No. 124
The Trusty Servant
the Warden into the Lodgings, and their disinclination to negotiate was shown when they presented a list of grievances beginning with the spectacularly tactless‘ That you are ugly.’ The mayor, arriving to mediate, was jeered. The militia was called out. When the colonel arrived the boys announced that‘ if his soldiers came near enough they would have their heads broken by stones from the tower.’ They were tricked into surrendering their fortified position by the Master, who suggested that if they came out there would be a holiday. When the scholars emerged from their citadel the militia, with fixed bayonets, charged and routed them. Once again there were numerous departures.
Such behaviour continued throughout the century. Thomas Arnold- later to become a distinguished headmaster- wrote a series of letters while a scholar indicating that what seem to the 21stcentury reader extraordinary levels of violence were commonplace. Of one pitched battle on St Catherine’ s Hill in September 1809, he wrote to his aunt that he had:
‘ Hurled such stones at him as would if rightly directed have sent him to the shades below … I wounded [ him ] in the neck and twice in the breast and chin; at last I made a furious charge, & hurled him down the precipice, pelting his posteriors almost raw in the descent. … But on the next day, our skirmishing was put a stop to in a very unfortunate manner … when a stone from Rosehill struck Awdry on the forehead, so that reeling back a few paces he fell to the ground.’
Winchester was not uniquely violent and vile. Wellington College was founded to educate the orphan sons of officers. The day that school opened, they were lined up and addressed by the headmaster with such ferocity that that night the whole school ran away. This is, I believe, the only recorded occasion when an entire school has done a bunk.
It is hardly surprising that Sydney Smith used to speak with horror of the wretchedness of his Winchester years, declaring the whole system was‘ one of abuse, neglect, and vice.’ Subsequently he recounted that William Howley, who became Archbishop of Canterbury, had at Winchester knocked him down with a chessboard for having checkmated him.
He disapproved of the whole public school system, declaring,‘ to give to a boy the habit of enduring privation to which he will never again be called upon to submit … is surely not a very useful and valuable severity in education,’ particularly objecting to the system, which operated well into the 20 th century, of rule by boys:
‘ At a public school … every boy is alternately tyrant and slave. The power which the elder part of these communities exercises over the younger is exceedingly great- very difficult to be controlled- and accompanied, not unfrequently, with cruelty and caprice. It is the common law of the place, that the young should be implicitly obedient to the elder boys; and his obedience resembles more the submission of a slave to his master, or of a sailor to his captain, than the common and natural deference which should always be shown by one boy to another a few years older than him.’
Anthony Trollope found this out when he arrived as a scholar in 1785, two years after Sydney Smith. Trollope’ s elder brother, Thomas Adolphus Trollope, was a prefect and exercised his prefectorial powers by regularly beating his younger brother— with a cricket stump.
A good deal of Smith’ s spleen was reserved for the boy at the head of the boy-rule hierarchy:
‘ The head of a public school is generally a very conceited young man, utterly ignorant of his own dimensions, and losing all that habit of conciliation towards others, and that anxiety for self-improvement, which results from the natural modesty of youth.’
This may reveal a degree of selfknowledge: Smith was Aulae Prae in 1788.
One element of the curriculum to which he took particular exception was the emphasis on classical languages:‘ The prodigious honour in which Latin verses are held at public schools is surely the most absurd of all distinctions.’ This may be a reflection on his own relative academic performance: he won the prize for an English prose essay, rather than one of the more prestigious classics prizes, for which silver medals were awarded. Smith received the two volumes of Apollonius Rhodes Argonauticorum libri quatuor,( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1777), bound in one. It is a remarkable binding, in scarlet straight-grained morocco bearing the College coat of arms on the front cover and the arms of George Pitt, first Baron Rivers, on the back.
The use of this particular College coat of arms demonstrates that the book was bound in the bindery at the rear of the bookshop- a bindery still functioning today. I have seen many Winchester prize bindings, but this one is unique: the most notable element is the prominently raised spine, into which is set an engraved ivory plaque recording:
APPOLLONIUS RHODIUS. Winchester College Prize, FOR AN ENGLISH PROSE ESSAY, BY SYDNEY SMITH. 1788.
It must have been commissioned by Smith himself. Despite the fairly uniformly negative views Sydney Smith expressed of Winchester, one may suggest that he did feel some pride in the achievement this prize represented.
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