The Old Boys by David Turner

Author:David Turner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300189926
Publisher: Yale University Press

‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’, wrote Horace in an ode studied by many a public school boy who went, from 1914, to die on Flanders fields: ‘It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country’. We in the twenty-first century know only of Wilfred Owen's ironic kidnapping of the phrase to describe death by gassing, neither sweet nor fitting, on behalf of a mother country whose armies were run by incompetent idiots. Many public school boys of the age would, however, have agreed more with the Roman poet's original heartfelt sentiment.

The huge casualties suffered by the public schools made the First World War too sad a conflict to be called a good war, even by the most gung-ho of commentators. Death rates were 27 per cent among old boys from Harrow and Loretto, 20 per cent for several of the more famous boarding schools, and around 16 or 17 per cent for many of the public day schools, all above the national average of a little over one in ten. This can partly be credited to the schools’ disproportionate share of the officer class – disproportionately likely to die – and partly to their well-organized Officer Training Corps at the war's outbreak. The OTC boys tended to join up quickly – cursing them with more years in which to be killed.18

Admiration for the readiness of old boys to die bravely muted criticism of the public schools in the First World War. Remembering Richard Levett, an Old Etonian lieutenant killed in the war, a rifleman wrote: ‘No one will ever be able to say that the upper classes haven't given their all in this just cause. The best and bravest have given their lives freely.’ He was one of hundreds of Etonians killed in the conflict. In Flanders’ Ypres salient alone – scene of some of the bitterest fighting of the war – 324 Old Etonians died. In response, old boys of the school funded the Ypres Memorial School, which educated the children of those who tended the local war graves until the area was overrun by the Germans in 1940.19 Another Old Etonian killed during the war was American-born Henry Simpson. Returning to England to take part in the war, he became a British citizen with his mother's consent, ‘freely given as soon as she realised his conviction that duty to England, which for him meant Eton, left him no choice’. Simpson became a member of the Royal Flying Corps, and died while testing new planes in 1916.20

If bravery is measured by medals, Eton led the public school field with thirteen Victoria Crosses, part of its total tally in British history of thirty-seven, which was more than any other school.21 Eton is also, tellingly, the school whose old boys have contributed the most to the canon of patriotic songs, including ‘Rule Britannia’, composed by Thomas Arne, ‘Jerusalem’, set to music by Sir Hubert Parry, and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, whose lyrics were penned by Arthur Benson.

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