From the brainiacs to the bluffers: a guide to public school stereotypes

A Wykehamist, an Old Etonian and an Old Harrovian are in a bar. A woman walks in. The Old Etonian says: ‘Fetch her a chair!’ The Wykehamist gets it. The Old Harrovian sits in it.

It’s the oldest public-school joke in the world — and it still has the ring of truth. (Though you might add these days: ‘And then the Old Etonian becomes prime minister.’) But what about the other public schools? Here are the classic characteristics of our most famous schoolboys — and schoolgirls.

Charterhouse

Artistic, literary, louche, political and on the make… the received wisdom about Old Carthusians was set in stone in the Alms for Oblivion sequence by Simon Raven (1927-2001), who was at the school in the 1940s. At his own admission, Raven was a pleasure-loving libertine. His Charterhouse contemporaries were thinly disguised in the novels: William Rees-Mogg, Jacob’s father, later editor of the Times, is the ambitious Catholic opportunist Somerset Lloyd-James.