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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