Joe Bain sent these impressions to Brian Rees who was engaged on a history of Stowe School.
5.v.92
Dear Mr Rees,
I know that this is not what you wanted at all. If I were in your place I’d want anecdotes and jokes & things. However, it is the way this particular cookie crumbled and I’m too lazy to change it. It’s a sort of worm’s eye view of Stowe, and from that perspective, ”Molehills seem mountains, and the ant appears a monstrous elephant.” It seems odd that I’ve had so much to say about Roxburgh but I suppose it’s “Roxburgh” I’m talking about: the real bloke may have been quite different.
The most interesting pair by far in my time, take them warts and all (& there were some who couldn’t) were Bill and Patience McElwee. They were both most inspiring people and unfailingly kind to me personally. You will no doubt have heard of them endlessly. They lived in what I hope was the world’s untidiest house, with streams of people flowing through and adding to the debris. I remember an old friend of theirs saying, “Whenever I stay chez Bill I never put my feet down to the bottom of the bed: you can never be sure what you’ll find there.” They were marvellous company & unique. There should be similar people in each Common Room by Act of Parliament, but they aren’t available quite so easily!
In my day the most inspiring teachers I’m aware of – there were probably others – were, in their very different ways, the afore-mentioned Bill, Brian Stephan, Simon Stuart, Peter Longhurst, and (so I’m told, though in subjects remote from me) Raymond Walker & Oliver Ridge. I don’t suppose that is very germane to your wants and there were many other excellent guys, so I’ll shut up.
Use what you like or chuck it away, but don’t get me into trouble with the Governors: I might want to revisit the place some time.
It does occur to me that you might just conceivably be an Evangelical. If so, please regard my remarks on the subject as so much senile raving and don’t take um. I am writing about geological time & in those days they bulked large in our private mythology.
Good luck with the book. – Your sincerely – Joe Bain.
p.s. Entre nous, what a great Headmaster Anthony Quinton would have made! Unfortunately he was too eminent to have thought of it & anyway might not have suited the selectors. P.P.S. I see I haven’t mentioned the boys. Oh well!
*****
It is now nearly twenty years since I left Stowe and I know little about it today, except what I’ve seen on occasional visits. The Stowe I knew was dominated by the memory of Roxburgh; so perhaps I had better start with the impression he made on me, who never knew him.
No school I can think of was so much the creation – one might even say the incarnation – of one man. He had retired in 1949, and yet when I got there in 1954 his personality – or perhaps more accurately, endless versions of his personality recreated in the minds of people often totally unlike him and for whom he would probably have had little sympathy or respect – permeated the place. He had created the school and very nearly (posthumously) brought it down.
Stowe had been founded by the (in my time nearly unmentioned) Percy Warrington and others as God’s answer to the Woodard Schools. How J.F. came to be its first headmaster seems to be to be beyond belief. I think though that in some way it was the profound tension between Roxburgh’s partrician humanism and the Founder’s rumbling desire the smite the ungodly that gave the place its early vitality. Besides, the whole feel of the site: the Palladian landscape, the elegant theatricality of it all, made it an inauspicious place to smite the ungodly from. Few who have lived there can have escaped its civilizing influence and for them, I think, (whether they realized it or not) J.F. was the genius loci: assured, relaxed, civilized, aristocratic, elaborately informal, the park, the buildings and the man were ideally matched. Eighteenth Century elegance and order were weapons by which the Evangelical party was kept at bay, and even triumphantly routed. The Martyrs’ Memorial Trust lurked in the wings and on the Governing Body but they were no match for the wily J.F. Religion without enthusiasm in the good Eighteenth Century manner became the unwritten motto of the school.
Stowe was never a “progressive” school; but Roxburgh’s style ideally suited the Twenties and Thirties. Despite many distinguished academic and sporting Old Stoics of the period, it was never an academic or sporting school – there was some justification for the old story of the voice from a Stowe scrum at a Stowe/Oundle match: “For pity’s sake, Humphrey; you’re standing on my hair!”
In my ignorance, I’d never heard of Stowe when I was a boy at Marlborough, but at Cambridge the many Stoics I met impressed me with the sort of confident unselfconscious air one usually associates with Etonians – the description of Stowe as, “This other Eton,” was at least as appropriate as the unkinder, “Stowe on Styx.” The benevolent despotism of Roxburgh and the image of him as a father of his nation, surrounded by acolytes & satraps ranging from Housemasters to domestic servants and matrons (“Thank you, but I don’t think that will be necessary,” to an unfortunate matron who had tried to join the school photograph; or, to a garrulous Housemaster travelling in the same railway compartment: “Do go on talking, but you must excuse me if I don’t listen: my doctor tells me I mustn’t get over-excited,” seem to set the tone of the relationships) the beautifully contrived showmanship – nowadays PR – which (prompted by the faithful school secretary Lucas) enabled him “spontaneously,” to know every boy’s Christian name and to congratulate him on his birthday; the treatment of the boys as civilized gentlemen; too civilized to wear the traditional uniform; the realization that the traditions of the school were the traditions of the great house and grounds which it had so naturally inherited: all these things gave the place an atmosphere that no other school could possibly match. There were many bonuses too: many of the domestic staff had served, “the family,” and were an established part of the scene – some of them had not only the names and the profiles of their Bourbon ancestors, but “belonged” to the old order in a way that no upstart schoolmaster could match. The very decay of the garden buildings gave a romantic “Lost Domain,” feel to the grounds: they felt lived in like a well-made old suit of clothes.
What ought to have been the golden Autumn of J.F.’s reign was marred for him I’m sure by the war and the terrible toll of Old Stoic casualties. I think that those who knew him were all agreed that he stayed too long. This wasn’t in my view the main trouble. By 1949 the whole of the world that Stowe had enshrined in the inter-war years was crumbling: the Public Schools were on the brink of change, and nobody could foresee what sort of change. For Stowe it was even worse: the civilized consensus of gentlemanly behaviour and good form was passing beyond recall: it was Stowe’s unenviable fate to have to face up to the threat of the passing of the Country House & the Public School at the same time. From Country House to Campus, to Theme Park was bad enough: from Academic Grove to Language Lab for continuous assessment, to Co-education & GCSEs were inevitable steps in a process which if Roxburgh were alive would have killed him, as the saying goes.
It was Eric Reynolds’s misfortune to inherit a bag of ferrets. As you implied in your letter, he has had little justice done to him. I wasn’t of course in his confidence, so treat my hunches as no more than that [To save aplogizing and qualifying on each occasion, I do so now. You can judge for yourself whether what I say sounds reasonable.]
I think that when he came on the scene the conflicted forces were beginning to break cover. Roxburgh had kept them in check, but now everybody was his own Roxburgh (who meanwhile had quit the scene and as far as I know, loyal to his successor, avoided overt implication). Though nobody could sense the direction the world was moving many felt in their bones that all was not well. It was clear that, whatever its failings, Stowe was not suited to being an “ordinary” Public School; but how was it to establish itself again? What would J.F. have done? In the first place, he he would have been there, and this he clearly wasn’t. So the obvious thing was to reestablish the values of the school as it was when it was founded. Unfortunately J.F. was a much more subtle (and, I imagine, devious) person than many of his admirers. What some of them appear to have wanted was a second coming: the young J.F. was to appear and lead them back triumphantly to 1923 There’s something perhaps about the climate of Stowe that nourishes such dreams; but E.V.R. was not the man to take them on this path.
To the Evangelicals things were, as usual, easy. “Back to Percy Warrington!” might not have much appeal, but Back to Fundamentals was an inspiring thought. E.V.R. though a sound Christian was no Evangelical, and smiting the ungodly wasn’t his style.
To many of the older staff the picture was clear too. What they wanted was J.F. and they would take no substitute: which was rough on E.V.R.
Like many shy people Reynolds was very good on public occasions: speeches, sermons and such things – when he had an audience – were excellent. What he was bad at was coping privately with bores or fools. He hadn’t J.F.s skill at fending off thrusting wives or mothers; and falling down the mountain had made him incredibly self-conscious of his appearance. (When he interviewed me at the Public Shools Club for the job at Stowe, I was slightly fazed by being seated more or less behind him, while he put questions to me over his shoulder: I wasn’t then as au fait with Headmasters as I later became.)
He was given little or no credit for his efforts on behalf of teachers’ salaries – a thing that I suspect came rather lower on J.F.’s scale of priorities.
He was accused of favouritism, and it’s true that having been a Housemaster – and, I’m told, a very successful one – he must occasionally have been a bit lonely and wanted to chat with congenial rather than uncongenial people of any age.
They said that he didn’t like getting up in the morning (a failing he shared with Dr Arnold, no less) but he seemed to have been around early or late as far as I know.
He was, as a Headmaster, essentially a man of peace. I don’t know how much aware he was of the nature of the opposition to him, nor that most of the junior masters of about my age were supporters of his. Whether he could have given more opportunity for this to become apparent, or whether we should have been more vocal in our support I don’t know. There were problems: not least that there was a great gap in the middle age-group of the staff at that time and we were strongly outnumbered by the oldies, and anyway in those days, we, ‘knew our place.’
I remember a grievance at that time was that he was said to invite only a small number of married staff to his (excellent) dinner-parties and others not at all. The young unmarried masters were fairly regularly invited to make up numbers with unattached matrons and secretaries and librarians and had no complaints. The position was reversed under D.C.M. who used to invite the Common Room to lunch in strict rotation. The grievance then was that they were now asked too often and that there was no damned merit in it. Who’d be a Headmaster?
E.V.R. was a civilized and trusted boss for us younger chaps and I think that we liked him partly because he wasn’t Roxburgh (nothing personal of course, but J.F. had been crammed down our throats so much that we welcomed a different diet, especially as the Roxburgh flavour was suspiciously more dependent on the cook than the ingredients.)
I’ve often thought that it would have been better for Stowe if D.C.M. had come first, and E.V.R. after him – always supposing that either or both were inevitable.
I’m not more inquisitive than most, but I should dearly have liked to have heard the directions given to D.C.M. on his appointment. I think “they” (whoever they were) got many things into a misleading perspective. They, I’m sure, thought the place needed a short, sharp shock and the Evangelicals (I seem to be obsessed with them, but I’m not really) thought that at last they’d got one of their own kind. But just as they had misjudged E.V.R. they misjudged his successor. For all his rugged appearance and (dare one say it?) lack of tact, he was more humane and well-disposed than I think they had bargained for. Had the problem been what the “powers’ thought it was and what, I suspect, D.C.M. himself had been led to think it was, everything would have turned out much better. He was often a singularly good judge of character and gave many people very shrewd advice – though some of them didn’t think so at the time. He did really marvellous work in putting the grounds into good shape – as far as money allowed, of course.
I mean no disrespect to any of these headmasters when I say that what Stowe needed then, and may indeed have needed in 1949 was a young, imaginative, super-human Headmaster who could have given the place the sort of inspiration (but in new terms) that Roxburgh had given it when it started. Can such things be? Stowe had been lucky to find one genius: they don’t come twice. E.V.R. was altogether too decent a guy to do what had to be done, and by D.C.M.’s time the old order had decidedly changed. I think in retrospect that D.C.M.’s was the last attempt – doomed I suppose to failure – to keep Stowe a ‘special’ kind of school. I don’t mean a good school – I’m sure it’s still that – but a school that in its short life [illeg.] it greatest and animated its surroundings rather than just inhabiting them.
R.Q.D. was my last Headmaster at Stowe and what he achieved is too well-known for me to need to comment on it. He put the place to rights and worked the transition from ‘Empire’ as well as it could be worked. He was also – no mean feat – liked and trusted.
Both the ‘other Eton’ and the ‘Stowe on Styx’ images have gone and only nostalgic old buffers will regret their passing. Delusions of grandeur have gone the way of all such delusions; J.F.’s war against the Philistines is probably lost, but much of the pretentiousness and exclusiveness and snobbery has gone too, and no bad thing either. The great and eccentric characters whom J.F. was shrewd enough or inspirational enough to emply: T.H.White, George Rudé, Bill and Patience McElwee and so many others, have packed their bags, but I hope the National Trust hasn’t swept up all the ghosts.
It was a strain at times to live in one of the greatest stage-sets in England (one of my young colleagues used to feel the need to go and walk down the street at Bletchley once a week, just to meet real people) but it was wonderful and, selfishly, I’m glad I was there when I was. Like Matthew Arnold’s Oxford it was a home of lost causes, but they were honourable causes in the main. The causes of today are what it has to face, and perhaps it was because it refused to face them in the past that one or two things – not many after all – went wrong.
It is and was a magical spot and an unforgettable place to be young in. I know that I too have lived in Arcadia.
[Brian Rees’s sparkling, Stowe, The History of a Public School, 1923 - 1989, was published by Stamp Publishing in 2008. It seems that back in the early 1990s it was thought by the school’s governors to be a little too candid for the times.]