The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School Ethos

by Peter Parker

Long unavailable, this acclaimed book traces the history of an ideal and examines its effect on the lives of those caught up in the First World War. Rupert Brooke's apparent enthusiasm for the War in 1914 was echoed throughout England, particularly by young men who had been educated in a gentlemanly tradition of patriotism, chivalry and sportsmanship at their public schools. These codes had also trickled down through society thanks to the school stories that appeared in popular boys' magazines, and to the missions and boys' clubs run by the schools and universities in the poorer parts of the country. 


Drawing upon a wealth of material, Peter Parker's fascinating book traces the growth and dissemination of  what Wilfred Owen dismissed as 'the old lie' in his poem Dulce Et Decorum Est. It also explores the wide variety of responses to the war - from celebration to denigration, from patriotic acquiescence to bitter rebellion - as they were reflected in the poetry, plays and prose of the period.  The Old Lie unearths some truly bizarre notions about education and warfare and illuminatingly re-examines the literature of the First World War by placing it in its historical and social perspective.

Genres: World War I, History

344 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1987

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Peter Parker (1954-) was born in Herefordshire and educated in the Malverns, Dorset and London. He is the author of The Old Lie: The Great War and Public-School Ethos and biographies of J.R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood. He edited the Reader’s Companion to the Twentieth-Century Novel and The Reader’s Companion to Twentieth Century Writers, and was an associate editor of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He writes about books and gardening for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines and lives in London’s East End.

Reviews

[Katherine Addison · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Old Lie is about World War I and British public schools, more specifically about the way in which the public schools created an officer caste that believed the greatest achievement possible for them was to die young in battle. (Apply the words "glory" and "heroism" and "chivalry" to taste.) Parker goes into great detail, with seemingly endless primary sources, to show that not only were the young men of Britain being told that that was what they should want, but for many of them, it was true. They internalized this ethos, interpolated themselves into its systm, and participated enthusiastically in the indoctrination of their younger brothers (both literal and metaphorical).

And they died. Horribly. Unheroically. Unromantically. For reasons that had nothing at all to do with the reasons they were willing to die. "Poppies for young men," as Sting says, "death's bitter trade."

This is a fascinating book, and an appalling one. The alien lunacy of the primary sources belies the fact of their historical proximity. Although it trivializes Parker's project to reduce it to merely a useful secondary source, it is true that The Old Lie helped me understand the undercurrents of The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.

Parker is so steeped in his subject, that I suspect some of his argument was actually lost to me because I'm not familiar enough with either the British public school system or the poetry of WWI. Or World War I itself. (I could seriously have used an apparatus of annotations.) But despite that, this was an illuminating read on a subject I find difficult to get my head around.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at the unique culture of the English public school and how it shaped the pupils who would become officers in the "Great War," as WWI was then called.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book anyone interested in England in the early to mid-twentieth century should read because the Public Schools (for non UK reader that means private schools) were of such singular importance in forming the governing class and thus setting a template that had an influence far beyond the narrow percentage numbers that they educated. Wonderful scholarship, fascinating and at times bizarre quotes from rightly forgotten men (and we are of course talking about men). Also a great sadness - a whole homoerotic or homosocial culture pushed often by celebite men, who we would now see as clearly gay, but who clearly loved the 'idea' of young men as a group, rather then any particular young man. One can't help thinking that if more of those who spoke the utter rot examined in this book had loved not the idea of a young man but a real on with all their idiosyncrasies then they might have been less willing to push a generation of young men off to war with such hollow words.

Anyone interested in English literature of or post WWI or English history of or post WWI should read this book.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

The great British Public Schools were the formative ground for the ruling classes of the 19th and early 20th Centuries in Britain. From the reforms of Dr. Thomas Arnold at Rugby in the mid-19th Century, the Public Schools evolved a comprehensive curriculum and ethos that was inculcated into generations of boys and young men. This ethos, in turn, informed and lead to the generation that would go on to lead during the battles in the trenches of the First World War. And that was where the ethos would be broken.

Parker traces the changes and the development of that ethos, one of service, Christianity, structured society, and a sanitized Classicism. He shows how the expansion of the Public Schools coopted the affluent middle classes and aligned them with the ruling upper classes. In turn, the use of Missionary efforts and the literature of the Public School story helped to bring the working classes into the same ethos.

Parker balances his tracing of the Public School ideal with a look at how the experiences of the trenches lead to the writings of Siegfried Sassoon and Owen (and others) which changed the idea of "Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori" from a value to live by to "The Old Lie." At the same time, it is also admitted that the same ideal that lead so many Public School graduates to the trenches was also of some small value of helping to sustain them through their experiences and providing a framework to help them interpret those same experiences.

This book would be of value for someone interested in the lines of thought that lead up to the First World War and who wanted to know how and why people were so eager at the start of the war.