The Importance of Being Eton
Nick Fraser Short Books, 227pp, £12.99
ISBN 1904977537
I professed to hate my last year at "School" (audibly capitalised, that's what Old Etonians habitually call the place, out of coyness or arrogance, or both). A bumptious, Marxist, brown-English adolescent, I had been put on "expulsion warning" by the headmaster, the formidable Eric Anderson, for consistent chapel-skipping and organising an unauthorised political society, as well as an alleged Bacchanalian "Shelley Party" in the Thamesian groves. At my school-leaving interview, he gave me the standard choice of present - a bespoke edition of the poems of Thomas Gray or a catalogue of "Eton Treasures". As I plumped for Gray, he said triumphantly: "I knew you were a traditionalist at heart."
The battle between tradition and innovation at England's best-known school illuminates the pages of Nick Fraser's The Importance of Being Eton, in which Anderson (now "Sir Eric") outlines his plans to raise Old Etonian money in order to freeze fees and increase the number of scholarships. Fraser, ever the skilled and subtle documentary-maker (he is editor of the BBC's high-quality Storyville strand), has a talent for asking the perfect forensic question - he asks Anderson "whether the training of an elite was ever practised consciously at Eton" - and a knack for knowing when, and why, not to expect a proper answer: "I am not sure whether the Provost gets my drift - indeed, why should he?"
The Importance of Being Eton weaves together social history and literary criticism with charming and at times arresting personal memoir. Fraser explains how, in the 19th century, College (the scholars' house) was "a pace-setter within the school, its function nationally to supply intelligence to the English elite in just the right proportions", and takes us on a tour of the copious literature on Eton, from André Gide's ejaculatory observations to Orwell's insistent denials of Etonian influence. And, in a disappointingly rare insight into the question of race at Eton, Fraser deftly psychoanalyses Dillibe Onyeama's Nigger at Eton.
There are, inevitably, significant sections on the old Eton obsessions of beating and buggery (the two things I used to find that visiting Old Etonian grandees in the 1990s were most interested to know about: both had disappeared by my time). But Fraser's central concern is the psychological blessings and burdens the school bestows on its boys. Here he uncovers the school's central paradox, writing that the Browning scholar, College librarian and inspirational English master Michael Meredith "loves all forms of old-fashioned excellence, and he has fought on their behalf, against the conservatism of the school". This excellent book celebrates the ideal of noblesse oblige - of valuing old-fashioned excellence while seeking at the same time to extend it to all - particularly in Fra ser's portraits of the great reforming headmas ters Robert Birley and
Michael McCrum, who were ultimately doomed in their enthusiasm by Eton's centuries-old apathy.
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