Such, Such Were the Joys

Gilded Youth : Privilege, Rebellion and the British Public School by James Brooke-Smith

The Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2019

Britain’s “public,” which is to say private, schools have been around since at least the 14th century. The controversy over their place in the country’s life sometimes seems to have been raging for almost as long, although it really only took off a couple hundred years ago, the day before yesterday in a land of ancient grievances.

“Gilded Youth,” James Brooke-Smith ’s addition to the sizeable canon of unflattering accounts of these curious establishments, has plenty of room for familiar complaints: bullying, sadism, sexual abuse, emotional repression, entrenching “the privilege of the wealthy few,” and so on. But even those exhausted with this well-worn topic may be intrigued by Mr. Brooke-Smith’s examination of the surprisingly complex history of public school dissent—there were some inmates who struck back against what they saw as asylums.

Mr. Brooke-Smith, an English literature professor at the University of Ottawa, recounts a series of armed revolts (yes, armed) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and accurately describes these as risings in defense of an established regime—specifically schoolboy rights of self-governance, an attitude of “aristocratic libertarianism” with, not infrequently, a touch of “Lord of the Flies” about its consequences. The author then goes further, detecting stirrings of a broader youthful group identity.

Beyond depictions of later well-known (but less violent) examples of public-school rebellion, Mr. Brooke-Smith identifies intriguing patterns of cultural subversion. The schools’ relentless emphasis on Latin and Greek, and, in particular, the concentration on grammar left imaginative pupils free to fool with content, as they shoehorned zany jokes, juvenilia and other banter into a forbidding classical structure.

“Nonsense,” writes Mr. Brooke-Smith, “is the inverse image of classical pedagogy, the silky lining to its sow’s ear. . . . Language became a toy to be played with, a gift to be enjoyed rather than an extension of the school’s wider system of discipline and order.” It’s a delightful idea (which he expands on elsewhere) and so delightfully expressed that one can forgive the way in which the author, elsewhere, occasionally lapses into the forbidding brutalist structure of contemporary academic prose (“walking with pronouncedly mincing gait . . . could function as a strategic intervention within the symbolic economy of the school”). That said, it’s a stretch for Mr. Brooke-Smith to claim that this “delirious chatter of schoolboy nonsense” was, as a staple of British comedy from Lewis Carroll to Monty Python, “one of the more unexpected ways in which the public school system has exerted its influence on British popular culture.” It may be better to see this manner of humor as having reinforced a long-standing national fondness for absurdity, whimsy and wordplay, something the author partially acknowledges elsewhere.

Turning his attention to explicitly leftist dissent during the 1930s, Mr. Brooke-Smith focuses primarily on the notorious Romilly brothers, two of Churchill ’s nephews no less. The younger, Esmond, fled Wellington to go slumming with London’s left and to continue work on the underground magazine launched by the duo and written, as the author puts it, “in the mixed tones of juvenile delinquency and doctrinaire Marxism.” Its aim was to foment a public-school revolt.

The Romilly story looks to me like one of self-importance and entitlement wrapped up in the red flag. Esmond’s Grand Tour was a stint in Spain fighting Franco. He married a Mitford sister (the Stalin ist, not the Hitler groupie). Adding a layer to the way this tale is usually told, Mr. Brooke-Smith notes that a strong thread of performance ran through the whole saga. He does not, unfortunately, stop to consider whether there was something, beyond the thrill of revolution and concern over the fascist threat, that made communism so attractive to not only these two brothers but a host of other upscale rebels, such as Kim Philby (who wore, Mr. Brooke-Smith records, “his old Westminster scarf while in exile in Moscow”). After all, the USSR was an austere, authoritarian entity united (in theory) by a sense of a greater purpose, and run by a hierarchy that reported in turn to Stalin, the toughest headmaster of them all.

In “Gilded Youth” the uneven struggle between the dominant hearties—products of the anti-intellectualism and team-sports fixation that characterized the public schools for decades—and dissident aesthetes is given its predictable airing, but made more interesting by Mr. Brooke-Smith’s observation of the double game played by the rebels in adulthood. Taking advantage of the midcentury’s more relaxed cultural climate, many built careers in opposition to the ethos of the old school, yet used the polish and connections they had gained there to get on: “[Poet John] Betjeman, who we last encountered prancing like a nymph on the sidelines of a Marlborough rugby match, went on to become Poet Laureate.”

The author’s disapproval of what he believes to be the unfair prominence of public-school alumni (a category, incidentally, that includes both Mr. Brooke-Smith and, full disclosure, me) has been, I suspect, sharpened by the way it persists in a dramatically changed Britain. These alumni have flourished, to his evident irritation, in environments, from rock music to cinema, hard to square with public schools’ stereotypical stodginess. He may be repelled by these institutions’ pasts, but the thought that they might have a future appears to grate far more. He wants to see them either “radically reformed or incorporated within the state sector.” That, however, is not what this book is “about”—not directly—any more than it is about how Mr. Brooke-Smith understands and has processed his own (abbreviated) time at Shrewsbury. But the subtlety and an honesty with which he writes about the latter suggests that this issue is lurking nonetheless.