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Gilded Youth: Privilege, Rebellion and the British Public School
The British public school is an iconic institution, a training ground for the ruling elite and a symbol of national identity and tradition. But beyond the elegant architecture and evergreen playing fields is a turbulent history of teenage rebellion, sexual dissidence, and political radicalism. James Brooke-Smith wades into the wilder shores of public-school life over the last three hundred years in Gilded Youth . He uncovers armed mutinies in the late eighteenth century, a Victorian craze for flagellation, dandy-aesthetes of the 1920s, quasi-scientific discourse on masturbation, Communist scares in the 1930s, and the salacious tabloid scandals of the present day.
Drawing on personal experience, extensive research, and public school representations in poetry, school slang, spy films, popular novels, and rock music, Brooke-Smith offers a fresh account of upper-class adolescence in Britain and the role of elite private education in shaping youth culture. He shows how this central British institution has inspired a counterculture of artists, intellectuals, and radicals—from Percy Shelley and George Orwell to Peter Gabriel and Richard Branson—who have rebelled against both the schools themselves and the wider society for which they stand. Written with verve and humor in the tradition of Owen Jones’s The And How They Get Away With It , this highly original cultural history is an eye-opening leap over the hallowed iron gates of privilege—and perturbation.
Drawing on personal experience, extensive research, and public school representations in poetry, school slang, spy films, popular novels, and rock music, Brooke-Smith offers a fresh account of upper-class adolescence in Britain and the role of elite private education in shaping youth culture. He shows how this central British institution has inspired a counterculture of artists, intellectuals, and radicals—from Percy Shelley and George Orwell to Peter Gabriel and Richard Branson—who have rebelled against both the schools themselves and the wider society for which they stand. Written with verve and humor in the tradition of Owen Jones’s The And How They Get Away With It , this highly original cultural history is an eye-opening leap over the hallowed iron gates of privilege—and perturbation.
296 pages, Hardcover
First published February 2, 2019
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May 9, 2019My review: https://openlettersreview.com/posts/g...
January 12, 2024
The author of this thought-provoking book certainly didn’t need to convince this reader that the creation of a fairer, more equal society is impossible while private education continues to exist, but his main focus is on those products of the system who attempted to reject its values. This is a scrupulously researched yet impassioned history of public school rebels spanning over two hundred years.
A recurring theme is how the successive waves of public school rebels eventually rejoined the establishment or formed cabals of their own which changed little of substance. The dandy-aesthetes and Left-wing radicals of the ‘20s and ‘30s transmuted into the liberal cultural establishment of the post-war period. Cyril Connolly, Philip Toynbee and Stephen Spender became the literary lions of post-war London, a tight-knit old boys’ network as unwelcoming to outsiders as any other. They had rebelled against the team games and phony team spirit of their public schools primarily by asserting their individuality which tended to make them ultimately suspicious of genuinely transformative collectivist movements like socialism. All retained the manners and style of their upbringing and a deeply ambivalent attitude towards their old schools which oscillated between hatred and a nostalgic attachment bordering on love. The emotional and psychological pull of the ‘total institution’ of the public school proved difficult to escape. Old Etonian George Orwell did more than most to deracinate himself but, at the end of his tragically short life, he was simultaneously criticising the Atlee Government for failing to abolish private education and planning to send his adopted son to Eton.
The British counterculture of the late ‘60s was replete with public school dropouts who self-consciously perceived themselves as the elite vanguard of a new society but Brooke-Smith seems correct in his assertion that the main legacies of the counterculture were in commerce and the culture industries. Pop group managers Andrew Loog Oldham (Wellingborough School) and Kit Lambert (Lancing College) were heirs to the dandy-aestheticism of Brian Howard and Harold Acton. Loog Oldham and Lambert radiated an effortless yet highly stylised anti-establishment hauteur which, paradoxically, was the direct product of their privileged education. Like delinquent prefects they trained their respective and socially inferior charges, The Rolling Stones and The Who, in the fine art of epater la bourgeoisie. In his groundbreaking survey of ‘60s pop culture Revolt Into Style yet another public school rebel, George Melly, argued that it had made British society less hidebound by tradition and more emotionally open; and so it did but it also left the structure of society unchanged. In the subsequent decades Britain has actually become a less equal and more socially divided society.
Lots of fascinating stuff here: armed and mutinous eighteenth century schoolboys, flagellating Victorians, how public school battles between athletes and aesthetes were reimagined in spy fiction, the connection between Greek and Latin cribs and nonsense literature; and, not least, Esmond Romilly, an extraordinary character straight from the pages of an alternative Boy’s Own Paper. Romilly was, I admit, new to me and I’m very glad to have made his acquaintance. At fifteen in 1934 he absconded from Wellington College to start a Marxist newspaper called Out of Bounds. When not attending conspiratorial Left-wing meetings or anti-fascist rallies he was spending the weekends at Chartwell with his uncle Winston Churchill. Romilly went off to fight fascists in the Spanish Civil War taking Jessica Mitford with him. Being killed in the Second World War did at least save him from the ignominious fate of turning into an old reactionary, unlike so many of his contemporaries.
A recurring theme is how the successive waves of public school rebels eventually rejoined the establishment or formed cabals of their own which changed little of substance. The dandy-aesthetes and Left-wing radicals of the ‘20s and ‘30s transmuted into the liberal cultural establishment of the post-war period. Cyril Connolly, Philip Toynbee and Stephen Spender became the literary lions of post-war London, a tight-knit old boys’ network as unwelcoming to outsiders as any other. They had rebelled against the team games and phony team spirit of their public schools primarily by asserting their individuality which tended to make them ultimately suspicious of genuinely transformative collectivist movements like socialism. All retained the manners and style of their upbringing and a deeply ambivalent attitude towards their old schools which oscillated between hatred and a nostalgic attachment bordering on love. The emotional and psychological pull of the ‘total institution’ of the public school proved difficult to escape. Old Etonian George Orwell did more than most to deracinate himself but, at the end of his tragically short life, he was simultaneously criticising the Atlee Government for failing to abolish private education and planning to send his adopted son to Eton.
The British counterculture of the late ‘60s was replete with public school dropouts who self-consciously perceived themselves as the elite vanguard of a new society but Brooke-Smith seems correct in his assertion that the main legacies of the counterculture were in commerce and the culture industries. Pop group managers Andrew Loog Oldham (Wellingborough School) and Kit Lambert (Lancing College) were heirs to the dandy-aestheticism of Brian Howard and Harold Acton. Loog Oldham and Lambert radiated an effortless yet highly stylised anti-establishment hauteur which, paradoxically, was the direct product of their privileged education. Like delinquent prefects they trained their respective and socially inferior charges, The Rolling Stones and The Who, in the fine art of epater la bourgeoisie. In his groundbreaking survey of ‘60s pop culture Revolt Into Style yet another public school rebel, George Melly, argued that it had made British society less hidebound by tradition and more emotionally open; and so it did but it also left the structure of society unchanged. In the subsequent decades Britain has actually become a less equal and more socially divided society.
Lots of fascinating stuff here: armed and mutinous eighteenth century schoolboys, flagellating Victorians, how public school battles between athletes and aesthetes were reimagined in spy fiction, the connection between Greek and Latin cribs and nonsense literature; and, not least, Esmond Romilly, an extraordinary character straight from the pages of an alternative Boy’s Own Paper. Romilly was, I admit, new to me and I’m very glad to have made his acquaintance. At fifteen in 1934 he absconded from Wellington College to start a Marxist newspaper called Out of Bounds. When not attending conspiratorial Left-wing meetings or anti-fascist rallies he was spending the weekends at Chartwell with his uncle Winston Churchill. Romilly went off to fight fascists in the Spanish Civil War taking Jessica Mitford with him. Being killed in the Second World War did at least save him from the ignominious fate of turning into an old reactionary, unlike so many of his contemporaries.
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