KURT HAHN
Kurt Matthias Robert Martin Hahn CBE (5 June 1886, Berlin –
14 December 1974, Hermannsberg) was a German Jewish educator. He founded Schule
Schloss Salem, Gordonstoun, Outward Bound and the United World Colleges.
Early life
Born in Berlin to Jewish parents, Hahn attended school in
Berlin, then universities at Oxford, Heidelberg, Freiburg and Göttingen. During
World War I, Hahn worked in the German Department for Foreign Affairs,
analyzing British newspapers and advising the Foreign Office. He had been
private secretary to Prince Max von Baden, the last Imperial Chancellor of
Germany.[3] In 1920, Hahn and Prince Max founded Schule Schloss Salem, a
private boarding school, where Hahn served as headmaster until 1933.
Hahn was raised as a Jew and served as the Salem School's
headmaster during Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Hahn began his fierce criticism
of the Nazi regime after Hitler's storm troopers killed a young communist in
the presence of his mother. When he spoke out against the storm troopers, who
had received no punishment, Hahn spoke against Hitler publicly. He asked the
students, faculty and alumni of the Salem school to choose between Salem and
Hitler. As a result, he was imprisoned for five days (from 11 to 16 March
1933). After an appeal by British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, Hahn was
released, and in July 1933 he was forced to leave Germany and moved to Britain.
United Kingdom
Hahn settled in Scotland, where he founded Gordonstoun with
Sir Lawrence Holt on similar principles to the school in Salem. Later, Hahn
converted to Christianity and became a communicant member of the Church of
England in 1945 and preached in the Church of Scotland. He also started an
international organisation of schools, now called Round Square. Hahn was also
involved in the foundation of the Outward Bound Organisation, Atlantic College
in Wales and the wider United World College movement, and the Duke of
Edinburgh's Award.
Return to Germany
Hahn divided his time between Britain and Germany after the
war. He founded several new boarding schools based on the principles of Salem
and Gordonstoun: Anavryta, Greece (1949); Louisenlund, Germany (1949); Battisborough,
England (1955); Rannoch School, Scotland (1959); Box Hill, England (1959);
International School Ibadan, Nigeria (1963); The Athenian School, USA (1965).
He resigned from the headship of Gordonstoun on health grounds and returned to
Hermannsberg near Salem in 1953. He died there on 14 December 1974 and was
buried in Salem.
Philosophy
Hahn's educational philosophy was based on respect for
adolescents, whom he believed to possess an innate decency and moral sense, but
who were, he believed, corrupted by society as they aged. He believed that
education could prevent this corruption, if students were given opportunities
for personal leadership and to see the results of their own actions. This is
one reason for the focus on outdoor adventure in his philosophy. Hahn relied
here on Dr. Bernhard Zimmermann, the former Director of the Göttingen
University Physical Education Department, who had to leave Germany in 1938 as
he did not want to divorce his Jewish wife. Hahn's educational thinking was
crystallized by World War I, which he viewed as proof of the corruption of
society and a promise of later doom if people, Europeans particularly, could
not be taught differently. At the Schule Schloss Salem, in addition to acting
as headmaster, he taught history, politics, ancient Greek, Shakespeare, and
Schiller. He was deeply influenced by Plato's thought. Gordonstoun is based
less on Eton than on Salem. Hahn's prefects are called Colour Bearers, and
traditionally they are promoted according to Hahn's values: concern and
compassion for others, the willingness to accept responsibility, and concern
and tenacity in pursuit of the truth. Punishment of any kind is viewed as a
last resort.
Hahn also emphasized what he called "Samaritan
service", having students give service to others. He formulated this as
focusing on finding Christian purpose in life. It has however been adopted by
the IB program and secularized.
Gordonstoun School
Gordonstoun School is a co-educational independent school
for boarding and day pupils in Moray, Scotland. It is named after the 150-acre
(61 ha) estate originally owned by Sir Robert Gordon in the 17th century; the
school now uses this estate as its campus. It is located in Duffus to the
north-west of Elgin. It is a "public school" in the English usage of
the term as defined by the Public Schools Act 1868. The school follows certain
practices such as usage of the Common Entrance Exam for the 13+ entry age.
Founded in 1934 by German educator Kurt Hahn, Gordonstoun
has an enrolment of around 500 full boarders as well as about 100 day pupils
between the ages of 6 and 18. With the number of teaching staff exceeding 100,
there is a low student-teacher ratio compared to the average in the United
Kingdom. There are eight boarding houses, formerly nine prior to the closure of
Altyre house in summer 2016, including two 17th-century buildings that were
part of the original estate. The other houses have been built or modified since
the school was established.
Gordonstoun has a few notable alumni. Three generations of
British royalty were educated at Gordonstoun, including the Duke of Edinburgh
and the Prince of Wales.Due to Dr. Hahn's influence, the school has had a
strong connection with Germany. It is part of the Round Square Conference of
Schools, a group of more than 80 schools across the globe based on the teaching
of Hahn. Around 30% of students attending Gordonstoun come from abroad.
History
The British Salem School of Gordonstoun was established in
1934 by Kurt Hahn after he was asked by friends to give a demonstration in the
UK of his "Salem system".He was born in Berlin in 1886 and studied at
the University of Oxford.[8] After reading Plato's The Republic as a young man,
Hahn conceived the idea of a modern school. With the help of Prince Max of
Baden, he set up the Schule Schloss Salem in 1919.After the First World War, both
men decided that education was key in influencing the future. They developed
Salem in order to develop its students as community leaders. By the 1930s Salem
had already become a renowned school throughout Europe. In 1932 Hahn spoke out
against the Nazis and was arrested in March 1933.
He was released and exiled to Britain in the same year
through the influence of the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, who was familiar
with Hahn's work.[10] At the urging of British friends, Hahn decided to start a
new school in Morayshire.
Gordonstoun was started in a small way and had financial
difficulties in its early years. After the death in 1930 of Sir William
Gordon-Cumming, 4th Baronet, his house at Gordonstoun was obtained by Kurt
Hahn, whose offer for the lease was accepted on 14 March 1934. The buildings
needed repair and renovation, and at the start of the first academic year, the
school had only two enrolled pupils. Hahn expected Gordonstoun to operate for
only a few years, as an example of his vision. The number of pupils steadily
increased, and some additional pupils transferred from Salem, including Prince
Philip of Greece, now the Duke of Edinburgh. By the start of the Second World
War, 135 boys were attending.
In June 1940 the school was evacuated and the Gordonstoun
estate was taken over by the army for use as barracks. The school was relocated
temporarily to quarters in Montgomeryshire in Mid Wales when Lord Davies, a
parent of two pupils, allowed the school to use one of his houses. The
buildings were insufficient, and finances and pupil numbers began to drop. The
school survived the war, pupil numbers increased again, and the school became
well known throughout Wales and the Midlands. Once the war had ended, the
school returned to the Gordonstoun estate.
By the end of the 1940s, the school achieved its primary
target of 250 pupils and continued growing in size. It built dormitories on the
estate, removing the need of maintaining a house in Altyre, Forres, many miles
away from the main campus. Gordonstoun also developed its academic offerings.
It arranged to admit poorer children from the surrounding areas, and to deepen
the "Outward Bound"-type activities that were central to Hahn's
system. Skills in mountaineering and seamanship were always taught at the
school. The introduction of the Moray Badge, from which the Duke of Edinburgh's
Award was borrowed, expanded the types of physical challenges for students to
conquer.
From the 1950s onwards, the school administration
concentrated on improving the facilities and expanding the curriculum. Major
changes since then include: the founding of Round Square in 1966,[6] an
international community of schools sharing Hahn's educational ideals; the
school becoming co-educational in 1972; and the moving of Aberlour House,
Gordonstoun's preparatory school, from Speyside to a purpose-built Junior
Schoola[›] on campus in 2004.
Ethos
In the beginning, Hahn blended a traditional private school
ethos, modelled on his experiences at Eton and Oxford, with a philosophy
inspired by Plato's The Republic and other elements of ancient Greek history.
This is seen in the title "Guardian", denoting the head boy and girl,
the adoption of a Greek trireme as the school's emblem, and a routine that
could be described as Spartan. Outdoor activities and skills such as seamanship
and mountaineering are emphasized. The school had a reputation for harsh
conditions, with cold showers and morning runs as a matter of routine. It also
used physical punishments, known as "penalty drill" or PD, in the
form of supervised runs around one's house (dormitory) or the south lawn of
Gordonstoun House (pictured). Physical education and challenging outdoor
activities are still practised, but cold showers and punishment runs have been
dropped.
Hahn's views on education centred on the ability to
understand different cultures. Gordonstoun incorporates this in a number of
ways including its association with Round Square and in offering pupil
exchanges to the different schools within the association. Additionally there
is a chance to join one of the annual international service projects which take
pupils abroad to help a foreign community, for instance there have been
projects to build schools in Africa, build wells in Thailand and help orphans
in Romania. Hahn believed that an important part of education was to challenge
a person and take them out of their areas of familiarity and comfort, improving
a person's ability to deal with difficult situations. The school requires that
every pupil takes part in a series of outdoor programmes particularly
expeditions in the Cairngorms and sailing training on the school's 80-foot
vessel, Ocean Spirit.
Hahn believed that "The Platonic view of education is
that a nation must do all it can to make the individual citizen discover his
own power and further more that the individual becomes a cripple in his or her
point of view if he is not qualified by education to serve the
community."[29] The idea of service at the school is thought to encourage
students to gain a feeling of responsibility to aid other people and is
implemented in creating an array of services to the community which every
student becomes involved in.
Gordonstoun offers a series of grants, drawing on its
investments and other funds from which the school can draw upon in order to
support pupils who are unable to pay the full fees.[30] In the academic year
2009/10 the school provided financial support for 163 pupils including 11 with
100% fee coverage and 95 with 50% fee reduction.The school is a registered
charity: Scottish charity number SC037867.
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Flannelled Fool: A Slice of a Life in the Thirties
Flannelled Fool: A Slice of a Life in the Thirties is an
autobiography by T. C. Worsley, published in 1967. It takes its title from a
phrase in "The Islanders", a poem by Rudyard Kipling.
Though Flannelled Fool is subtitled A Slice of a Life in the
Thirties, much of it treats the author's childhood and education at Marlborough
College before he began a schoolmastering career at Wellington College in 1929.
The frank accounts of many of its personages, only thinly
disguised by false names, led, according to Alan Ross, the book's eventual
publisher, to several rejections:
At least three leading publishers turned it down on legal
advice, and Cuthbert Worsley himself admitted that he had been warned it was
folly to expect publication. Re-reading it now I feel there were good reasons
for anxiety, but at the time, with little to lose, it seemed worth the risk.
Worsley had assured me that all the 'college' [Wellington] masters likely to
cause trouble were dead, and Kurt Hahn, whose possible reaction had done most
to scare off the others, was, safely, we hoped, back in Germany.
In the event, nothing happened. Far from bankrupting us or
putting Cuthbert and me in gaol, the book both sold well and received a
wonderful press.
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Flannelled fool: A slice of life in the Thirties (1967)
by Thomas Cuthbert Worsley
REVIEW by jbarnabasl
3.0 out of 5 starsIs he a fool?
19 December 2006
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Flannelled-fool-slice-life-Thirties/dp/B0000CNFRJ
T. C. Worsley is disarmingly -self-deprecating, in a way
that is rather out of fashion now. He was brought up in what would now be
considered a dysfunctional family. His father, the Dean of Llandaff, abandoned
his senior post in the Church of England, his house and his family, and spent
most of his time playing golf. For Worsley, his father's life and character
represents the kind of ineffectuality that he desperately wants to avoid in his
own life, but fears he will ineluctably become.
Worsley is clearly good at some things, particularly
cricket. At his public school, Marlborough, he takes on the character of a
"hearty", one who loves games and despises learning. When he goes up
to Cambridge, though, he eventually comes to love English literature and spends
his early adulthood trying to find a balance between the various things he
loves.
He repeatedly makes it clear that he is a late maturer in
many ways. He is sexually repressed, but comes to recognize that his preference
is for boys. Nowadays, this would earn him nothing but obloquy, but in the less
censorious 1930s, when he was a young master at "College", it was
believed by some that men who are paederastically inclined sometimes make the
best teachers of boys. As far as we can tell from the book, he did not have any
kind of sexual contact with the boys he taught, although he was subject to
insinuations of inappropriate behaviour by "the old guard", the older
masters at "College".
I recognized "College" (which is how Worsley
refers to the school at which he taught) as Wellington College, my alma mater.
Worsley's description of the buildings would be recognized by any Old
Wellingtonian (and I am one), as would the name of the Master (the head
master), Malim, and one of the outstanding teachers (in a Mr Chips kind of
way), Talboys.
Worsley suffered from the illusion that he had to write a
novel and left his post at Wellington to dedicate himself to writing. He
encountered Kurt Hahn, the founder of Gordonstoun (the boarding school in the
north of Scotland where Prince Charles was sent). Hahn invites him to spend a
term at Gordonstoun, where he could live and write in return for advising Hahn
about how the school was developing - it was a new school in those days.
Worsley very soon realizes that Hahn, a Jew who had left Hitler's Germany to
escape persecution, is as much an elitist as the Nazis whose attentions he had
fled from. Worsley neatly undermines the Hahn myth and shows Hahn himself to be
rather an unpleasant, if charismatic, character.
Just before the Second World War starts, Worsley finds a
niche at the New Statesman, work he's able to resume after grappling with the
stupidities of bureaucracy and the Services during the War (all amusingly
described); he has a breakdown and is invalided out of the RAF, returns to the
New Statesman and in due course becomes the Literary Editor and Drama Critic.
The book is subtly written, easy to read, but not one of
great or universal significance. I enjoyed it, partly because Worsley had been
a teacher at my old school, Wellington and partly because I recognize Worsley's
fear of falling into the kind of ineffectual life his father (despite his
promotion to a senior post in the Church) had lived and the kind of character
his father had been. In fact, Worsley cannot have been as ineffectual as he
feared, far from it. He fought many battles with those whose views he found
repellant and found subtle ways to deal with the bullying of senior officers to
which he and others were subject during the War. Clearly he is a good writer,
but I was left with a sense of a man who yearned to have had a loving and
strong father - the failure of his father to form a strong emotional bond with
him seems to have stunted his (Worsley's) capacity to form strong, lasting and
healthy relationships with others.
In 1934, through his lectures in London to the New Education
Fellowship, Hahn met the educationalist T. C. Worsley and persuaded him to
spend a summer term at the newly founded Gordonstoun in the capacity of
consultant.In his memoir Flannelled Fool: A Slice of a Life in the Thirties,
Worsley records his impressions of Hahn's penetrating character analysis, and
his energy and commitment in the cause of human development, but as time went
on he became critical of Hahn's "despotic, overpowering personality":
He revealed himself as having a fierce temper, a strong hand
with the cane, and a temperament which hated being crossed. Especially damaging
to my very English view, was his dislike of being defeated at any game. Hahn
was an avid tennis player. But was it an easily forgiveable weakness that his
opponents had to be chosen for being his inferiors or else, if their form was
unknown, instructed not to let themselves win?
Hahn's behaviour came to seem to Worsley "so ineffably,
so Germanically silly" that he was unable to share the clear adulation of
the teaching staff:
We were going through the classrooms when, in one, he
suddenly stopped, gripped my arm, raised his nostrils in the air, and then, in
his marked German accent, he solemnly pronounced:
'Somevon has been talking dirt in this room. I can smell
it.'
Hahn's views on Shakespeare led to an open disagreement:
He had what I have since learned to be a common German
belief that Shakespeare was better in German than in English. I refused to
allow this. I argued that the German translation might indeed be very good, but
that the English original must be better. No, he assured me, the German was
better; and as I didn't know German and he did know English, he must be right.
We grew absurdly heated.
This is the story of Worsley’s acquaintanceship (ending
badly) with Kurt Hahn, the forceful German exile who founded Gordonstoun School
in Scotland in 1934. Having met him twice, Worsley was invited to spend a
summer term observing Gordonstoun without being enrolled as a teacher.
He [Hahn] took me over one day to show me this coastguard
watch in action. As we walked towards it there came, trotting towards us away
from it, one of the duty boys, dressed in the shirt and shorts which all Gordonstoun
boys sensibly wore. The lad trotted by, and Hahn stopped me and in that
familiar gesture of his gripped my arm:
‘Did you notice that boy?’
I had noticed him only because he was well known as the
school tart; but I wasn’t sure whether Hahn would have been aware of that so I
replied non-committally:
‘Not particularly.’
‘You didn’t,’ said Hahn, ‘notice his eyes?’ I admitted that
I hadn’t.
‘Ah!’ Hahn said sadly. ‘You should have noticed that. That’s
what coastguard watching does for a boy. His eyes were crystalline and pure.
You only see such eyes in two kinds of people,’ and with immense emphasis, ‘ze
hunter home from ze hill and ze sailor home from ze sea.’
This remark, and the other in the classroom seemed to me so
ineffably, so Germanically silly, that I couldn’t take Hahn completely
seriously from then on.
The Lonely Heir: Inside the Isolating Boarding School Days
of Prince Charles
Growing up, Prince Charles struggled to please his parents
and to fill a role that was against his nature. In an adaptation from her new
book, Sally Bedell Smith chronicles the brutal bullying the heir endured at
school, and the unlikely place in which he found solace.
by SALLY BEDELL SMITH
APRIL 2017
I. A SENSITIVE BOY
Before the stroke of midnight on November 14, 1948, Prince
Charles Philip Arthur George officially became public property. While his
22-year-old mother, Princess Elizabeth, rested in her bedroom suite in
Buckingham Palace, her newborn heir was brought to the vast gilded ballroom by
the royal midwife, Sister Helen Rowe. Under the 46-foot-high
ceilings—juxtaposed with the monarch’s massive throne draped in red-and-gold
embroidered velvet—the infant was swaddled in white blankets and placed in a
simple cot for viewing by the royal courtiers who served his grandfather King
George VI and his grandmother Queen Elizabeth.
“Just a plasticine head,” observed Major Thomas Harvey, the Queen’s
private secretary. “Poor little chap, two and a half hours after being born, he
was being looked at by outsiders—but with great affection and good will.”
Charles was hemmed in by high expectations and scrutiny from
the start—unlike his mother, who had 10 relatively carefree years of childhood.
It was only when her father unexpectedly took the throne, in 1936, on the
abdication of his older brother, King Edward VIII, that Princess Elizabeth
assumed her position as next in line.
In December, four-week-old Charles was christened beneath
the ornate dome of the Music Room at Buckingham Palace. The Archbishop of
Canterbury doused the little prince with water from the river Jordan that had
been poured into the gold Lily Font, designed by Prince Albert and used for all
of his and Queen Victoria’s children. Delighted with her firstborn, Elizabeth
breast-fed him for two months, until she contracted measles and was forced to
stop. Yet she was often away from Charles in his infancy, spending as much time
as she could with her husband, Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, an officer in the
Royal Navy, who was posted to Malta in October 1949. She managed to celebrate
her son’s first birthday, but afterward she was abroad, and separated from her
son, for long intervals.
Prince Philip scarcely knew his son for the first two years
of the boy’s life, though on his return from overseas duty he did take the time
to teach Charles to shoot and fish, and to swim in the Buckingham Palace pool.
When Prince Charles hit bottom after his separation from Diana, in 1992, he
unburdened himself about the miseries of his youth to Jonathan Dimbleby, who
was writing an authorized biography. Dimbleby noted that, as a little boy,
Charles was “easily cowed by the forceful personality of his father,” whose
rebukes for “a deficiency in behaviour or attitude . . . easily drew tears.”
While brusque, Philip was “well-meaning but unimaginative.” Friends who spoke
with Charles’s permission described the duke’s “belittling” and even “bullying”
his son. Charles was less harsh about his mother, but his opinion had a bitter
edge. She was “not indifferent so much as detached.”
Nearly two decades later, in 2012, Charles tried to make
amends in a TV documentary tribute to the Queen on her Diamond Jubilee. Home
movies depicted an idyllic childhood at the family’s country estates at
Sandringham, in Norfolk, and Balmoral, in Scotland. Footage of Prince Philip
teetering on a tricycle and zooming down a slide on the Royal Yacht Britannia
contradicted his reputation as a tetchy martinet, and scenes of the Queen
romping with her children were meant to dispel the notion of her being distant
and unaffectionate.
Charles was sensitive from the start, and his finely tuned
antennae were susceptible to slights and rebukes. During one luncheon at
Broadlands, the home of Philip’s uncle Louis Mountbatten, the guests were
served wild strawberries. Charles, aged eight, methodically began removing the
stems from the berries on his plate. “Don’t take the little stems out,” Edwina
Mountbatten said. “Look, you can pick them up by the stems and dip them in
sugar.” Moments later, his cousin Pamela Hicks noticed that “the poor child was
trying to put all the stems back on. That was so sad, and so typical of how
sensitive he was.”
As Philip watched these traits emerging, he worried that
Charles could become weak and vulnerable, so he set about toughening him up.
Asked in an interview when he was 20 years old whether his father had been a
“tough disciplinarian” and whether he had been told “to sit down and shut up,”
Charles answered without hesitation: “The whole time, yes.”
More often than not, the duke was a blunt instrument, unable
to resist personal remarks. He was sarcastic with his daughter, Anne, as well.
But Charles’s younger sister, a confident extrovert, could push back, while the
young prince wilted, retreating farther into his shell.
When Elizabeth became Queen, her dedication to her duties
meant even less time for her children. She relied increasingly on her husband
to make the major family decisions. Neither parent was physically
demonstrative. That lack of tactile connection was achingly apparent in May
1954, when the Queen and Prince Philip greeted five-year-old Charles and
three-year-old Anne with handshakes after an absence of nearly six months on a
tour of Commonwealth nations. Martin Charteris, Elizabeth’s onetime private
secretary, observed that Charles “must have been baffled by what a natural
mother-son relationship was meant to be like.”
Charles was indulged by his maternal grandmother, the Queen
Mother, and visited her frequently at Royal Lodge, her pale-pink home in Windsor
Great Park, when his parents were away. As early as age two, he would sit on
her bed playing with her lipsticks, rattling the tops, marveling at the colors.
When he was five, she let him explore Shaw Farm, in the Windsor Home Park. She
also opened up a world of music and art that Charles felt his parents didn’t
adequately appreciate. “My grandmother was the person who taught me to look at
things,” he recalled.
As heir to the throne, he made an inviting target for
school-mates, who ridiculed his protruding ears.
She never hesitated to give her grandson the hugs he craved.
She encouraged his kind and gentle nature—the eagerness to share his candy with
other children, and, when choosing sides for games, to select the weakest first
for his team. “Her protective side clocked in on his behalf,” said her longtime
lady-in-waiting, Dame Frances Campbell-Preston. At the same time, with the best
intentions, she fueled the young prince’s tendency to self-pity, which fed one
of his strongest traits, known as “whinging”—the more pointed British word for
whining.
II. “OUT FOR A DUCK”
Charles’s early home-schooling was supervised by Catherine
Peebles, his sensible Glaswegian governess, nicknamed “Mispy,” who felt
compassion for his insecurities and his tendency to “draw back” at the hint of
a raised voice. Eager to please, he plodded diligently through his lessons but
was easily distracted and dreamy. “He is young to think so much,” Winston
Churchill remarked after observing Charles shortly before his fourth birthday.
One book that caught the prince’s eye and helped hone his
sense of humor was Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses, a volume of poetry about
the consequences of bad behavior. It brimmed with quirkiness and bizarre
characters—a precursor to the sketches by the Goons and Monty Python comedy
troupes, two happily subversive influences in his life. But by the time he was
eight, the Queen and Prince Philip had decided that he needed the company of
children in a classroom, making him the first heir to the throne to be educated
outside the palace.
Early in 1957, he arrived in a royal limousine at Hill House
School, in Knightsbridge, London. For all his parents’ efforts to put Charles
in a normal environment—taking the bus to the playing fields and sweeping the
classroom floors—he had difficulty mixing with the other boys. A newsreel of
the school’s “field day” of sports competitions that spring showed a solemn
prince introducing his parents to his classmates, who obediently bowed.
Charles had ability in reading and writing, although he
struggled with mathematics. His first-term report noted that “he simply loves
drawing and painting” and showed musical aptitude as well. But after a mere six
months, his father transferred him to Cheam School, in Hampshire, where Philip
himself had been sent at the age of eight. Although it was founded in 1645, the
school had a progressive tilt, avoiding the exclusive atmosphere of other
preparatory boarding schools.
Charles was just shy of his ninth birthday but considerably
more vulnerable than his father. He suffered from acute homesickness, clutching
his teddy bear and weeping frequently in private. “I’ve always preferred my own
company or just a one to one,” he has said. As heir to the throne, he made an
inviting target for school-mates, who ridiculed his protruding ears and called
the pudgy prince “fatty.” He fell into a routine that included weekly letters
home—the beginning of his passion for written correspondence. In the tradition
of the time, he braved beatings from two different headmasters for flouting the
rules. “I am one of those for whom corporal punishment actually worked,” he
grimly recalled.
Charles lacked his father’s resilient temperament, and he
lacked the physical prowess to command respect.
Charles had a fragile constitution. He suffered from chronic
sinus infections and was hospitalized for a tonsillectomy in May 1957. Later
that year, when he was bed-ridden at school with Asian flu, his parents didn’t
visit him. (Both had been inoculated, so there was no fear of contagion.)
Instead, before leaving for a royal tour of Canada, in October, the Queen sent
him a farewell letter. The Queen and Prince Philip were again on tour, in
India, when Charles came down with measles, at age 12.
Physically uncoordinated and slow as well as overweight,
Charles had no talent for Rugby, cricket, or soccer—the prestige schoolboy
sports. During vacations he joined local boys who lived near Balmoral for
cricket matches. “I would invariably walk boldly out to the crease,” he
recalled, “only to return, ignominiously, a few minutes later when I was out
for a duck”—that is, having failed to score any runs. Elizabeth had taught
Charles to ride, starting at age four. He was timorous on horseback, while his
sister, Anne, was bold. Mostly he feared jumping. Anne’s equine prowess pleased
her mother, and Philip saw a kindred spirit in her confidence and fearlessness.
Charles’s loneliness and unhappiness at Cheam were painfully
obvious to his family. In a letter to Prime Minister Anthony Eden at the
beginning of 1958, the Queen wrote, “Charles is just beginning to dread the
return to school next week—so much worse for the second term.” She knew that
Cheam was “a misery” to her son, according to a biography of Charles by Dermot
Morrah, which was sanctioned by the royal family. Morrah observed that the
Queen thought her son was “a slow developer.”
Asked as he was approaching his 21st birthday to describe
the moment he first realized as a little boy that he was heir to the throne,
Charles replied, “I think it’s something that dawns on you with the most
ghastly inexorable sense . . . and slowly you get the idea that you have a
certain duty and responsibility.” He did, however, experience an unanticipated
jolt in the summer of 1958 while watching the closing ceremony of the
Commonwealth Games in Cardiff, Wales, on television with some school-mates in
the headmaster’s study at Cheam. Suddenly he heard his mother declare in a
recorded speech that she was naming him the Prince of Wales—a mortifying moment
for a shy nine-year-old boy who wanted desperately to be seen as normal and
already carried the burden of his six other titles. Even as a very young boy,
he was marked out as different.
The most important experience at Cheam was Charles’s
discovery that he felt at home on a stage—a helpful skill for a public figure.
For his role in a play about King Richard III, called The Last Baron, he spent
hours listening to a recording of Laurence Olivier in a production of
Shakespeare’s Richard III. It was November 1961, and once again his parents
were abroad, this time in Ghana. In their place, the Queen Mother and Princess
Anne watched the heir to the throne perform as Richard, the 15th-century
monarch famous for his deformity.
“After a few minutes on to the stage shambled a most
horrible looking creature,” the Queen Mother wrote to her daughter, “a leering
vulgarian, with a dreadful expression on his twisted mouth; & to my horror
I began to realize that this was my dear grandson!” She added that “he acted
his part very well” and that “in fact he made the part quite revolting!”
Charles formed no lasting friendships during his five years
at Cheam. The Queen Mother made a strong pitch to his parents for him to
continue his education at Eton College, the ancient boarding school near
Windsor Castle. She knew that Philip had been pushing for his own alma mater,
Gordonstoun, located in an isolated part of northeastern Scotland. In a letter
to the Queen in May 1961, the Queen Mother described Eton as “ideal . . . for
one of his character & temperament.” If he went to Gordonstoun, “he might
as well be at school abroad.” She pointed out, quite reasonably, that the
children of the Queen’s friends were at Eton.
But Philip doubled down on the value of a rough-and-tumble
education, arguing that Gordonstoun would be the best place for his timorous
son. The Queen sided with Philip, sealing Charles’s fate.
III. THE PRISON OF PRIVILEGE
The Queen did not accompany her husband in May 1962, when he
delivered Charles to Gordonstoun. A certified pilot, Philip flew Charles to a
Royal Air Force base in Scotland and drove him the rest of the way. With a
17th-century gray stone building at its center (built in a circular design,
according to legend, by Sir Robert Gordon so that no devils could fly into
corners), the campus had an undistinguished collection of seven pre-fabricated
wooden residences that had previously been used as R.A.F. barracks. The prince
was assigned to Windmill Lodge with 13 other boys, the start of an ordeal that
he viewed as nothing less than a “prison sentence.”
The school’s founder, Kurt Hahn, was a progressive educator
who had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and ran a school in southern Germany
called Salem. Hahn, who was Jewish, fled to Britain after Hitler came to power.
He established Gordonstoun in 1934, with Prince Philip among the first
students. The school’s motto: “There is more in you.”
Hahn sought to develop character along with intellect. He
promoted Plato’s idealistic vision in The Republic of a world where
“philosophers become kings . . . , or till those we now call kings and rulers
truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into
the same hands.” Contemplating his future reign, Charles would identify with
the philosopher king, a notion later encouraged by well-meaning advisers who
championed the idea of an “activist” monarch who would impose his wide-ranging
worldview on his subjects.
Physical challenges at Gordonstoun were at the heart of
building character. The testing began with the boys’ attire (short trousers
throughout the year) and the living conditions (open windows at all times in
the grim dormitories). The day began with a run before breakfast, followed by a
frigid shower. “It was a memorable experience, especially during the winter,”
recalled Somerset Waters, a school-mate of Charles’s. The prince nevertheless
became so accustomed to the morning ritual that as an adult he continued to
take a cold shower each day, in addition to the hot bath drawn by his valet.
Hahn aimed to create an egalitarian society where “the sons
of the powerful can be emancipated from the prison of privilege,” an ethos that
suited Philip when he was there. His assertive personality and Teutonic
sensibility helped him adjust to the school’s demands. He was also a natural
athlete who served as captain of both the cricket and hockey teams. Charles had
neither his father’s resilient temperament nor his relative anonymity, and he
lacked the physical prowess to command respect. Encumbered by his titles and
his status as heir to the throne, he was singled out as a victim from his first
day. “Bullying was virtually institutionalized and very rough,” said John
Stonborough, a classmate of Charles’s.
The housemaster at Charles’s dorm was Robert Whitby, “a
truly nasty piece of work,” recalled Stonborough. “He was vicious, a classic
bully, a weak man. If he didn’t like you, he took it out on you. He was wrong
for Charles.” Whitby, like the other housemasters, handed over the running of
the houses to senior boys, who imposed a form of martial law, with ritualized
psychological and physical abuse that included tying boys up in laundry baskets
under a cold shower. Few students would walk with Charles to meals or class.
Those boys who tried to befriend the prince were derided with “slurping”
noises. Many years later Charles complained, with evident anguish, that since
his schooldays people were always “moving away from me, because they don’t want
to be seen as sucking up.”
As at Cheam, he was taunted for his jug ears, which his
great-uncle Earl Mountbatten unavailingly urged his parents to have surgically
pinned back. During intra-house Rugby matches, teammates and opponents alike
pummeled Charles in the scrum. “I never saw him react at all,” recalled
Stonborough. “He was very stoic. He never fought back.” At night in the
dormitory, the bullies tormented Charles, who detailed the abuse in anguished
letters to friends and relatives.
Charles found one escape at the nearby home of Captain Iain
Tennant and his wife, Lady Margaret. She was the sister of a childhood friend
of the Queen’s, David Airlie (the 13th earl). Tennant was chairman of
Gordonstoun, so he could extend the privilege of weekend visits, when Charles
would “cry his eyes out,” said Sir Malcolm Ross, who served as one of the
Queen’s longtime senior advisers. “Iain and Margy really saved him from
complete misery,” said David Airlie’s wife, Virginia.
A crucial day-to-day support for Charles was Donald Green,
the royal bodyguard who, in time, became a father figure. Green stood six feet
five, dressed well, drove a Land Rover, and seemed “slightly James Bond-ish” to
the other boys. Green was Charles’s one constant friend, although there was
little he could do about the abuse that occurred within the dormitories. This friendship,
more readily made than with Charles’s peers, set the prince’s lifelong pattern
of seeking company with his elders.
In June 1963, during Charles’s second year, he was sailing
on the school ketch, the Pinta, to the Isle of Lewis. The boys were taken to a
pub in the village at Stornoway Harbor, where the 14-year-old prince ordered a
cherry brandy. “I said the first drink that came into my head,” he recalled,
“because I’d drunk it before, when it was cold, out shooting.” Unbeknownst to
Charles, a tabloid reporter was present, and his foray into under-age drinking
became banner headlines in the tabloids as “the whole world exploded around my
ears.” Afterward, the Metropolitan Police fired Don Green, robbing Charles of
an ally and confidant. Charles was devastated, saying later that “I have never
been able to forgive them for doing that. . . . I thought it was the end of the
world.”
Charles had middling success in his coursework—with the
exception of his declamatory ability—but he found a creative refuge in the art
room presided over by a kind and somewhat effete master in his 20s named Robert
Waddell. The prince gravitated toward pottery rather than painting—“like an
idiot,” he later said. Classical music served as a balm as well. His
grandmother had taken him to see a concert by cellist Jacqueline du Pré,
inspiring him to take up the instrument at age 14. “It had such a rich deep
sound,” he recalled. “I’d never heard sounds like it.”
Gordonstoun nearly extinguished Charles’s budding interest
in Shakespeare, as he and his classmates “ground our way” through Julius Caesar
for standardized tests. The Bard came alive only after the arrival in 1964 of a
new English master, Eric Anderson—like the art teacher Waddell, also in his
20s—who encouraged Charles to act in several of Shakespeare’s dramas. In
November 1965 he played the lead in Macbeth. His interpretation, said Anderson,
evoked “a sensitive soul who is behaving in a way that is really
uncharacteristic of him because of other forces.” Charles was excited about the
prospect of his parents’ coming to see a performance. But as he “lay there and
thrashed about” onstage, he wrote in a letter, “all I could hear was my father
and ‘Ha, ha, ha.’ ” Afterward, he asked Prince Philip, “Why did you laugh?” “It
sounds like the Goons,” said his father—a dagger to the heart of a young man so
eager to please.
He similarly disappointed Philip in team sports, although he
did develop considerable skill in the more solitary pursuit of fishing, along
with traditional upper-crust shooting. At 13, Charles shot his first stag,
steeling himself to the sight of the beast being eviscerated by servants on the
hillside at Balmoral.
In 1961, he took up polo, eager to follow his father. “I was
all for it,” said Charles. “At least you stay on the ground”—as opposed to
jumping over fences in fox-hunting. By 1964, Charles was applying himself to
the sport more seriously. That year, he also started playing practice matches
with Philip at the Household Brigade Polo Club, on Smith’s Lawn, at Windsor
Great Park. Still a censorious figure, Philip nevertheless was idolized by
Charles. The young prince began to mimic his mannerisms—walking with one arm
behind his back, gesturing with his right forefinger, clasping his hands for
emphasis, and pushing up the sleeve of his left arm.
IV. “POMMIE BASTARD”
With renewed determination to give his son backbone, Philip
made the unusual decision to send him to Australia at age 17 for two terms in
the outback at Timbertop, the wilderness branch of the Geelong Church of
England Grammar School, in Melbourne. Other than a trip on the Britannia to
Libya, at age five, it was Charles’s first time leaving Europe.
Philip assigned David Checketts, his equerry—an aide-de-camp
entrusted with logistics—to supervise his son’s stay Down Under. Unlike other
royal advisers, the 36-year-old Checketts was decidedly middle-class. The
product of a state-run grammar school, he had served in the Royal Air Force.
His down-to-earth manner put the uncertain prince at ease.
Charles and Checketts arrived in Australia in early February
1966. They were greeted by a daunting contingent of more than 300 reporters and
photographers that the prince endured with gritted teeth. At Timbertop he
shared a bedroom and sitting room with a handpicked roommate, Geelong’s head
boy.
The prince was liberated by the informality of a country
where, as he quickly discerned, “there is no such thing as aristocracy or
anything like it.” For the first time, he was judged on “how people see you,
and feel about you.” Students and masters treated him as one of them, and to
his surprise he felt little homesickness. He was mildly teased as a “Pommie,”
Australian slang for Englishman, but faced none of the sadistic hazing endemic
at Gordonstoun.
The boys did only a modicum of studying. Timbertop was all
about physical challenges, which Charles now embraced with surprising success.
He undertook cross-country expeditions in blistering heat, logging as many as
70 miles in three days—climbing five peaks along the way—and spending nights
freezing in a sleeping bag. He proudly relayed his accomplishments in his
letters home.
He encountered leeches, snakes, bull ants, and funnel-web
spiders, and joined the other students in chopping and splitting wood, feeding
pigs, picking up litter, and cleaning out fly traps—“revolting glass bowls
seething with flies and very ancient meat.” It was a more physically testing
experience than Gordonstoun, “but it was jolly good for the character and, in
many ways, I loved it and learnt a lot from it.” On his own terms, in the right
circumstances, he showed his toughness and proved to his father that he was
not, in fact, a weakling.
On weekends he relished ordinary life with David Checketts’s
family at the farm they rented near the small town of Lillydale. He indulged
his passion for fishing, helped David’s wife, Leila, in the kitchen, played
with their three children, and watched television in his pajamas. In completely
relaxed surroundings he perfected his talent for mimicry by performing routines
from his favorite characters on The Goon Show, which to his “profound regret”
had ended its run on the radio in 1960. One of his best efforts was Peter
Sellers’s falsetto “Bluebottle.”
Charles reveled in the sheer Goons silliness. (Seagoon:
“Wait! I’ve got a hunch!” Grytpype-Thynne: “It suits you!”) Later in life he
would rely on a sense of absurdity as an antidote to his oppressive
surroundings. Goons humor, typically British, was all about breaking the rules,
which carried an extra frisson of pleasure for the heir to the throne.
Charles enjoyed his six months in Australia “mainly because
it was such a contrast to everything he couldn’t stand about Gordonstoun,” said
one of his advisers, recalling the bullying that had so tormented him. He also
showed his mettle during some 50 official engagements—his first exposure to
crowds on his own. “I took the plunge and went over and talked to people,” he
recalled. “That suddenly unlocked a completely different feeling, and I was
then able to communicate and talk to people so much more.” The Australians, in
turn, discovered “a friendly, intelligent, natural boy with a good sense of
humor,” said Thomas Garnett, the headmaster of Timbertop, “someone who by no
means has an easy task ahead of him in life.” When he left, in July 1966, his
mates gave him a rousing “three cheers for Prince Charles—a real Pommie
bastard!”
After an extended summertime stay at Balmoral, Charles
returned to Gordonstoun in the autumn of 1966 for his final year. Headmaster
Robert Chew named him head boy, known by the Platonic term “Guardian.” Among
the prince’s privileges as Guardian was his own bedroom in the apartment
assigned to Robert Waddell, “the quiet alter ego of Gordonstoun,” in the view
of Charles’s cousin and godson Timothy Knatchbull, who later attended the
school. “With his tittle-tattle and his mini-snobbery . . . [Waddell] had the
sort of mind of a Victorian matron. He was a wonderful other pole of
Gordonstoun, away from the sort of knobby-kneed brigade.” Charles’s only
lasting friendships from his five years on the shores of the Moray Firth were
with his older masters, Anderson and Waddell.
After he left with his parents for Balmoral at the end of
July 1967, Charles obediently said that Gordonstoun had taught him self-control
and self-discipline, and had given “shape and form and tidiness” to his life,
although in fact he was personally disorganized. Always a correct, dutiful, and
seemingly mature figure in the public eye, Charles nevertheless remained
socially awkward and emotionally immature, even as he appeared old before his
time. Surprisingly, his parents acknowledged to authorized royal biographer
Dermot Morrah that the Gordonstoun experiment had fallen short of their hopes,
and that Charles was “a square peg in a round hole.” Morrah wrote in To Be a
King, his 1968 book about Charles’s early life, that the school had driven the
prince only “further in upon himself.” Well into his 60s, Charles continued to
complain about the unhappiness he had felt at Gordonstoun. And as his cousin
Pamela Hicks observed, “he can never leave anything behind him.”
Adapted from Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of
an Improbable Life, by Sally Bedell Smith, to be published this month by Random
House; © 2017 by the author.
