A rebellion among Rugby schoolboys proved perfect training for its ringleader in putting down a Jamaican slave-rising in later life

The public schools ought to have gone out of business long ago. The Education Act of 1944, which promised ‘state-aided education of a rapidly improving quality for nothing or next to nothing’, seemed to herald, as the headmaster of Winchester cautioned, the end of fee-paying. Two decades later Roy Hattersley warned the Headmasters’ Conference to have ‘no doubts about our serious intention to reduce and eventually to abolish private education in this country’.Yet David Turner is able to conclude in this well-researched, impeccably fair and refreshingly undogmatic history, that this is their golden age. He takes the unfashionable line that they are now vital contributors to the country’s economic, political and scientific well-being.

It was not always so. In earlier centuries, public schools (as he calls them throughout) were often far from good, and always hopelessly slow in adapting to changed circumstances. Shrewsbury was down to 26 boys at one point in the 18th century and St Paul’s to 35. There were six rebellions at Winchester, and six at Eton. A rebellion at Rugby, quelled at swordpoint by the local militia, was no doubt a useful practical lesson for one of the ringleaders, Sir Willoughby Cotton, who put down a slave rising in Jamaica in later life.

In the 19th century, following the example of Dr Arnold, headmasters reduced the systematic cruelty and general idleness of their pupils by using those who would have led the riots to lead the school instead. There was a wave of new foundations — day schools in the 1820s and boarding schools like Marlborough in the 1840s — but for another century classrooms were dominated by Latin and Greek.

The great entrepreneurs and practical men of the industrial age — Faraday, Stephenson, William Smith and Brunel — were self-educated or had been taught in small dissenting academies.