Nicholas
Lezard
The boys who never grow up: Sad Little Men, by
Richard Beard, reviewed
A furious denunciation of the private boarding school
system which produces damaged men prone to dissembling, hypocrisy, snobbery –
and a blind belief in their right to run the country
From
magazine issue:
04
September 2021
Sad Little
Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England
Richard
Beard
Harvill
Secker, pp. 278, £16
I can’t
recall reading an angrier book than this. Richard Beard has written what I hope
for his sake is a cathartic denunciation of the private boarding school system,
and his rage is on two fronts. The first is how being sent away at the age of
eight damaged and twisted him and just about everyone else who experienced the
same; the second is about what these damaged children as adults have done to
the country. He pays special attention to the Prime Minister and his
predecessor but one.
I suspect
that The Spectator has quite a few readers who went to boarding school, and who
even think the government is doing a good job. So you may either have given up
on this review already or will have no intention of reading the book. But that
would be a pity, because you would be missing out on one of the finest polemics
I have ever come across.
It is a
passionate, well-argued case against a system by which a pool of less than 5
per cent of the population have a disproportionate influence over every
significant aspect of our lives. It is also a system which instils in these
people dissembling, hypocrisy, snobbery, moral blindness and indifference to
anyone else’ssuffering. Think of the Prime Minister’sand Foreign Secretary’s
decisions to go on holiday just as Afghanistan was about to be catapulted back
to the Middle Ages.
This book
clarifies much: the smirking of Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab and Matt Hancock —
they simply don’t care. The reason Johnson is the suboptimal person he is — the
kind who refuses to tell us even how many children he has — is because he’s
still at school. Even his hair is still at school. And a particular kind of
school. In Beard’s words:
It is
noticeable, and often noticed, that something immature and boyish survives in
men like Cameron and Johnson as adults. They can never quite carry off the role
of grown-up, or shake a suspicion that they remain fans of escapades without
consequences.
Beard
begins his book in the grounds of Radley College, his alma mater; since a
divorce, he has moved to within walking distance of the school. What’s that all
about? Coincidence, he says. Hmm. ‘It’s as much of a coincidence as when a man
marries a woman with the same first name as his mother.’ He notices during his
lockdown walks around the grounds that they are much larger than he remembers.
What, too, is that all about? It’s usually the other way round; and Sad Little
Men is, in part, an acknowledgment that one’s schooldays loom larger in one’s
life than one thought.
His 1970s
education was rooted in a world of familiar anachronism in which huge areas on
maps were still coloured pink and where the second world war was being fought
in the form of miniature Commando comic books. His armoury now consists of
quotations from Orwell, Arendt and Erving Goffman (particularly his book on the
inmates of mental asylums and other ‘total institutions’), and, pertinently,
Nigel Molesworth. (Oddly, he doesn’t once mention Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film
If...).
His book
makes the same point again and again with elegant variation because it’s a
point that needs thrashing into us: that the system produces damaged men who
are nevertheless encouraged to believe they can run the country. Since there is
no longer the colonial service for them to enter, the country they end up
damaging is their own.
I suffered
a similar education, though in a much diluted form: I went home after school
every day. But my public school still fostered the same kind of arrogance and
sense of entitlement. (Actually we felt so superior we regarded Etonians as
overprivileged dolts, which may give a clue as to which school it was. As a
result we have not fiddled so much with the levers of power: that sort of thing
is beneath us.)
It didn’t
take me long — thanks, paradoxically, to the habit of critical thinking the
better teachers tried to instil in us — to work out that the system was deeply
flawed, grossly unfair and probably the biggest single factor in making this
country so particularly screwed up. Like George Bernard Shaw, I want to see the
public schools razed to the ground and their foundations sown with salt, and
have felt like this for more than four decades. Which is not unusual for a
product of public school — but not usual enough, alas.
I imagine that many will dismiss this book’s premise and conclusions with sentiments that could be summarised as ‘didn’t do me any harm’ or ‘made me the success I am’. But for me, Sad Little Men has been an eye-opener. I may not have suffered the emotional damage caused by early boarding, but I now recognise in myself traits of arrogance and entitlement, and am aware of the damage you can do to others if you think you can go through life without suffering consequences. At least I hurt only myself and those near to me, and not an entire nation.
WRITTEN BY
Nicholas Lezard
Patriotism and posh boys: The books exposing the
dark truth of UK private schools
The country’s elite institutions are under fire in a
new spate of memoirs that criticise the privilege of receiving a costly
education and question who gets to become leaders. Nick Duerden speaks to authors
Richard Beard and Robert Verkaik
Sunday 22
August 2021 08:02
Early on in
Sad Little Men, Richard Beard’s book on private school education, he writes:
“This is a memoir about white middle-class public schoolboys. We have a
reputation for a reason.”
The
reputation, as he asserts both quickly and fulsomely over the course of his
story, is a roundly negative one, freely disseminated by men who go through
life not only with the sense of entitlement given to them by their education
but also a certain emotional immaturity, and the capacity for an awful lot of
bluff. It is the latter, Beard warns, that carries them on through their
careers like a favourable wind, and of which everyone else should be wary.
“Boys are
taught to be ambitious,” he says, “in whatever their profession. Every MP who
came from a private school background, for example, is a failed prime
minister.”
Though they
followed the national curriculum fairly closely – with added Latin and Greek –
private school students were more generally trained, Beard writes, for
leadership, “or if not to lead then to earn. The most convincing reason to go
to a private school remains to have gone to a private school.”
Beard’s
account of his time at Pinewood in the west of England during the Seventies and
Eighties – at the same time that David Cameron and Boris Johnson were also
benefitting elsewhere in the UK from private schooling – reads as much as
polemic as it does memoir. It’s a sober – and sobering – takedown of the damage
such institutions do, and the subsequent havoc it wreaks, not just upon the
individual but society at large.
“If people
wonder quite how an individual like, say, Jacob Rees-Mogg can still exist in
today’s world,” Beard says, of the MP who appears to be a throwback to an
earlier age and a bygone era, “then that’s the public school education system
for you.”
This is an
institution where class and tradition runs so rampant, it remains largely
impervious to thrusting modernity, to non-heteronormative mores, to a
generation weaned on Love Island. Here, the empire is still routinely invoked,
and Britain remains “Great”, patriotism as robust as it is on the football
terraces.
Beard, who
is 54 and has been writing books for three decades, chose now to expound upon
this subject because he believes it to have a timely societal resonance: in the
already bitter legacy of Brexit, for example, and in the governance of people
who might not seem entirely up to the job.
“My book is
a witness statement from the scene of a crime,” he says, smiling ruefully.
“Having gone to a private school at exactly the same time as Cameron and
Johnson did, I saw what they saw, and learnt what they learnt. I hope my book
goes some way to explaining such a mindset, and why what’s happening in the
country right now is happening.”
When I did go home for the holidays, I brought back
sexist and classist attitudes, which undermined my mother. I’d no idea what I
was doing
Richard Beard
If private
education speaks mostly, these days, to an increasingly rarefied demographic,
then it nevertheless remains in rude health: all schools have long waiting
lists, despite the fact that annual fees are around £30,000, while the average
UK salary, as of 2020, is just over £31,000. A mere 7 per cent of the
population today is privately educated, but graduates make up many of the top
jobs: 65 per cent of judges, 62 per cent of armed forces personnel, almost half
of all business leaders. A full 36 per cent have gone on to become cabinet
ministers. David Cameron, who went to Heatherdown in Berkshire, and Boris
Johnson, who went to Ashdown House in Sussex, both then attended Eton, and both
ultimately rose to the top job. Not quite “World King”, but almost.
Beard was
not typical private school fodder. His father was a builder from Swindon, but
he hated his job and his social standing, and wanted better for his son. And
so, aged seven, Beard was packed off to board, to learn to be “better”. He was
miserable at Pinewood, lonely and homesick, but that was of little consequence
there; alongside a classicist-leaning curriculum, pupils are taught the benefit
of a stiff upper lip. “I hated what it made me become,” he says. “When I did go
home for the holidays, I brought back sexist and classist attitudes, which
undermined my mother. I’d no idea what I was doing.”
Though he
was good in both the classroom and on the rugby field, he never fully
acclimatised. Upon finishing school, Beard didn’t look back, and kept in touch
with no one. By choosing writing as his career, he would have far less chance
to rely upon the old boys’ network as he might have in other, perhaps cannier,
career choices for boys with his “fortunate” start in life.
This didn’t
mean that he didn’t still possess high ambition; privately educated types
invariably do. “Oh, if I was going to be a writer, then I had to be a Nobel
prize-winning writer.”
The Nobel
has yet to materialise. “It took me quite a long time to get over those sorts
of high ideals,” he laughs.
In his 2018
book, Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin England, Robert Verkaik takes
an in-depth look at the system: how it operates, and how it serves to keep the
country in its state of imbalance.
Verkaik had
previously spent time researching the subject of inequality, and wanted now to
find its source. “When you go back to the beginning of a person’s life,” he
says, “you find education. If everyone were given a fair chance to have the
same education, we’d have a fairer society. But that isn’t happening, and not
many people seem to want to discuss the apartheid of this system, how money
alone can advance one child over the other.”
Verkaik
himself attended a secondary modern. When, as an adult, he saw how public
school alumni dominated so many sectors of the workforce, it began to rankle.
“You realise that there are forces at play here that have little to do with
natural ability. Wealthy people can’t have all the talent, can they?”
His book
argues for the “slow and peaceful euthanasia” of private schools, to be
replaced by a more level playing field, but he concedes this is unlikely to
happen any time soon, irrespective of which party is in power. “Plenty of
Labour politicians attended private school,” he says, among them Tony Blair and
even “people’s champion” Jeremy Corbyn. Diane Abbott and Shami Chakrabarti both
chose to educate their children privately.
Not many people seem to want to discuss the apartheid
of this system, how money alone can advance one child over the other
Robert Verkaik
Meanwhile,
there are relatively few books that dare criticise the institution, something
which makes Richard Beard’s Sad Little Men feel rather incendiary.
“At private
school,” Beard explains, “you are taught not to snitch, and my book is 250
pages of snitching.”
Perhaps
it’s like Las Vegas: what happens in private school tends to stay there?
Earlier
this year, the journalist Musa Okwonga wrote his memoir, One Of Them, which was
billed as the “first in-depth Eton College memoir to be published in the UK in
nearly 50 years”. This isn’t entirely accurate for the simple reason that it
isn’t particularly in-depth. Eton itself takes a rather secondary role to the
engaging coming-of-age tale of a Ugandan immigrant whose intelligence won him a
scholarship there. Though Okwonga does admit to finding it difficult to attend
school reunions, convinced that “freelance writer” is hardly a captain of
industry, he ultimately comes to its defence on the page. The overall sense is
of punches obligingly pulled.
“When
people criticise Eton to me,” he writes at one point, “I find myself defending
the kind of people I knew there, the patient teachers and charismatic pupils.”
Someone
else unlikely to denounce his privileged education is writer and PR consultant
Saurav Dutt, a 38-year-old born in India but raised in Warwickshire, where he
attended Rugby (noteworthy alumni: Neville Chamberlain, Lewis Carroll, Salman
Rushdie). Dutt says that it was at an earlier comprehensive school where he
felt stifled, and was the frequent recipient of racism. At Rugby, however, “I
received the very best level of education, the support of my peers, and a real
sense of encouragement to be the best I could”.
He
initially went into law, and admits he found entry-level jobs difficult chiefly
because the atmosphere was so unfriendly. But perhaps this is unavoidable for
all such graduates, required as they are to mix with those they’ve previously
been deliberately kept from: the hoi polloi.
“It is true
that the more senior you become, the more you notice a definite shift in
behaviour amongst your colleagues,” he concedes.
Like
Okwonga, Dutt is protective of the institution, and is bemused that anyone
would ever sneer at it. “There is a sense when you are going through the
[education] process that society will reward you for the time and effort that has
been put in,” he says, “but for the most part that hasn’t been the case. So you
do feel a little resentful that society doesn’t see this distinction.”
He’s not
suggesting, he adds, that the privately educated pupil is necessarily better,
“but a lot has gone into this person, and that should, I think, be
appreciated”.
Richard
Beard believes otherwise. You finish his book convinced, as he is, that its
manner of teaching, the way it bestows a sense of unearned supremacy, is
ultimately harmful in ways both obvious and hidden. It’s in keeping things
hidden that problems arise.
“They base
their success on A-level results and public office jobs, and the fact that some
go on to become famous,” he says, citing the actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who
went to Harrow, “but there is also this huge in-between hinterland of frayed,
raddled and unhappy people for whom the sort of performative confidence private
schools teach you ultimately wears off. And what then? They’re left stranded,
and ultimately miserable.”
And it is
simply not true, he continues, that someone needs to have this kind of
education in order to have the necessary confidence to lead in life. He
references leaders from all walks of life, from all over the country, “people
who do an amazing job not because they had a particular education, but because
they know their stuff, and they have an authority that comes from that
experience and knowledge – and the respect.”
Echoing
Robert Verkaik, but probably not the current prime minister nor his earlier
predecessor, Beard yearns for equal opportunity in pursuit of nothing more than
a fairer society. A utopian ideal, in other words.
“But that’s
how leaders should be chosen,” he stresses. “Not because they’ve been taught to
have a sham confidence at schools most people couldn’t ever afford to attend.
And I’d say it’s about time we saw through that.”
‘Sad Little
Men’ by Richard Beard is published on 26 August
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