Hard times | 4 September 2014

When the late, great Ronald Searle and Geoffrey Willans conspired to create St Trinian’s and Nigel Molesworth, the archetypal English prep school boy, they wanted to evoke an air of -austere, post-war gloom. Molesworth’s school, St Custard’s, was, in his own words, ‘built by a madman in 1836’. For both St Custard’s and St Trinian’s, Searle plumped for a grim, early Gothic Revival style, all inky, glowering crockets and pinnacles. His choice of Gothic was inspired by his wartime service when he was stationed in Kirkcudbright in 1940. There he met two schoolgirls, evacuated from a school called St Trinnean’s, Edinburgh, an OTT exercise in high Scottish Gothic. ‘I prefer Renaissance architecture, but the gloom of Gothic suited my work better,’ said Searle, ‘I misspelt it by accident — St Trinnean was an ancient saint — and it stuck.’ Austere gloom was certainly still the prevailing mood in my school days in the 1970s and 1980s. Westminster School may have been expensive — although a lot less expensive in real terms than it is today, at £10,830 a term for boarders. But it also retained an echo of St Custard’s — not just in the crockets and pinnacles of neighbouring Westminster Abbey, but also in a threadbare echo of that post-war austerity. Living standards were appropriately monastic in the shadow of the Abbey. We stuck milk bottles out on the ledge of our day room to keep them cool. What would have been the point of a fridge? Thirteen-year-old boys don’t need fancy, new-tangled devices to satisfy their plain, brutish tastes. Lunch wasn’t much better. We lived off buttered toast to compensate for the sub-optimal school food. At one particularly uninspiring meal, a friend of mine complained to the school chef that his roast lamb was sweating. ‘You’d sweat if you were put in an oven for three hours,’ barked the chef.