From Teddy Boys to the Tardy Book: What Eton was really like in the Good Old Days

 

Features

From Teddy Boys to the Tardy Book: What Eton was really like in the Good Old Days

 

Nicky Haslam, who attended Eton in the Fifties, recalls the days of beaks, fag-masters and dames

 

By Tatler

13 August 2018

Eton in the Fifties

https://www.tatler.com/article/obsoletonians-eton-in-the-fifties

 

We were a fairly uniform lot, the intake to Eton in the first years of the 1950s. Echoes – even visions – of the war shaped our youthful minds. Bomb damage still blighted cities, tattered blackouts still flapped on buildings, rationing was still in force. The angular modernity of the Festival of Britain had barely pierced our teen consciousness. Perhaps, assimilated from our elders, we hoped against hope that the future would return to a version of a not-yet-forgotten past.

 

So there we were, fresh out of boys’ school, overawed by the size and splendour and age of our new surroundings, by a sense of self, of horizons and of space – your own room, from day one, after regimented, dingy confines in sandy Surrey. One might be scared or lonely, miss Nanny or one’s dog, but soon came a visceral challenge, to grapple with emerging adulthood.

 

We quickly learned the rules, or rather customs. We dutifully prepared our Saying Lesson before Lights Out, we got up at seven for Early School, went to Absence (in fact, presence), then Chapel. We ate revolting Boys Dinner in the allotted 20 minutes before doing battle on the Playing Fields of Sixpenny, or dragged padded grey-flannel shorts down to Boats. We noted the swagger of sixth-form boys, seemingly wildly grown-up, and were careful to do nothing that might single one out to the gods of Pop. We skeltered to Boy-Calls, we skivvied for Fag-Masters, we cleaned their Corps boots, we flattered Tutors, we oiled up to dames, we ‘capped’ all beaks. And we were drunk with relief on graduating from Remove to Upper School.

 

What all this taught us was to be polite, have good manners, to show respect. Even so vast an institution was essentially intimate: we formed a mutual bond, didn’t feel superior, although we scoffed slightly at Tugs (scholarship boys), jealous of their cleverness rather than snobbism. This bonding was essential as there was almost no recreation besides sports – except, thank God, the Drawing Schools. There were no foreigners, though one raven-haired beauty was rumoured to be half-Egyptian. ‘Crumbs! Egyptian!’ we whispered as he passed. There was no swimming pool, no theatre (concerts, or plays, usually Shakespeare, were desultory affairs in School Hall), no cinema, no medicines (my dame believed in a scant thimble of brandy as a cure-all), no cameras or Coca-Cola, no radios, TV or gramophones, and most certainly no drinking or smoking – sackable offences.

 

These privations weren’t exclusively because we were at Eton. There wasn’t, anywhere, pop music, nor young singing idols (though we knew girls who swooned at Johnny Ray and later jiggled about to Bill Haley), no new humour, no dark Nouvelle Vague films, no Going Abroad, put paid to by a £50 take-abroad limit: the theatre was Anna Neagle comedies, artists were in Paris; nightclubs were for one’s parents’ friends, smooching to Edmundo Ros; clothes hadn’t changed in decades, jeans were unheard of. There was no street life we yearned to emulate (though Teddy boys did have a certain allure), no social level to step down to. Drugs were unknown; Du Maurier cork-tips made one dizzy; whisky in quantity unexpectedly made one sick, putting a sticky end to that fumble with the deb we were trying to delight. Thus we had no good reason to believe holidays would be a panacea of excitement, just more huntin’/shootin’/fishin’ and going to the circus at Christmas, along with finding out that we were even more tongue-tied with girls, Nanny wasn’t indispensable, and your sister had adopted your dog.

 

And beyond? There was no gap year. Instead National Service loomed, then Oxford or Cambridge beckoned the brainier, a Guards regiment the rest, and – to the very few – the unmentionable thrall of a more lilac life in an almost club-like gay milieu. For four or five years, Eton consumed our whole being. But some of us understood that we had a lifetime ahead in which to roll, and rock, in the gutter.