The battle for Eton’s soul

When trying to get my head around the row that has engulfed Eton College in the past two weeks I keep getting sidetracked by the comic details. Like the fact that the headmaster, Simon Henderson, is nicknamed ‘trendy Hendy’ on account of his mission to transform Eton into a modern, progressive institution. By all accounts, he has set about trying to cleanse the school of its ‘toxic’ traditions with the zeal of a captain in the Red Guards, promising to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum, recruiting the creator of the Everyday Sexism blog to lecture the staff on the gender pay gap and, at one point, proposing to scrap Eton’s famous uniform. Among his initiatives has been to elevate a drama teacher to the post of Director of Inclusion Education. Earlier this year, this redoubtable bluestocking wrote a blog post for the school’s website saying she’d like to see the Black Lives Matter flag flying over the College gateway.