IN THE DAYS before the arrival of the internet the only discussed perversions and fetishes were bondage, high-heels and necrophilia. Then came the knowledge, reluctantly gained, that there was a whole “community” that was turned on by fluffy toys, and even from this there was a breakaway group whose most exciting moments came while themselves dressed up as fluffy toys. I thought I knew it all.
Then, last week, my friend Nick Fraser publishes a book about Eton where, it turns out, he went to school. And in it Nick reveals that there are women out there (he knows them) who are unable to make love with anyone who didn’t attend the college. They wouldn’t have a Wykehamist or a Salopian; one kept “a tally of bagged Etonians in the style [writes Fraser] of Lord Byron stuffing a cushion with the pubic hair of his conquests”.
Whether this specialised attraction helps to account for the polling figures putting David Cameron ahead of his political rivals, or whether those are down to William Rees-Mogg’s revelation in these pages that Mr Cameron’s mother was the daughter of the 2nd Baronet Mount, is a matter for conjecture. What isn’t conjectural is that much of this Eton business makes me ill.
Unlike most other writers on this subject, I cannot tell an Old Etonian from anyone else, even by reference to such supposed characteristics as confidence, self-effacement or the wearing of several women at the same time. But I do recognise that along with aristocracy the school has been the subject of what one former Australian Prime Minister once called a “cultural cringe”. It has been mythologised by those outside it and those inside it. Hogwarts wouldn’t work as a stereotype if we weren’t all so familiar with a school for magical people, where special words are used and special clothes are worn.
Just do a quick search. You can find Rowan Pelling in 2002 telling readers that “the only bad thing about being in France for 10 days, was missing the wedding of the year. This dazzling event was Lucy Sykes’s wedding to old Etonian Euan Rellie”. Why is the former school of the groom of any significance, whether to Pelling or to us? Or the celebrated food critic of the London Evening Standard, Fay Maschler, beginning a 2005 review of her local brasserie, Sam’s, with the words: “Old Etonian Sam Harrison . . .” Does the food taste better because Sam’s pater came up with the 20 or so big ones needed to get the boy into Eton?
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This stuff, whether about Mr Cameron or some noisy offshoot of the Goldsmith or Ferry clans, makes Charles Ryders of us all, goshing and wowing in the wake of a gilded Sebastian, as he charms us around Brideshead (taking care to charge us 20 quid for the tour). I feel that it’s demeaning. But do Etonians themselves believe that they are special?
In his book, The Importance of Being Eton, Fraser recounts an interview with Eton’s Provost, Sir Eric Anderson. Sir Eric regrets the level of Eton’s fees, which then are around £23,000 a year. “The fees are high and they can’t be kept down,” he says. “Eton is subject to the same regulations concerning wheelchair access . . . as any lesser educational establishment.”
As any lesser educational establishment? Does he mean smaller educational establishment? You know he doesn’t. The one word “lesser” says everything. The 1,300 pupil comprehensive in the inner-city area with 60 per cent of the pupils eligible for free meals, and where the academic results have improved 400 per cent over five years, is — presumably — lesser. And the pupils are lesser. And the teachers are probably lesser, otherwise they’d be teaching at Eton. The parents are definitely lesser.
Now add self-pity to snobbery. “The time may come,” says Anderson, “when few native English can afford to send their sons to Eton.” £23,000 must be pretty close to the average gross annual earnings in “England”, so very few “native English” can afford Eton right now. What he really meant was Eton might not be able to afford many native English people; and that is an entirely different problem. A gigantic artificial rowing lake, completed five years ago, Eton can stump up for. Wheelchair access? That’s a bit pricey.
Naturally, there’s comedy in this. I recall a piece in one of the Mail titles by a David Thomas, who wrote lamenting the worsening ordeal of the British middle classes at the hands of the Iron Chancellor. In tones so lachrymose that the byline picture was damp, Thomas confessed that he could not afford to send his son to the same school that he himself had attended. The school was Eton. Somehow the tears just wouldn’t come.
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At the same time the head of the Mail titles, Paul Dacre, sent both his sons to Eton. And this despite the disadvantages that the poor lads might suffer. As Old Etonian Charles Moore put it in The Daily Telegraph last year when David Cameron was attacked by Gordon Brown for his parents’ choice of schooling: “It is hard to think of another minority against whom prejudice about unchosen origins could be expressed so freely. If Mr Brown had attacked an opponent saying ‘He’s a Jew’, ‘He’s a slum boy’, ‘He’s a cripple’, his career would rightly have drawn swiftly to its close.”
That Dacre knew exactly what he was doing was suggested this week by a study published by the Sutton Trust, the educational charity. This seemed to show that over the past 20 years the proportion of “top” media folk educated privately had not fallen, as one might have expected, but risen. If Etonians, pace Mr Moore, are wearing a star, it’s made out of gold.
Some reaction was hilarious. One newspaper argued that newspapers recruiting too much from a privileged elite was “embarrassing” — for the Government. The trust itself reported a common perception among leading editors “that the gap in ability between those from private schools and those from state schools has widened over the last few decades. Young, independently educated aspiring journalists . . . are just more confident, knowledgeable and self-sufficient at an earlier age than their state-school counterparts.”
Where, one would like to know, did this common perception come from? Where did those leading editors send their own kids? Who did they meet? In his review of Fraser’s book the author John Carey speculates that the reason for Eton’s continuing celebrity is the “failure” of the state system. “Few parents,” he writes, “would send their children to schools where they risk being attacked with knives, if they could possibly afford the fees to send them elsewhere.”
Attacked with knives! The ickle Dacres didn’t slip into tails to avoid being sliced, for God’s sake, but in order to maintain competitive advantage. That’s why kids go to private schools — not because state schools are necessarily bad, but because fee-paying schools will always strive to maintain their pupils’ competitive advantage in exams, in extra-curricular “life-broadening” activities and in social contact. Will always strive to make them Little Etonians.
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Read David Aaronovitch’s blog here