No.127
The Trusty Servant
Eminent Victorians of Win Coll:
Robert Lowe (Commoners, 1825-29)
The Editor, Tim Giddings, relates:
nothing but bread and a pat of butter,
plus one pail of milk between 130
boys, which was frequently knocked
over in the rush for sustenance. The
only way to vary this diet was to
supplement it at their own expense:
‘Our pocket money, as long as it
lasted, went in buying the food
with which we ought to have been
supplied.’
‘David therefore departed thence, and
escaped to the cave Adullam… And
every one that was in distress, and
every one that was in debt, and every
one that was discontented, gathered
themselves unto him: and he became
a captain over them.’ (1 Samuel 22.1)
In 1865 Liberal Prime Minister
Viscount Palmerston, the
swashbuckling Regency rake who had
somehow survived and prospered in
straight-laced Victorian Britain, died.
With his passing, reforming energies
pent-up during his premiership
were again unleashed. His successor
Earl Russell, who had helped pass
the Great Reform Act of 1832 and
failed with another bill in 1860, was
determined to expand the franchise
with a new Reform Bill. Gladstone
brought the bill to the house in 1866,
but it was stopped in its tracks, not by
the machinations of Disraeli, but by a
faction of Liberals opposed to reform.
The Radical MP John Bright dubbed
them the ‘Adullamites’, after the
group of malcontents who gathered
around David to oppose King Saul’s
rule over Biblical Israel. And who
played the role of David? Not one
of the faction’s patrician grandees
such as Lords Lansdowne, Grey and
Grosvenor, but a short-sighted albino
OW named Robert Lowe.
A political career – or indeed any
career – had seemed impossible when
he was born in 1811. His albinism
rendered him almost blind, and his
parents initially thought he would be
unable to go to school. Nevertheless,
in 1825 he arrived in the ramshackle
Medieval-Georgian complex where
Flint Court currently stands, Old
Commoners. His description
of his school years in his brief
autobiographical note (published in
Martin’s Life) blunt the sentimental
criticism of George Moberly for
sweeping the buildings away entirely
in 1839. Lowe claims that he writes
‘for the benefit of boys who think
they are badly treated’. Modern
Wykehamists complaining about the
reliability of the WiFi could do with
reading it.
According to Lowe, the whole system
in Commoners was ‘conducted
with a view to make the expenses
to the Master as small as possible.’
The pupils’ sustenance make Oliver
Twist’s workhouse gruel look
luxurious. Breakfast was not served
until 10:30am, 4.5 hours after the boys
had to get up, and 15.5 since their
previous meal (of bread and cheese)
the evening before. Breakfast was
13
The daily regimen seems like that
of a prison. On a full day they were
herded into School for work from
7:30-10, 11-12 and 2-6, and worked in
their hall from the end of supper until
being sent to bed at 8:30pm. They
were allotted only an hour of play,
and the only permitted venue was the
top of St Catherine’s Hill (Meads was
reserved for the Fellows). On Sundays
they endured five hours of services
and were then allowed one hour of
walking; the rest of the day they spent
shut up in Old Commoners, either in
the hall or the tiny court.
Studying was difficult, surrounded
by ‘perpetual noise and worry’.
Lowe was a bookish youth, but his
evening studies in hall were hindered
by the indoor cricket games that his
less cerebral peers preferred: ‘As my
cupboard happened to be what is
technically called “middle on,” the
pursuit of the Muses was attended
with some difficulty’. He did manage
to find some time for books, although
at the time he thought reading English
literature ‘a great piece of idleness’.
Yet he later credited those hours as
the most valuable he spent at the
school, ‘for it was thus I learnt the art
of speaking and writing correctly.’
However, the general barbarities
of life in Commoners pale in