Synthetic Young Gentlemen
Clean Young Englishman. By John Gale. (Hodder and Stoughton, 25s.)
SYNTHETIC: well, yes: it was an artificial sort of place. I was, all the same, rather flattered when `J.F.' asked me to join his staff. I was glad, also, to leave after a year; and I suspect that my little pupils were glad, too. Some of them may not have been; and to them I send a sort of posthumous love; and to `J.F.,' too. Lord Annan has written an admirably objective study of his old headmaster; John Gale, a far more talented writer, has dealt with him fairly in passing: passing on to life as it is.
Roxburgh was a very confused man, like so many of his generation. Lord Annan mentions a wistful early love affair, but Roxbtirgh's love for the apposite sex was really confined to the mothers of his pupils. He was in the purest sense of the word a gx,S6p2o-rqs: a bringer-up of boys. Such men are rare. He was a classic type of schoolmaster and I think that the strain of it all killed him. Austere himself, he was soft about his pupils. My colleague Roy Meldrum- -a school- master of my own, it so happened- and I both thought too soft. Boys need more bracing treat- ment. His love leaned over into sentimentality, and the artful little beasts knew it. Boys have a tart- like knowledge of their elders' weaknesses. The social problems to be faced at a school inade- quately endowed, like Stowe, are complex. It was a breeding-ground for snobbery. Some of the parents were quite breathtttkingly awful, full of car-chat, mink-chat, and just plain snob-chat. The boys were sweet: good. some of them: clever, a lot of them; brave, a great many of them. Socially, horribly muddled. I can speak only of the war years, when these things were sadly irrelevant. The war—the deaths of old boys--did for Roxburgh. But he enjoyed his one- man band. while it lasted. He could never have run Eton; nor, I think, would he have wished to do so, had the post been improbably offered to him. Stowe as contrived by him was a slightly dotty, rather elegant phenomenon. His own . prodigious, personal effort.
John Gale, whom I remember as the most en- gaging child, got, he feels, nothing out of the place. An extravert, a good athlete, he would have been 'happier' almost anywhere else. He followed his father and brothers into the Cold- stream, is a brilliant and powerful manic- depressive, has a lovely family, and can write most people's pants off. Did he go to the wrong school? I think the defects of Roxburgh's Stowe did as much for him as the more Roman virtues of stock educational establishments might have done. Roxburgh's rather nervy Hellenism worked very well when the boys were tough enough Ao take it. 'J.F.' was a virtuotis man. His faults -- snobbery, sentimentality--were those of his class and environment. In any case, they were the products of an England as dead as Richard Hannay and the Dodo. RIP.
.101 IN D.\\'I-,NPOI(I
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