“Pray, charge your glasses, gentlemen
And drink to Harrow’s honour!
May fortune still attend the Hill
And glory rest upon her!
The world outside is wondrous wide
But here the world is narrow
One magic thrall unites us all:
The name and fame of HARROW.”

By the time I first heard those words I could already see that the “name and fame” of the school concealed a grimmer reality. Its boarding houses, in which 60 or 70 boys lived away from their parents with barely any adult supervision, seemed to me cauldrons of dysfunction. At the state comprehensives I’d attended before going to Harrow on a scholarship, its rigidly hierarchical culture — in which older boys were allowed to discipline (or, in practice, simply bully) younger boys — would have been unimaginable. Few ever sought official protection against their tormentors, either because they accepted their predicament as normal or feared the consequences of being branded a “grass”. In one case during my time at Harrow, a group of boys in my boarding house dared to report a particularly vicious senior pupil for acts of appalling abuse. Rather than involving the police, the school — possibly mindful of press attention — simply expelled him, leaving him free to find victims elsewhere.

And yet, if at 16 I had been capable of absolute self-honesty, I would have admitted to myself an awkward fact: that whenever I heard “Stet Fortuna Domus”, with its rousing tune like the anthem of a Right-wing military junta, a part of me felt precisely the “magic thrall” it invoked. I may have decided, shortly after arriving at Harrow, that I was a socialist who’d like nothing better than to see the whole place burn down. But when I considered that every day I walked the same cobbled pavestones as Byron, Churchill, Peel and Palmerston, I couldn’t quite suppress a throb of pride.

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But then, one of the remarkable things about schools like Harrow is their ability to command the loyalty of students they make thoroughly miserable. Just ask Charles Spencer, whose new memoir A Very Private School details the chilling physical and sexual abuse he endured at an exclusive “prep” school called Maidwell in the Seventies. Spencer portrays Maidwell — overseen by a cane-wielding headmaster and staffed by a sinister crew of paedophiles and predators — as akin to something from the darkest tales of that other graduate of boarding school trauma, Roald Dahl. When Spencer says that he and his contemporaries were scarred for life, it’s not just a metaphor: one of them, he reports, can still see the wounds from his headmaster’s cane on his 50-something-year-old backside.

However, perhaps the most startling line in the book comes in the epilogue where — having spent 270 pages detailing his memories of flogging, sexual assault and other “unfathomable sadistic rituals” — Spencer admits that when Maidwell opened a co-ed pre-school in the early Nineties, he promptly enrolled his daughters there. True, this was before he had an “epiphany” about how his school experiences had affected him and decided to emigrate with his children to “spare [them] a classically English upbringing”. Still, it may seem puzzling that it took entering therapy for Spencer to see just how deeply his time at Maidwell had damaged him.

Then again, the 9th Earl Spencer was merely continuing a centuries-long English custom whereby members of the ruling class suffer bitterly through their education only later to expose their own children to similar experiences. He can trace his own lineage of “forced abandonment” all the way back to 1716, when an eight-year-old John Spencer was sent away to Eton. “These psychologically hobbled victims would invariably perpetuate the madness,” writes Spencer of his ancestors, “sending them to the same schools they had hated in their time.”

What can explain this endless recycling of generational trauma? A clue may lie in psychological studies of “hazing” rituals in US campus fraternities, which have shown that the more upsetting and degrading they are, the more group loyalty they inspire. Victims are forced to rationalise their experience as meaningful trials imposed by a benevolent community. In the context of English boarding schools such cognitive dissonance can become a powerful catalyst for class solidarity.

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This may help explain why, even after what he survived, Spencer flirts with the notion that it is not the practice of sending children away from home to sink or swim at boarding school that is damaging, but certain badly run institutions. The culture of bullying I witnessed at Harrow in the early 2000s belies his breezy claim that the system “evolved significantly” after he left. Even George Orwell, who nobody can lightly call naïve, ended his classic account of boarding school horror — written some 30 years before Spencer went to Maidwell — by claiming that “the present-day attitude towards education is enormously more humane”. Both Spencer and Orwell succumb to a comforting thought: surely, surely things can no longer be allowed to go on the way they used to?

And of course, since your childhood defines your sense of what’s normal, it’s extraordinarily difficult to see clearly how it may have (to quote a certain poet) fucked you up — particularly if virtually everyone else in your social world had the same experience. Neither your own upbringing nor your child’s is an experiment that can be run twice. And if there are negative outcomes, who’s to say they wouldn’t have occurred in different circumstances? If they had gone to a different school, would the boys who were abused in my boarding house have suffered the ordeal they did? Would the boy from my year who, in a tragic case that became national news, picked up a knife during a psychotic episode still be in Broadmoor, and would the teacher’s daughter he attacked with it be dead?

I’m not aware of any similar stories concerning my former peers at Cedars Upper School in Leighton Buzzard, who by comparison to the boys at Harrow struck me as paragons of mental wellbeing. But neither did any of them go on to become a prime minister or canonised poet, or to achieve the kind of distinction (if that is the word) enjoyed by more recent Old Harrovians like disgraced financier Crispin Odey or culture wars influencer Laurence Fox.

And this points to the simplest reason for the perpetuation of a system that, generation after English generation, has succeeded in producing one emotionally stunted winner after another: by some very obvious measures, it works. Some psychiatrists have come to speak of “boarding-school syndrome”, but none seems to have considered that the problems with intimacy and vulnerability it involves are symptoms not of the system’s failure but of its success. The traumatic lesson taught by these schools — that the world is divided into the strong who dominate and the weak who are dominated — is part of the syllabus.

One individual who came to feel nostalgic for school days he once hated was Winston Churchill, who during the Blitz in 1940 returned to Harrow, where the boys eulogised him with a specially composed verse of “Stet Fortuna Domus”:

“Nor less we praise in sterner days
The leader of our nation
And CHURCHILL’s name shall win acclaim
In each new generation
For in your fight to guard the Right
Your country you defend, Sir
Here grim and gay we mean to stay
And stick it to the end, Sir!”

I admit I am still moved by the story that, with the Luftwaffe circling overhead, the war leader wiped away a tear at those words. And I have always been impressed that, in a wonderfully Churchillian touch, the prime minister himself asked to amend the first line from “darker” to “sterner days”. What I didn’t notice until I looked up the words to quote them was the double meaning in that capitalised “Right”. It seems to me now that in these lines you can find the whole essence of the system Harrow belongs to. It’s all there: the stern spirit that impelled Churchill to stand firm against Hitler, and that has helped countless boarding school boys stick out their smaller ordeals; the identification of a new generation’s elite with the greatness of the past; and the elision of the school, the country, the “right” and the “Right”. Stet fortuna domus, indeed.

Harrovians still sing those words at the event that has been rechristened for Churchill every year, just as we did 20 years ago, and just as I have no doubt they will to the last syllable of recorded time. But can conditions in these schools possibly be as awful as they were in my day, or in Charles Spencer’s, or George Orwell’s? When, 40 years on, today’s pupils write their memoirs of boarding school, will they too reveal the scars the system imprinted on them? A part of me struggles to believe it. I am told that the top British private schools — booming, despite Labour’s plans to tax them, as the scions of a new global elite queue up to fill their places — now abhor bullying, competing with each other to recruit full-time counselling staff. Perhaps this makes sense: tomorrow’s ruling class will presumably need to wield power with a softer touch than those who ran the British Empire. And in any case: surely, surely things can no longer be allowed to go on the way they used to. Can they?

The reader who looks to fiction for a critique of something or other will find no critique here of anything at all. If there is a glimmer of hope when Mike’s pal Psmith reveals himself a monocle-wearing eccentric and declares himself a socialist, the glimmer will fade once it emerges that his socialism doesn’t extend beyond addressing everyone as “Comrade”, and his eccentricity is not a sign of alienation from the middle-class world he happily inhabits. Psmith and his creator find many things about that world ridiculous — but not contemptible.

The sort of reader I have in mind is most likely Left-wing in their politics, suspicious of anything that mocks a social world not as way of, but as a substitute for, changing it. But the demand for seriousness once came from conservatives worried about the essential frivolity of novels — books that didn’t instruct their readers in manners or morals. It was that view to which Jane Austen was responding in the much-quoted passage of Northanger Abbey where she defends novels as the works “in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed.”

Few writers have seemed to care so little about importance as Wodehouse. His endless linguistic ingenuity made admirers of Left-wing authors such as George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens — the effortless succession of wild similes, the clever deconstruction of weary clichés. That and the mad but intricate plots. But what seems absurd is the idea that anyone might be drawn to Wodehouse for his themes, or what you might call his “ethic”.

In fact, it isn’t absurd at all; it seems so because we only count “serious” themes as real, and conflate having an ethic with being didactic. Yet why shouldn’t a comic view of the world be less insightful than a tragic or an angry one? “If you take life fairly easily”, Wodehouse once remarked to an interviewer, “then you take a humorous view of things. It’s probably because you were born that way”.

His words here recall the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan: “Nature always does contrive / That every boy and every gal / That’s born into the world alive / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative!’ There’s a misplaced debate among Wodehouse’s champions and detractors about exactly where he fits on the political spectrum. Liberal, say readers who see his jokes at the expense of his upper-class characters as satire. Conservative, say readers who notice that he, “in creating such characters as Hildebrand Spencer Poyns de Burgh John Hanneyside Coombe-Crombie, 12th Earl of Dreever… is not really attacking the social hierarchy”.

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Those last words are from George Orwell’s essay, “In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse”. He was writing just after the war, when the uproar about Wodehouse’s idiotic (but well-intentioned) broadcasts on German radio in 1941 were fresh in public memory: Wodehouse was in need of a robust defence. But Orwell, a political man through and through, could not avoid, even when defending Wodehouse’s lack of political nous, adopting a reductive view of the man’s writing. “Wodehouse’s real sin”, he wrote, “has been to present the English upper classes as much nicer people than they are”.

In Orwell’s worldview, whole classes — as distinct from the individuals who comprise them — might have their niceness appraised. Wodehouse, by contrast, sees his characters as individuals — paradoxically so, given how many of them were stereotypes. He once described his approach to his later fiction as “making the thing a sort of musical comedy without music, and ignoring real life altogether”. But the very earliest boarding school novels, animated though they are by a basically comic spirit, are not yet the farces for which he became famous.

Few other stories published in the same magazines that published Wodehouse’s juvenilia stand up today. The clichés are too numerous, the plots entirely interchangeable. But Wodehouse’s early novels hold up surprisingly well. In an age when public schoolboys seem to divided themselves into sentimental nostalgists on the one hand and angry rebels on the other, Wodehouse distinguished himself by the matter-of-fact tone in which he wrote of boys’ attitudes to their schools:

“The average public schoolboy likes his school… He is sorry to leave and he likes going back at the end of the holidays, but as for any passionate, deep-seated love of the place, he would think it rather bad form than otherwise.”

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One can’t doubt that the experience of boarding — involuntary separation from family, the casual brutality of masters and other schoolboys — must have left many boys with scars they carried into adulthood. There is no shortage of memoirs by men who survived the ordeal. But Wodehouse speaks for what must have been the silent majority: men for whom boarding school had its challenges but was not conspicuously more traumatising than any other place they might have spent their childhood and adolescence.

His protagonist, Mike, is a representative of that untraumatised majority. He is a straightforward teenage boy, interested above all in sport. Transplanted midway through the book from a school with fine cricketing traditions, Wrykyn, he finds himself at Sedleigh, a place with an undistinguished sporting tradition. “Mike’s outlook on life,” Wodehouse tell us, “was that of a cricketer, pure and simple. What had Sedleigh ever done? What were they ever likely to do? Whom did they play? What Old Sedleighan had ever done anything in cricket?”

But at Sedleigh, he finds himself set against another character, Adair, to whom “Sedleigh was almost a religion … a public school among public schools, a lump of radium.” (In this we see the beginnings of the grown-up Wodehouse’s talent for the entirely original analogy.) Adair wants Mike to play for the school side; Mike prefers to play for a village team. Like countless schoolboy antagonists, they fight. A little while later, their reconciliation is dramatised in a simple exchange when someone describes Adair as “not a bad cove”, and Mike replies, simply: “He’s all right.”

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There is no mawkish sentiment, but equally, no affectations of adult toughness. The boys have their feelings, but they are the feelings one can imagine real boys having in that time and place. They sort out their problems between themselves and learn to live with other. Each boy has his place in the little world of the school. The book’s most celebrated odd-couple pairing of Mike and a much more flamboyantly eccentric character than Adair: Psmith. He is, of course, “really” a Smith, but informs the bemused Mike when he first meets him: “If you ever have occasion to write to me, would you mind sticking a P at the beginning of my name? P-s-m-i-t-h. See? There are too many Smiths.”

Part of what’s so funny about Psmith is that the silliness of how he spells his name is only apparent in writing. It was Wodehouse’s first really good joke and foretold the many glorious jokes to come — Jeeves and Wooster, Lord Emsworth and his enormous pig. It also encapsulates the wholesomeness that distinguishes him from other comic writers — whose comedy begins in anger and vengefulness. Saki, like Wodehouse, had scary aunts, but took pleasure when they were killed by a vicious ferret. Roald Dahl’s nasty grown-ups are set up for some horrible and ingenious punishment. If political-minded readers are disappointed that Wodehouse doesn’t care more for justice, they might remind themselves that he cared even less for revenge: most of us have a hard time telling the desire for fairness apart from the desire to get even.

We live in a world anxious again to divide people into goodies and baddies, their views into liberal and conservative. Wodehouse was unusual in seeing that it is enough to divide them into “all right” and “bad coves” — in other words, those we like and those we could learn to live with. If that didn’t make him sound like a more solemn figure than in fact he was, you might even call that the deep insight behind his comedy. The message — if that’s not too pompous a thing to ascribe to Wodehouse — is: it takes all sorts to make a world. The right word for the author’s ethic — such as it was — is not “liberalism”, which is the label for a political philosophy; the imputation of any such thing would indeed have made him seriously ill. What he possessed was a rarer, more precious thing: the virtue of liberality.

Wodehouse’s world is one in which the monocled dandy can be friends with the school jock. (A great lover of American English, he would not have protested the Americanism.) And both can live, eventually if not right off the bat, in harmony with the idealist and the prig. Is that an ethical ideal? Not, perhaps, in a sense that Orwell would have recognised. But that only tells us that some people have too narrow a view of the ethical. Whatever those words — ethical, political — mean, they must have something to do with living together with other people. The desire to transform other people so that they live up to our own ideal is at the root of so much political violence. The idea, especially at Christmas, of a writer who doesn’t want to change you — or anyone or anything — is all the more attractive, for just that reason.

So our rebellion, to the extent that it wasn’t just about smoking grass and listening to the Grateful Dead, tended to be about class and class guilt. Like Malcolm McDowell in the 1968 public school revolution fantasy film if…., we were on the Left. We spoke with mockney accents; one of my friends became a skinhead and slipped away to Stamford Bridge every other Saturday.

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Today’s elite public school radicalism is a very different animal. The schools no longer think of themselves as conservative institutions training a ruling class to preserve a national heritage — they are now academic forcing houses attracting and producing a global elite of the “brightest and best”. They think of themselves as academic meritocracies, albeit with a bias towards the affluent, and are often in the vanguard of the most fashionable pedagogical and social trends.

Contemporary race- and gender- based progressivism is therefore no threat at all to the people running the schools, indeed it is positively welcomed by them. One can observe this in the kerfuffle surrounding the Eton master who has been sacked for explaining, and at least partially defending, the concept of patriarchy — it was the Eton authorities who intervened, not an uprising of radical pupils, and some parents and pupils have actually been protesting against the sacking. But in my experience of speaking at London private day schools and knowing plenty of young people who have emerged from them in recent years, progressive groupthink is the norm.

I recently stumbled across an example of this in the alumni magazine of St Paul’s, another elite private school. It featured an interview with former pupil Jonah Freud, who has recently launched a petition to “Decolonise St Paul’s” that has been signed by more than 1,000 current and former students. The letter calls for “educating through a global, rather than eurocentric, curriculum” and “deconstructing the racist fabric of our society”. Jonah, who studied Race and Pop Music at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualised Study, is the son of Matthew Freud, grandson of Clement, himself the grandson of Sigmund. Interviewer Tom Adeyoola writes of the moment Freud was awakened:

“For someone already ‘woke’ it was something closer to home that compelled him to action in writing to St Paul’s; the similarity between the names of George Floyd and his older brother George Freud. In his own words, ‘I have never experienced anything of the fear that George Floyd’s family would have feared and the only reason for that is that I am white.'”

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I don’t want to sound cynical about this; it is obviously a welcome development that young men and women, many of whom will graduate to important jobs in our society, have egalitarian instincts and are aware of their privileges. But what about the most important privilege of all: their parents’ wealth? It is rather morally convenient for them to believe passionately in every kind of equality except economic equality.

Perhaps at some unconscious level the elite progressive public school authorities and pupils feel they will get a free pass for their huge financial advantages, if only they shout loudly enough about how they are challenging all other kinds. And as the conformist young progressives agonise about their white privilege it is rather handy that this places them in the same boat as lower income white people in struggling post-industrial towns. If both groups are primarily privileged by their race, the heads of Eton and St Paul’s can with a clear conscience complain about anti-public school bias when Oxford and Cambridge colleges try to raise their quota of people from such low income backgrounds.

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“If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere,” said Theresa May in 2017. It was a clumsily expressed sentiment. But isn’t this exactly what she was talking about? A financial and educational elite, including significant sections of big business, who are increasingly disconnected from the feelings and interests of the rest of the country yet regard themselves as leading the struggle for human progress.

Shaun Bailey, the Tory London mayoral candidate, talks about tackling black disadvantage and widening access to the elite as a means of strengthening the national “team”. This is the kind of language that people of all races can happily support; but a worrying aspect of the BLM protests earlier in the year was how it divided the country, between a big section of the white elite — who embraced it enthusiastically — and the white provincial majority who seemed to be looking on with some scepticism.

Surely, if elite public schools do have any justification in a modern liberal democracy, it is precisely that the people who run them are teaching their privileged pupils to think clearly, honestly and independently about social (and other) problems, not egging them on to embrace the latest fashionable cause. As the greatest of 20th century Etonians, George Orwell, put it: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Have you ever worn a boater? I confess: I have. There is surely no more potent symbol of our nation’s class divide than this most singularly pointless and poorly designed piece of headwear.

I owned a boater for the one year I spent at a school called Croftdown, at the age of six. It is almost impossible to settle a boater comfortably on your head. They look ridiculous. Only a school confident its parents had enough money to disregard practicality in school uniform would ever inflict a boater on its pupils. And yet: these schools exist, and the boater manufacturers of the world remain, tragically, in business.

When I tried, in the coalition government, to ban state schools from including boaters in their school uniform, my interlocutor Jo Johnson MP accused me of “class warfare virtue signalling”. He had no idea I was simply acting out a 25-year-old vendetta.

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Most people who’ve been to public school understand their privilege. David Cameron – an old Etonian like Johnson – used to say he was passionate about education reform precisely because he wanted every child to have as great a schooling as he had experienced, at Eton. That instinct is to be admired. But my schooling convinces me that he and so many posh-boy reformers are on the wrong crusade: they’re missing half the point of what makes a private school education so valuable.

I went to a lot of schools: seven in total. The reasons would be too much of a distraction to bother you with them. (But if you’re worried: no, I was never expelled nor did I explode any school buildings). The seven include the full spectrum of all educational opportunities available on these British isles, from a prep school so ostentatiously privileged it had its own steam railway, to a comprehensive in rural Wales where a suspicious number of children disappeared during the lambing season, and only half made it to sixth form.

So I have experienced at first hand the extraordinary divides between our state and private school systems. And if those who’ve experienced a luxury education want to have even a chance of recreating it for those less privileged, they need to go beyond their usual areas of focus, which seem to be uniform and academic standards.

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There is zero evidence that uniform improves children’s attainment. The trend for blazers and ties at state schools is based around a set of flawed cultural assumptions that making people look like posh kids is good for them. There is no place at all in our state system for any of the ludicrous items I was forced into by my fee-paying schools (which include a magenta gym slip and matching gym knickers, a special blazer worn once a week for church on Sundays and peach-coloured shirts only available at vast expensive in the school’s own shop).

Academic standards, by contrast, are important. The expectations of children in our private schools are, indeed, usually higher than in our state schools. I learnt Latin at seven, quite absurdly. But public schools take a completely different group of children from state schools. Many are selective. It is easy to expel difficult children. They don’t have to trouble themselves with kids too hungry to learn, kids in foster care, kids with disabilities. It isn’t remarkable that they get good results; it’s remarkable they get any bad ones.

We have made real progress over the last decade at improving the academic standards of our state schools, and I’m glad of it. But even if our state schools churned out children with the same GCSEs as their private counterparts, we would not have closed the gap. Because the biggest difference of all between the state and public systems is that, the posher the school, the more parenting it does for its pupils.

This is counterintuitive. It’s so often the rich who condemn people who argue that schools should offer breakfast, for example. “It’s the parent’s responsibility,” they say. Meanwhile, their own children at boarding school get breakfast at school every day.

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By Polly Mackenzie

Between the ages of seven and 11, I was at school from 8.30am to 7pm every weekday, and from 8.30am to 4pm on Saturdays. I did homework at school. I was fed two meals a day at school. I learned hockey, and tennis, and competed against a league of other schools every week. I had music lessons at school, and learned the flute. The school had its own Brownie pack, and Cubs for the boys. When there was an outbreak of headlice, it was Matron who combed chemicals into every child’s hair. School organised exchange trips with France and Spain, and penpals, too. They took us skiing.

My daughter is now 7, attending our local state school. She is their responsibility from 8:50am until 3:30pm, and I can expect them to teach her the national curriculum and nothing more. The difference with my school experience at that age is not that she isn’t learning Latin. It’s that sports, homework, music, brownies, travel, health, food: it’s all for me to organise. And I have to pay for childcare from the end of school until the end of the working day, because our school system is chronically incompatible with working life.

I don’t mind. I can afford it. But millions can’t. And it’s what makes the gap between private and state schooling so vast.

The public school system makes life easy for parents. We should enable the state system to do the same.