Spectator Life

After three years of theatrical um-ing and ah-ing, the Prince and Princess of Wales have seemingly acceded to the obvious: Prince George is apparently going to Eton. Despite their perennial posturing at being a ‘modern’ royal family (is there such a thing?) there was really only one option. Eton is after all – somewhat paradoxically – the only place capable of offering any semblance of a normal adolescence for George, as well as mentally preparing him for kingship. To an outsider, this sounds ridiculous. How can prancing around in tailcoats while speaking unique slang (teachers are ‘beaks’; Year 9 is ‘F Block’) have any bearing on normalcy? Yet normal is relative. One of the first things you realise at Eton is that the exceptional is unexceptional.

The recent ‘school wars’ farrago was an act of madness – or, more accurately, Madness. ‘All the kids have gone away/Gone to fight with next door’s school/Every term that is the rule’. So the Camden ska band sang on ‘Baggy Trousers’, their 1980 classic about their school days. Schoolchildren organising to duff up their contemporaries is not new; social media has made it easier for pupils to connect, parents to panic.   For the uninitiated, a TikTok trend thought to have begun in Hackney last month has seen posts pop up across the country – from Nottingham to Watford – encouraging children to meet for clashes between different schools organised into ‘red’ and ‘blue’ teams.

Another day, another report on how many children have had to leave their private schools, thanks to Labour’s VAT raid on fees. This particular survey, by wealth management firm, Saltus, found that almost one in ten parents have had to take their children out of the independent sector altogether while 65 per cent of those questioned admitted to making ‘significant changes’ to their circumstances to keep their children in private education.    When belts can only be tightened so far, parents need to get creative.

In Terence Rattigan’s 1948 play The Browning Version (filmed in 1951 starring Michael Redgrave), a public-school classics teacher called Arthur Crocker-Harris is appalled to discover that he is known to his pupils as ‘the Himmler of the Fifth’. According to the Guardian and the BBC, the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was a fan of Himmler’s boss, Adolf Hitler, when he was a student at Dulwich public school half a century ago. I suspect that those who are enthusiastically mining this story for its anti-Farage political potential did not attend single-sex male boarding schools in the 1970s. Given the war had ended just a few decades before, it was scarcely surprising that it was the common currency of schoolboy playground conversation.

There may well be, somewhere in this nation of ours, a long-established succession of sensitive, emotionally aware 14-year-olds who can appreciate and denounce the impact of bullying. But, honestly, none of them went to my school.  It doesn’t sound like there were many of this cadre at Dulwich College half a century ago either. At least, not if we believe the recent Guardian ‘scoop’ which claims, thanks to the testimony of Nigel Farage’s fellow pupils (much of which was made public years ago), that the Reform leader was a racist, hate-fuelled youth who taunted anyone of a different faith or ethnicity.

To a certain extent, all doctoral theses are a bit ridiculous – and therein lies their genius. I am allowed to say this because I spent four years of my life researching French Catholicism’s engagement with the first world war for my doctoral thesis, which I nattily entitled Calvary or Catastrophe? Back then, I was a baby academic hoping for critical acclaim and my own office. I’ve long since been disabused of this dream and have left academia’s dreaming spires behind to become a journalist – a profession that offers me neither my own office nor critical acclaim, but a great deal of online abuse. And while I don’t expect anyone ever to read my PhD (although you can DM me any time for a copy), I believe that it had some slim critical justification.

Now that the autumn term is well underway at universities and freshers’ week has removed its leering, spotty face from the calendar for another year, may I talk about how ghastly it is? Impressionable young people who believe they are completely mature adults but still have another decade or so of brain remodelling to go arrive at an unfamiliar place for the first time. Once any relatives who lugged their bulging suitcases packed with stuff to make them seem grown-up have disgorged the final single sock from the family car and driven off, hiding their tears, the young person is on their own. I remember being 19 and arriving at Edinburgh University. I took the train up from London and hauled my suitcase to the taxi line at Waverley.

Elitism has had a bad press in recent years. The concept has, alas, been tainted by its association with the numerous elites who have corrupted it by allowing self-interest and prejudice to become self-perpetuating. It’s been sullied by its association with old school ties and masonic-style handshakes – by closed networks which work to exclude those who happen to fall outside the pre-determined in-group. So no wonder we don’t like it any more. Who would? But its gravest sin of all has been its role in pulling up the drawbridge to protect privilege in general, through a kind of unspoken fish-knife test. If you don’t know what it’s for, you don’t get in. One way people used to storm the castle of privilege was through grammar schools, of course.

Britain is to get a new ‘super university’, an enormous centre of higher learning that will, from the next academic year, under a single vice-chancellor, educate some 50,000 students. Under the cumbersome name the ‘London and South East Universities Group’, the new university is a merger of the existing University of Greenwich and the cash-strapped University of Kent with its campus at Canterbury. A vital part of the new university’s campus will be the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich, one of Sir Christopher Wren’s architectural masterpieces, and a World Heritage Site described as being ‘the finest and most dramatically sited landscape ensemble in the country’.

How was National Standing on Doorsteps Week for you? For most, it’s a case of grabbing a picture two or even three days after la rentrée, when you remember that you’ve missed the annual obligation to record the progress of what Mumsnetters call the ‘DCs’ (darling children). Assemble them by the front door, roar at the one who’s kicking off to SMILE and look at ME, lament that you failed to get your sons’ hair cut before they went back as overnight they’ve come to resemble Hamburg-era Beatles, press the button and then bundle them into the car.

In the next couple of weeks, hundreds of thousands of young people will be heading off to university. They’ll be bracing themselves for the wholesale regret that freshers’ week will undoubtedly precipitate, and possibly contemplating attending a lecture or two. But among their number there will be some who got nothing like the requisite grades advertised on university websites, because clearing has radically changed the application landscape. Clearing shares certain features with the Grand National: tensions run high and chaos reigns as the starting gun sounds, and competitors jostle for position; a frenzied race ensues, and invariably there are a few casualties along the way.

As I trudge up to Marlborough’s observatory, near the top of the playing fields, I’m transported back to my time as a pupil here. I studied astronomy for GCSE, which meant spending many evenings at the observatory, gazing at the night sky. The Blackett Observatory, which houses a superb Cooke 10in refractor telescope, celebrates its 90th anniversary this month. I’ve been invited back by my tutor Jonathan Genton, former head of science and teacher of the GCSE astronomy course, and Gavin James, director of the observatory, who oversees the astronomy programme. ‘Everybody should study astronomy,’ says James. ‘It’s the original science.