"A Desire to Conform"

Up to the top of a hill in Britain's Hampshire countryside one morning last week trooped a procession of 500 boys, some clad in flowing black robes, others straw-hatted in neat tweeds and flannels. After Anglican prayers, the boys marched down the hill to their lodgings and breakfasted on sausages and fried tomatoes.

With such immemorial tradition began the 555th year of Winchester College, one of Britain's oldest public schools and the prototype of such others as Eton and Harrow. Founded in 1394 by William of Wykeham, Lord Chancellor of England, the school has sailed through all the storms of church & state since the days of Richard II. By building character as well as learning into the make-up of its students (the school motto: "Manners maketh man"), Winchester has turned out a share of statesmen (including Sir Stafford Cripps) and military men (Field Marshal Earl Wavell) as well as literary lights (18th Century Poet Laureate William Whitehead), businessmen and barristers.

Tacks & Taxes. How much longer such schools as Winchester could keep sailing, without at least changing their traditional tack, was the question. It costs -L-276 a year for Britain's heavily taxed middle-and upper-class parents to insure that their sons can wear the brown, red and black Winchester tie. Though this year there were ten applicants for every opening in the school, Winchester's slight, spectacled Headmaster Walter Fraser Oakeshott knows that the school will somehow have to broaden its student base to keep going in Socialist Britain.

To make a start, Oakeshott in 1946 got a promise of financial aid from the local school board and reserved 25 places at slightly reduced fees (-L-226) for boys from state-financed primary schools. But of the 40 examined, only three could pass the entrance exams, with their emphasis on Latin and Greek. In 1947, 25 were examined and none could pass: Winchester still had to draw its new boys from private primary schools. Last year again no qualified students were found among the state-school applicants. Oakeshott's proposed solution: better education in the government's schools. "Then," says he, "I think we could extend educational opportunities to a greater part of our population." The government's answer: cut tuition, get more applicants.*

Scholars & Gentlemen. Whatever the answer, English educators expect that more & more boys from the state schools are going to crash the hallowed gates of the public schools. At Winchester they will find that Wykehamisms (samples: "mugging" for working, "remedy" for holiday, "dead brum" for broke) are as much a part of the school as its rich educational diet. So are the class barriers between the 70 "scholars" (admitted to Winchester by virtue of high scholastic ability), the 16 "quiristers," who for centuries have received a free education for singing in the choir (until their voices change), and the 400-odd "commoners," whose families pay the full fee to make the lads both scholars and gentlemen.*

No less a tradition is Winchester's almost complete rule by the boys themselves; the head of the school government, always one of the "scholars," has five or six assistants in each of the ten dormitories. Under this system, which was started by the boys themselves to fill a vacuum left by a lax faculty some 250 years ago, Winchester's cloistered walls seldom echo to serious trouble. Says Headmaster Oakeshott: "The boys seem to accept the proposition that there are certain things which are just not done, not from a fear of punishment, but from a desire to conform to tradition."

The same desire makes it all the harder for ancient public schools like Winchester to change course, even when necessity seems to make changes inevitable.

*Founder Wykeham, in fact, specified that his students should be "pauperes et indigentes," and set an upper limit of -L-3 6s. 8d. on their annual income, but few real "pauperes" ever got in. For centuries, most of the appointments have gone to the sons of influential fathers. *Another group, the "Founder's Kin," long had special privileges, e.g., they could stay in Winchester until they were 25, but ultimately they became so numerous that the privileges were abolished. Unofficial test of a boy's relationship to Founder Wykeham: crashing a wooden platter down on his head. If the platter broke before the head had enough, the claim was valid.

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