Old School

A fascinating glimpse into an almost extinct culture

Some years ago, on the recommendation of a Twitter friend, I watched a now-forgotten film from 1948, The Guinea Pig, starring Richard Attenborough. It follows Jack Read, the 14 year old son of a London tobacconist, as he takes up a scholarship at Saintbury, a (fictional) English public school, under a post-Second World War scheme to encourage what we’d now call social mobility.

As you might expect, Read faces bullying and snobbery, the latter from masters as well as other pupils. He struggles to adapt to the social expectations of Saintbury, and his Housemaster, Mr Hartley, a long-serving reactionary, makes life difficult for him. Back at home old friends joke that he might get above himself. Read does eventually manage to flourish, with the help of a sympathetic master, Mr Lorraine.

The tribulations of a working class or (as in Read’s case) petit bourgeois character making their way in a stuffy upper-class institution, while also facing alienation from old friends in their original milieu, are a well-worn dramatic trope. It had been done before and it’s been done since, and The Guinea Pig is certainly not a masterpiece, though it apparently did well at the box office, reflecting the British love for school stories¹. The script doesn’t give Attenborough a great deal to do with the Read character, and his story gets a bit crowded out by another plot strand about Hartley.

However, the film’s overall moral attitude to Saintbury is remarkably interesting. At one point, Read is subjected to a nasty initiation ritual – it’s not clear whether this is something that all new boys must undergo or whether he is singled out for it because of his background – and when he protests to Hartley he is put firmly in his place. Who are you, says Hartley, to come here and question our ways? And Read is not given a good answer to this question.

This might be a shock to modern audiences, used as they are to hidebound and apparently cruel traditions being overthrown by the irresistible force of egalitarian and therapeutic dogma. But the writers of The Guinea Pig felt no compulsion to include a damning indictment of “hazing”.

Similarly, fagging - the long-standing practice in British public schools by which junior boys act as servants to senior boys, with the latter given considerable latitude to punish infractions - is presented with a certain ambivalence. On his first day Read is instructed by the school captain, or head boy, to take his suitcases to his study. The captain (who is later closely involved in the initiation mentioned above) and one of his cronies are snide and dismissive towards Read. Later, a senior boy canes him for a trifling error. This is all portrayed as unpleasant but not monstrous, an onerous discipline to be endured rather than a vile abuse to be eradicated.

In another incident, a boy in Read’s form who has persistently given him a hard time picks a fight with him. The fight is interrupted by Lorraine, who wants to know why it started. Read refuses to incriminate the other boy, maintaining the traditional schoolboy expectation of omerta on such matters, and Lorraine suggests they take it in to the boxing ring and sort it out by Queensberry Rules. They do so and after a longish bout leave the ring as friends. This is all presented as normal, natural and healthy.

Perhaps most curiously of all, the cantankerous arch-conservative Hartley is presented rather sympathetically. His long and loyal service to the school is valorised. The climax of the film is not Read’s successful integration into the life of the school and his winning of a place at Cambridge, but Hartley’s decision, before his forced early retirement on grounds of health, to use his influence to create further scholarships of the kind from which Read benefited. A chat with Read’s father, a retired Sergeant Major who sympathises with Hartley’s struggle to form his boys into men of character, is integral to this decision. Lorraine, who has spent the film sparring with Hartley over his insensitive treatment of the boy, becomes engaged to Hartley’s daughter and buries the hatchet with the old man. Even Read seems to view Hartley with considerable warmth by the climax.

It would not be fair to say that the film is complacent about the harshness of old-fashioned public schools in the first half of the twentieth century. Many of Saintbury’s inmates are shown being unthinking and unkind to Read – the problem is institutional, as we would say nowadays. Read tries to leave during his first term, and breaks down in tears when Lorraine catches him and asks him about his misery.

But it is curious what Lorraine says during this exchange – he is not given a barnstorming liberal speech. Instead, he encourages Read to show fortitude and perseverance, taking as an example Read’s much-admired father, an ex-soldier who played football for the Army. And this reflects something about the tone of the film which I do not think would be replicated in a similar film made today, i.e. its approach to the school is broadly respectful and balanced. While the cruelties and frustrations faced by Read are not glossed over, Saintbury is also shown as a place of learning and wisdom and the development of character (not least on the rugger field); as a pathway for the boy to a life of the mind that he would not otherwise have found. The subtext of the film is that such institutions, that represent the transmission and continuation of a great culture and form the elite of a great nation, must be allowed their strange ways and the odd unpalatable tradition, albeit open to gradual humane reform over time.

A modern version of this story, I suspect, would have a much more unambiguous and disruptive moral vision. Lorraine and Read would become eloquent critics of The System and their humanitarian zeal would sweep all before them. Hartley and the sixth-form bullies would be much more sinister figures, and the conclusion would have Lorraine defeating Hartley in argument or undermining his reactionary schemes. Maybe the school would abolish fagging or admit girls or stop teaching Latin in favour of sex ed and Media Studies.

I am certainly not an uncritical defender of traditional public schools (speaking as a veteran of all-male schooling and some mild if unpleasant bullying). Nevertheless, I do think it is worth reflecting on some of the nuances that the 1948 film captures, about character and grit and the development of male strength, and the relative importance of individuals and institutions.

1. I highly recommend RF Delderfield’s To Serve Them All My Days (1972).