Private schools were ruined long ago

There is a story in private education circles of an apoplectic father who raged to the bursar that he was unable to find a prep school for his son ‘without central-heating’. It is probably apocryphal, but it reminds us of the mad heights to which some private schools have stretched: rowing lakes, glitzy IT centres, West End-style theatres and Olympic-sized swimming pools, no doubt necessary for storing the ever-growing associated fees. 

It wasn’t always this way. My entire 1950s schooling was an exercise in back-to-basics privation, fostering a now-fashionable ‘resilience’ and ‘green’ ethos, unnoticed by us pupils of those distant days. My small Dorset school, where it was not uncommon in winter for the inkwells to freeze over, produced two Dames of the British Empire.

I visited it a few years ago, to find it still surprisingly unbeholden to the current expectations of the entitled, continuing to use the freezing bathrooms with huge rusting enamelled iron bathtubs. I doubt the washing regime continues, however. We small girls were plunged into these baths three at a time, twice a week, as the tepid water became increasingly soup-like.

The crumbling Jacobean country house had its own kitchen garden, not fashionably uprooted for tennis courts, whose potatoes, beetroots, cabbage and worm-ridden carrots filled us up at a time when postwar rationing had barely been abandoned. We swam, naked as Diana and her insouciant nymphs, in a weed-strewn duck pond overseen by the tweed-suited maths master in holy orders. Amazing, unheeded by us, but true.

You could have either margarine or runny strawberry jam on your toast at breakfast, but not both, and we were expected to drink the water in which rice or potatoes had been cooked at the end of the domestic science lesson. Only later did I learn that doing this had rescued many a wartime prisoner from beri beri in the camps of Japan. Our instructors knew this first-hand.

Clothes – no uniforms – were woolly jumpers from home, and you lined up for a bewhiskered matron to check if you could swap to anything clean. The answer was usually negative, and there was none of the frenetic American-style clothes washing expected today. If you were deemed ‘peaky’ you queued again for a spoon of Radio Malt. No one had a nut allergy. Hands were inspected before lunch, and you were dispatched to a chilly sink with a pumice stone if yours were inky. Once, my father, posted in the Middle East, sent the school a box of Jaffa oranges. We were transfixed as they were handed out, rather like Evelyn Waugh’s children seeing their first bananas, though brutally devoured in front of them by their father.

We slept in iron beds, ranked together in chilly historic chambers named after the poets of the house’s founding era – Marvell, Donne, and Dryden – and sang daily the lovely metaphysical school hymn of George Herbert, ‘Teach me My God and King, In all things Thee to see’. We had no purpose-built theatre, but a nearby ruined castle came in handy for producing Milton’s Comus, and in the gardens Midsummer Night’s Dream and, at Christmas, Eliot’s Journey of the Magi in the Jacobean hall. All this is to say that, against a background of unwitting frugality, we had what every parent is surely seeking: a rigorous, traditional education. 

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We were fortunate, of course, in that we were holed up for months at a time in ancient buildings of beauty. Latin was taught by the doughty Oxford-educated daughter of the manse, and we jumped up and down on one leg in front of the class if we committed howlers of declension or conjugation. This redoubtable pedagogue, recognised on her eventual retirement in her nineties with the accolade of ‘Teacher of the Century’, presented herself in moth-eaten cashmere, with straw in her hair from where she slept in the gallery above the stabled horses. Her fey sister, charmingly one Bramley short of a picnic, taught us painting in a cold outhouse. These were unwaged family members, and their venerable old foundress mother, beaky-nosed in a vintage cardi, played us Beethoven on her gramophone of a Sunday evening. I can still hear the fizzing grate of the needle hitting the 78 record as I struggled vainly with the ‘handwork’ we were expected to do the while.

We knew, too, our Divinity, with careful unpicking of the Scriptures, as was the norm before multiculturalism prevailed. When our own daughter went up years later to read English Lit at Cambridge, most of the undergraduates had not been exposed to enough history or Bible knowledge to grasp the terms of reference of Milton, Shakespeare, and Dickens. Samson Agonistes’ fate through the guile of Delilah would now come with a ‘trigger warning’ on gendering.

These homely country schools also functioned as a sort of charitable repository for the lame dogs of the era’s depredations: a geography master so damaged by Japanese prisoner-of-war camps that he could barely stand, a gifted German master who had fled Austria’s Nazis in poverty, a couple of ancient ex-public school housemasters eking out a pension while still retaining their Lucretius and their Edmund Spenser, and the wife of a dissident Orthodox priest hounded from St Petersburg, who taught Russian. Orphaned lambs lay on old towels by the massive Aga, to be bottle-fed by us girls, and in an outhouse hound puppies were sheltered from the chill. Such were the orphans of the storm, human and animal, sheltered but still deployed for our benefit, at minimal outlay.

Perhaps the VAT hike should invite a reconsideration of our independent schools. An opportunity to look again at what we’ve lost: schools that rate frugality, restraint, and resilience, still packing the intellectual punch but trimmed of expensive indulgence?