About Eton by Adam Nicolson & Eric Anderson / The Importance of Being Eton by Nick Fraser

About Eton

by Adam Nicolson & Eric Anderson

An excellent short guide to a remarkable institution

2 May 2012

“This is an excellent short guide to a remarkable institution. The authors write from extensive inside knowledge and experience, and cleverly use an anecdotal approach to give life to what could otherwise have been a dry history. As a range of characters both famous and infamous passes before our eyes we get a sense of Eton's colourful and sometimes murky past, and accounts of contemporary school life give us an insight into the machinery that keeps this ancient institution on top of its game. Entertaining, informative and highly readable.”

Douglas Lee

Adam Nicolson writes a celebrated column for The Sunday Telegraph. His books include Sissinghurst, God’s Secretaries, When God Spoke English, Wetland, Life in the Somerset Levels, Perch Hill, Restoration, and the acclaimed Gentry. He is winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and lives on a farm in Sussex.

The Importance of Being Eton

by Nick Fraser

“The uniform is Dickensian, the sports arcane, the fees astronomical. But Eton College still stitches itself into the fabric of our national life like no other school - the breeding ground for princes and prime ministers, where the arriviste meets the aristocrat. What is it about Eton? For many, it is a symbol of all that is wrong with Britain: an obstacle to modernity and a powerful force for privilege, elitism, and snobbery. For others, it represents a beacon of tradition and excellence in an otherwise monochrome world. But whether you love, loathe, fear or ridicule it, no one can ignore a school, which has such an impact on those who go there - and those who don't. Award-winning film maker Nick Fraser draws on his own experiences as an "OE", as well as those of teachers and fellow pupils - famous and infamous - to evaluate the phenomenon that is Eton.”

You can take the boy out of Eton ...

Bastion of wealth and privilege, or academic hothouse? With David Cameron poised to lead the Tories, fellow old boy Nick Fraser asks what Eton means now

Wed 23 Nov 2005 02.13 GMT First published on Wed 23 Nov 2005 02.13 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2005/nov/23/schools.uk

Can an Etonian become prime minister? I suspect that only weeks ago most journalists wouldn't have known how to answer this question. "Maybe, maybe not," they might have muttered. "But perhaps only in a Michael Dobbs novel, or in a BBC rewrite of a Trollope plot by Andrew Davies." David Cameron has a tastefully tattooed wife, and makes speeches without notes. We can't be sure about his views, but he has supplied a resolution to a conundrum that has lingered over British politics since the day in 1964, when the still young Harold Wilson consigned the antiquated "grouse moor" figure of Sir Alec Douglas-Home to the dustbin of history. And the answer is surely: "Yes."

Cameron has achieved this transformation in political attitudes by cannily deflecting discussion of his education with the bland, unexceptionable remarks that have become his trademark ("It's not where you come from that matters, it's where you are going," he said in his unscripted Blackpool speech, to rapturous blue-rinse applause). He may even have been helped in his efforts by the ruse of apparently unwisely discussing his attitude to drugs - ECSTASY BOY NOT ETON BOY, etc. But his success does signal a long overdue shift in attitudes. Either it means that the old, reflexive antipathy towards Eton is dying. Or, at the very least, it could be delivering the message that Etonians are becoming more adept at circumnavigating the treacherous reefs of class war.

I wish to know what it means to be Eton. For the past two years, I've been going to Eton, attending classes, talking to teachers and Etonians. I should of course state here that I was educated there. But this isn't some perverse exercise in nostalgia undertaken in middle age. I would like to find out how it is that a single-sex school, founded in 1440, with only 1,290 pupils, a bizarre, quasi-Hassidic dress code and fees of £23,000 a year has come to be identified (depending on whom one is talking to) both with conspicuous excellence and with the maintenance of grotesque privilege.

Except among foreigners, in whose company they still seem like gods sent to walk on earth, Etonians appear arrogant pricks, raving snobs, closet homosexuals, members of a corrupt Masonic order, or, at the very least, as Alan Bennett puts it, "exotic creatures" beyond the immediate comprehension of lesser mortals educated at state school. The old distinction between Eton and so-called "minor"' public schools, it must be noted, still appears to exist. "Etonians tend to rub along with anyone they meet - because they can afford not to feel superior," says Tatler editor Geordie Greig. "But minor public schoolboys do tend to suffer from a 'wannabe factor' in relation to Eton."

Tony Little, the current headmaster, was at Eton during the 60s, but he doesn't look or sound like an Old Etonian. With his Harry Potter specs and genial, unassuming manner, he appears to epitomise the chummy egalitarian style of contemporary Britain. Little was on Chinese television a few weeks ago, speaking about the glories of an Eton education. He is fond of talking, in an ironical way, about the old tradition of noblesse oblige. But he also refers to Eton as a "four-letter word". His advice to Etonians is that, like gays, they should decide when to come out. And Little is keen to point out that the school isn't just a place for toffs. Eton does offer scholarships to those who cannot afford the fees (around 25% of the boys receive some sort of assistance) and it claims to accept a number of boys from poor families. With competitive entrance standards, Old Etonians can no longer find places for their offspring. One master tells me that the "thickest 15%" no longer attend the school. There is a plan to double the school's endowment, which currently stands at £150m, thus allowing any boy to come to Eton, whatever his parents' circumstances. I am not sure that this is an adequate response, though it is hard to see what else Eton can do, short of internationalising itself and going after corporate money.

Meanwhile, I suspect that it is Eton's relation to the royal family that most arouses feelings of exasperated resentment. Last year the question of whether Prince Harry had been helped to cheat in his art A-level was aired during the proceedings of an employment tribunal. When Eton lost its case against a young art teacher, and was censured, it was Roy Hattersley, writing in this paper, who attacked Eton most bitterly. Hattersley didn't suggest that Eton was a bad school. Instead, he wondered what would have happened if a comprehensive school had found itself in a similar jam. His point was that unfairness lay at the heart of places such as Eton, and it is hard to disagree.

Eton is a surprisingly small place, ungrand in the best English way, especially if you compare it with the ugly blockhouse of Windsor castle. Disregard the shambling outhouses and the green playing fields, and one could be in an Oxford or Cambridge college. Most visitors glance at the red-brick 16th-century yard, going either to the Chapel, with its banners and exquisite stained-glass windows, or beyond, to the brick wall, at the foot of which the likes of George Orwell and the philosopher AJ Ayer struggled for advantage in the famously incomprehensible Wall Game.

Created for poor scholars, Eton flourished by establishing bed-and-breakfasts for the sons of the wealthy. Generations of aristocrats gave to Eton its distinctive, laidback culture of insouciance. Eton is a good school, coming near the top in the annual tables of exam results; but it remains, most of all, a grand place. Attempts have been made to change the dress code, or introduce girls, but these have foundered. However, Eton is also an institution with an unerring instinct for survival, trading off its reputation even as it seeks to extend its influence. Among the generals and civil servants, or the merely rich, one can find Eton spies (Guy Burgess); Eton geniuses (George Orwell and Maynard Keynes); Eton roués (Alan Clark); Eton bounders (Sir James Goldsmith); and Eton murderers (Lord Lucan). There have been many simply nice or not-so-nice-but-ordinary Etonian chaps. Encouraged by their elders, Etonians went out and got themselves killed for their country in astounding numbers, as the school's many unbearably poignant war memorials attest.

In the old days Eton didn't need or bother to sell itself; but it has recently acquired brand status. "It is a luxury brand," Greig points out. "And luxury brands are wanted these days. You can go to any city where English is spoken, and they will know about Eton." Nowadays, Eton likes to lay stress on the entrepreneurs it produces (Johnnie Boden), the athletes (Matthew Pinsent), actors (Damian Lewis), successful cultural log-rollers (Jay Jopling) or green activists-lobbyists (Jonathan Porritt). Provost Sir Eric Anderson was housemaster to Tony Blair at Fettes ("the Scottish Eton"), and an intimate of the late Queen Mother. And yet this formidable establishment figure now talks, like any management consultant, about the need to renew an old brand. "Don't forget that the school is, above all, a modern place," he observes. "We do change, even if we don't always change in an obvious way."

But the primary function of Eton over the centuries was to produce a more or less educated ruling elite. Those interested in the real, partly lost history of Eton and its relation to power in Britain should make their way to Upper School. This is a long, beautifully proportioned 18th-century room with a dais on which names are carved, with crude benches each side, and, above them, busts of 18th-century Etonian worthies, wearing togas, such as Lord North and Charles James Fox. It is here, next door to the small room in which headmasters punished recalcitrant Etonians by "flogging" (the exquisitely painful application of a birch to the bare bum) that school debates took place.

"Debating at Eton has always been important," the writer Adam Nicolson observes. "You're never allowed to go off and be dreamy. Everything has to be tested by means of confrontation." "Etonians are good at politics," the writer Anthony Sampson (not an Etonian) told me, shortly before his death. "I've never quite understood why. And this applies to Etonians of any political beliefs." There have been a number of Etonian prime ministers, among them William Ewart Gladstone, and, in modern times, AJ Balfour, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Home. More than half the members of AJ Balfour's 1902 cabinet were Etonians, but there were nine in Macmillan's 1956 government and 11 in Douglas-Home's.

How did these Etonians perform in government? In 1956, Eden took Britain into a catastrophic Middle East war, lying about the reasons for the conflict, and suffering a nervous breakdown that led to his resignation. Before the 1963 Profumo sex scandals, and his own prostate trouble, Macmillan presided over the spoliation of the countryside and the creation of abominable public housing, regaling Britons with such empty slogans as "You've Never Had it So Good". In his hands, too, the old "special relationship" with America came to mean agreeing with everything America wanted - a posture that ensured Britain's rebuff at the hands of De Gaulle when Britain wished to enter Europe. Poor at economics and public speaking, Douglas-Home used matchsticks in a vain effort to explain how he proposed to deal with Britain's economic ills. He is remembered chiefly for having made the career of satirists such as Bernard Levin.

In the early 60s, Etonians appeared to be everywhere in Britain - in City boardrooms, presiding over the National Theatre, as bishops or generals. Queen magazine ran a piece about the establishment by the journalist Henry Fairlie, with an illustration taken from an old Eton house photo in which all the boys' and masters' heads were superimposed images of contemporary Etonians. "The Macmillan era represented a never to be repeated moment," explains ex-Tory MP and writer Jonathan Aitken. "There was a joke to the effect that a sign was hung on the school gates - 'Cabinet Makers to Her Majesty the Queen'." With the fashion for egalitarianism, things began to change. "In those days it wasn't apparent what we were for," an Oxford professor educated at Eton explained to me. "And we suffered from the inheritance of so much privilege. We were instant dinosaurs, and, of course, no one would feel sorry for us."

Neither Ted Heath (cabinet-maker's son) nor Margaret Thatcher (grocer's daughter) displayed any conspicuous love for Eton. There were Etonians in Thatcher's first cabinet, but it appears that she didn't feel easy in their presence. In 1983, she sacked four of the most prominent Tory Etonians, prompting Macmillan's snobbish (and anti-semitic) mot about there being more Old Estonians than Old Etonians in the cabinet. There are still, to be sure, Etonians in the Tory party; but what Alan Clark called "government by means of the Old Etonian cabal", appears distinctly passé nowadays. When the mandarin Etonian Douglas Hurd ran unsuccessfully against the trapeze artist's son John Major, he was obliged, somewhat against his wishes, to stress the relatively modest circumstances in which he had been raised. "I was brought up on a farm," he said irascibly. "This is inverted snobbery. I thought I was running for leader of the Tory party, not some demented Marxist sect."

As shadow chancellor, Oliver Letwin was frequently barracked in the House of Commons, with cries of "You're an Old Etonian". Not so long ago, prodded on the matter by Jon Snow on Channel 4 News, he admitted that it was a disadvantage, if one wished to be leader of the Tories, to have gone to Eton. ("It's not important," he said, though it wasn't clear if this applied to the fact that Etonians couldn't any more get to the top, or was simply an attempt to evade Snow's irritating question.) Etonians wishing to get ahead in public life become parodies of themselves if they wish to survive. So we have Boris Johnson, MP and editor of the Spectator, adopting the role of buffoon in a way that would have seemed bizarre to Etonian forebears.

"Etonians aren't that political at present," says Fredrick Mocatta, who left Eton this year. "We tried to start a Conservative Club, and the school authorities gave us permission. But there was a total lack of interest in politics, Conservative or otherwise. Present-day Etonians are the same as the rest of the wristband generation - they vote in Big Brother. Give them the choice of debating the issues of the day and playing football, and you'll find that apathy and disinterest reign."

A contingent of 10 Etonians did march behind an Eton banner in the demonstration against the Iraq war, with school approval. But the school wouldn't allow its boys to protest against the ban on hunting, and a debate on the future of the monarchy was cancelled two years ago, because of the adverse publicity it might bring. Among the many Eton societies only the one named after Orwell has a record of airing dissident voices, and its meetings are often poorly attended.

Richard Pratt, a housemaster at Eton, and a Lib-Dem councillor, says that being Tory is still "the school's default mode". But he, too, believes Etonians are changing. Few boys admit to voting Labour, but a handful did canvas for the Lib Dems in the last election. "You do still encounter a quota of fat-bottomed Tories," he says. "On the other hand, I've never met an Etonian in my time here who actually said that he wanted to be a cabinet minister. Of course, Etonians are political, in the sense that they want to be rich and influential. But that means something different now. It's just not cool to be overtly political. Don't you think that politics now seem boring to many intelligent people?"

Significantly, Cameron wasn't active, or even much interested in, politics, either at Eton or, later, at Oxford. Like the young Tony Blair he appears enough of an outsider to seem fresh. In a contemporary British context (especially for a Tory party grown desperate in exile, grown old and regarding the jowly Cameron, perhaps a bit misleadingly, as the incarnation of Tory Youth), he doesn't appear to be a political hack. For the moment he can appeal outside politics, and across old class lines, to our sense of disgruntlement. As anyone in political life must do these days, Cameron looks and sounds like an anti-politician.

I recently spoke to a Toryish columnist who praised the rightwing tone of Cameron's formulations; but any Etonian will know that this is an illusion. Etonians are the ultimate pragmatists, totally free of ideology. Other than the imperatives of getting - and gaining - power, no conspicuous motives inspire them. In power, they mostly behave as other politicians, which is to say that they make compromises, cut deals and often end up telling half-truths, all the while talking of public service. It's not clear that Etonian politicians really believe in much except themselves - and this is one reason why Thatcher disposed of them so easily.

I wonder how the ultimate Cameron triumph, if it occurs, will play among Etonians. As Aitken explains, "oiling" is a readily practised school activity, indulged in if one wants to be elected to any of the self-selecting societies by means of which Eton governs itself. The Eton word "mob" (v.t.) means something like "to dismiss someone noisily, by taking the piss out of them". On the other hand, Floreat Etona is the school motto, and Etonians are expected to flourish. In their own blase way, they may simply come to believe that the school is once again receiving its due.

· Nick Fraser is the author of The Importance of Being Eton, published on June 4 2006 by Short Books.