with condensed milk, and extremely good it was. I may say I have never been so nearly an autocrat in my life as I was in my last year at a Public School, and I think most prefects would tell you the same. But of course it was not all amusement. You had your responsibilities. The keeping of order was left practically entirely to the prefects; keeping order in preparation time, keeping order in the dormitory, the general keeping

of discipline. I think I am right in saying never in my six years at school did I see a Master in our dormitory. The thing was left entirely to the prefects, and it was done very well, in my experience. If you ask how we managed to do it, well it was a sort of prestige, it was an established custom. I think English boys are probably more docile than you are here (Laughter). At any rate it has grown up, it is a sort of tradition. The only instrument you had was what we called a grand ash, an ash plant which had to be small enough to go through a certain rather big ring, and prefects were allowed to wield this to the extent of twelve blows; and it was a very good weapon because if you got a man who had a good eye and could bring it down on the same spot, it really felt like one stream of flame after another, and yet at the end of it, in ten minutes there was nothing left except if you got a looking-glass you could see some weals on your back. But that has been, I am sorry to say, abolished now; I think it was a very good thing.

What was the effect of all this? Let me begin with the drawbacks. People will tell you that the Public School in England was weak on the intellectual side, that it overdid athleticism, and I would not deny that that was sometimes so; and I am cergain that one of the secrets of education is to remember that you cannot train boys only through games. There is a discipline which comes from intellectual work and intellectual interests, which are equally indispensable with the other, and I admit that probably some Public Schools have ignored that; but it is not in the Public School system. At Winchester, where I was, the intellectual life and interest was keen, and I am certain we never suffered in that respect. It it merely a fact that it depends on who happens to be your teacher-but that is not a weakness of the system. Another complaint is that it makes people too much in one mould, that if you put a lot of small boys, or boys from thirteen to eighteen all together you get a sort of dead level of public opinion. You get people talking about herd instinct and conventionality and snobbery, and all that sort of thing. Well, I would not send an

eccentric, sensitive boy to an English Public School; I would not send a Shelley or a Swinburne to one; but I am quite sure that Shakespeare or Milton or Wordsworth would have got on very well. You don't want the sensitive, peculiar type of boy; he is a little liable to have a bad time. But in my memory at Winchester, if it was a Conservative school, and the vast majority of boys were Conservative, there was quite a fair sprinkling of Liberals which kept up their end in the Debating Society. I happened to be a Master at Eton during the last year of the war and I remember one boy there who was a relation of a very famous English statesman, I will not mention his name, a Conservative statesman who is well known to everyone here, who in the end of 1918 expressed Bolshevistic opinions and hung a red flag out of his study. He was a boy of fifteen. I do not pretend that those opinions were popular or that he did not get a ragging, but he was not badly ill-treated. He survived with his life (Laughter). I mean much more than that. He was not crushed at all; he was just gently ragged, and I think he was better treated, probably, than he would have been if he had been just south of the border in that famous home of democracy in the States. So that it does show that as a matter of fact eccentrics can survive perfectly well. And of course if I believe in a certain number of rebels fn society, I think it is a good thing to make a rebel see that he has got stuff enough in him to stand up for his opinions.

A third complaint is that the Public School encourages and develops that English reserve. A foreign critic described the English boy essentially, when he said, "Each of these Islanders is himself an island." And one knows what that means. I think it is partly in the English character; I think they are naturally more reserved than either Scotch, Irish or Welsh, and perhaps the Public School does develop it. I am inclined to think it does, and I think that it is a drawback. I think it is an advantage to be a little more expansive, perhaps. But of course you have these little boys together; they are shut off from all feminine influences; we, at any rate,

never saw a woman, unless we went down to the sick house when we were ill. That does, I think, rather tend to create reserve. People do not, or did not certainly in my time, talk about their homes, and they spent roughly, thirty-nine weeks of the year in that way. I think perhaps you can blame the Public School for that English reserve.

Now let me come to what I think ate the good things it does. After all, the English Public School has this testimony, that foreigners send their children there. It is quite common to meet boys from other countries in Europe who have been deliberately sent away from home to an English Public School; and you do not find English boys in the same way going over to a Lycee in France or a Gymnasium in Germany. That is a great unconscious testimonial to what is, and what I think a European would say is the character of the English Public School, that it trains character. What does it do? Well in the first place it makes people stand on their own legs. It appals me, sometimes, to think of a little boy of twelve going into that sort of society, everyone older than himself, away from his home, and no women around. Well it does teach people on the whole to stand up for themselves; and I think we want that more in England than you do. Here there is naturally a sort of pioneer spirit, in a country which is still being made, and then of course with your great spaces and open life, camping and that sort of thing, you have advantages in developing character which we really have not got. And I think the Public School is more essential to us probably than it would be over here. That is one thing, it teaches people to stand on their own legs, and to face loneliness and uncongenial surroundings.

And then I think you learn or begin to learn two very necessary lessons in life, which correspond to the two stages of which I spoke. In your early stage at a Public School you learn to obey, to do things because you are told to do them by someone who has the authority to tell you to do them, very often when you think them unreasonable and unpleasant. I do not think that is a

bad lesson. The second and perhaps more important is in your last years as a prefect you learn to command, and really the essence of commanding is not being able to fag and send them off to do your work, but to take certain responsibilities. Arnold's principle was this: he did not do things for his boys, he did not look very closely after them, he expected them to do things for themselves, to look after the discipline and the good tone and the order of the school by themselves. And that is a big responsibility to take. And it is in a way the essence of command, the feeling that you have got the privileges, but the duties go with them. I do not say there has never been bullying in a Public School. If you want to read an account of horror, read some of the stories of Eton in the eighteenth century; but I never, in the whole of my time, saw an instance of bullying of any kind, and if it had occurred the prefects would soon have put a stop to it. It is a curious sort of inversion. You would expect prefects to be entirely waited on by their juniors, but one of the rituals at Winchester was at each tea, which was at a quarter past six, a prefect always went and toasted for all the boys, the juniors, in his dormitory. They were not allowed to toast but he used to go and toast for them. Well, that is, in a way I think, is the main thing which the Public School taught a good many boys to do, and I think it is one of the reasons why India, for instance, is such a monument of the British Empire as a whole. The work of the Indian Civil Service in India is, I think, one of the great governing traditions of the world.

The third thing I think the Public School did was that it got over that great problem which has faced all political thinkers from Plato downwards, the problem of getting rid of the individual consciousness and making people think more of their community than of themselves. In a Public School you were essentially a member of a small society. From the atmosphere of the place and a sort of semi-compulsion, you felt yourself almost more a member of society than you felt yourself an individual. That seems to me to be a valuable lesson, too. You get

a training in this microcosm, the Public School, for that big macrocosm, the world. You get it put into you that through life you are a member of society, which is at bottom more important than yourself. You see that in England; you saw it in 1914 of course. All classes of the community did splendidly, but I do not think there was any class in which there was so much practical unanimity in the way in which people ran to arms as in the Public School class. Those boys, wherever they were on August fourth, went off at once and joined up, and that, I think, was helped by the Public School system. Of course I do not mean to say that the Public School had a monopoly on patriotism; it obviously would not be true; but I think that had been rammed into them. And where I do think you see it much more is in that very large amount of public service which one gets in England from a rather idle class. Here, of course, I think it is a tradition to people to work, but after all until the last ten years there has been in England a big class, the country squires, who really might just have sat still and hunted, and done nothing else. And some of them have been like that, but most of them have done an immense amount of public work, in parliament, in numerous activities, and above all in the ordinary work of country administration. They form the unpaid magistrates, they form the unpaid members of county councils, people who give up their own time, away from their own amusements and their work and business. That is a great example of public spirit, and I think the Public School has something to its credit there. I do not of course wish to seem to imply that a Public School is a perfect place, and that every good thing in England is due to it; that is not so; but I think it does express much of the best parts of the genius of the British people, and I think it has done a great deal to strengthen and develop that genius (Applause).

The thanks of the Club were tendered to the speaker by REV. DR. SCALTER.