The New Boy

For generations, to the often unconcealed horror of doting aunts and grandmothers, well-heeled young Britons have been bundled off to boarding schools at the tender age of eight or nine to learn to be young gentlemen in a manly atmosphere free of the influence of mothers and nannies. Last week, in similar fashion, Queen Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip took their eight-year-old son Charles by the hand and delivered him over to Headmaster Peter Beck at Philip's own alma mater, Cheam, one of England's oldest and most tradition-encrusted preparatory schools.

As the royal couple's black Lagonda, with Prince Philip at the wheel, swept up the driveway and pulled to a stop, the Queen Anne windows of the school were crammed with the curious faces of earlier arrivals. Placing a smart new hat with a blue C firmly on his head, Charles stepped up to the waiting headmaster at his mother's behest, raised the hat and shook hands with a firm "How do you do, sir."

Philip and Elizabeth saw their son to the dormitory he will share with six boys. A few minutes later, after a mother's kiss and a father's firm handshake, they were on their way home, leaving their son to the terrors and mysteries of a new, masculine world, and a mattress harder than any he had ever known before.

"Are they doing the right thing for Prince Charlie?" wondered the Sunday Express, but the question did not seem to get much of a rise out of Britons. Sending Charles to Cheam was not quite the prescription of that young critic of royalty. Lord Altrincham, who "would have liked to have seen him enter a state-run primary school." But it was certainly more democratic than the old royal custom that prescribed for all heirs to the throne a private education under governess and tutors in the palace schoolroom.

Young lordlings are no rarity at Cheam, one of whose former headmasters habitually underlined the prerogatives of birth by addressing the sons of commoners as "my child," the sons of peers as "my dear child," and young peers in their own right as "my darling child." As for the young Duke and heir to the throne, the word has gone round to all his 92 young schoolmates to call him plain "Charles."

As a critic of the royal family, Lord Altrincham is both a Tory and a monarchist. Last week an Englishman who is neither joined the argument. Young Playwright John Osborne, whose Look Back in Anger was scheduled to open in Manhattan this week and whose sulky bad manners have made him the current darling of London's West End intellectuals, got off an angry outburst in the highbrow monthly Encounter. Describing the royal family as "a ridiculous anachronism" and "the gold filling in a mouthful of decay," Osborne denounced "Queen worship" as "the national swill" and no fit occupation for Socialists. "I don't believe," he wrote, "that there can be one intellectual in the Labour Party who doesn't find it hilarious or contemptible. Naturally they would never dream of losing all those votes by saying so."

As for Prince Charles, Osborne went on to ask: "Is no one aghast at the thought of a lifetime of reading about that first day at prep school, the measles, the first dance, the wedding, and finally the beauty of the ceremonial?"

Most British newspapers pretended not to hear.

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