Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead. Paula Byrne

honing the ear for dialogue that became so acute in his novels, where pompous people are forever saying serious things that are unintentionally wildly funny.

      Even in his final months at Lancing he continued to be plagued by feelings of inadequacy, sensing that he was never first choice in anything, always a sloppy second. Alienated and depressed, generally unpopular, he considered running away: ‘I am burdened with failure this term, when I have been most successful really … Everything I have had has come to me shop-soiled and second hand.’

      Evelyn had an almost pathological fear and loathing of the second-hand and the second-rate. For him, Lancing came into both categories. Even whilst writing about his sabotaging of the OTC, he was thinking wistfully of the stylishness of the Eton rebellion. In a sense, this was not Evelyn’s fault. He had already been indoctrinated at home into the view that Sherborne was a much better school than Lancing, and at school, the headmaster, Henry Bowlby, himself a former master at Eton, also impressed upon the boys the superiority of the place where he no longer taught: ‘We held him in some awe and he remained aloof from us, never dissembling the opinion, to which we all assented, that Lancing was a less important place than Eton.’

      In his biography of Old Etonian theologian Ronald Knox, the adult Evelyn let slip the awe he felt for Eton. He describes Knox’s relationship with his school as ‘a life-long love’. Like many Old Etonians, Knox found Oxford a very poor second best. Eton, wrote Waugh, ‘was the scene of Ronald’s brilliant intellectual development and of his ardent and undying friendships’. Waugh went on to write that:

      Most candid Englishmen recognise it as a school sui generis which marks the majority of its sons with a peculiar Englishry, genial, confident, humorous, and reticent; which gives to each as little or as much learning as his abilities and tastes demand; which, while correcting affectation, allows the genuine eccentric to go his own way unmolested; which nourishes its rare favourites … in a rich and humane traditional culture which admits no rival.

      Lancing had not been like that. John Betjeman in his verse autobiography Summoned by Bells has one young man at Oxford saying to him ‘Spiritually, John, I was at Eton.’ The same might perhaps have been said of Evelyn Waugh. When Fulford came up to Oxford, Waugh recommended him not to talk so much about Lancing: ‘If you weren’t at Eton or Harrow or Winchester or Rugby, no-one minds much where you were.’

      What Lancing schoolboys did have in common with their peers at major public schools such as Eton was the cynicism they felt with regard to the disasters of the Great War. They firmly blamed the ‘old men’, Arthur Waugh’s generation, who had betrayed the golden boys of Rupert Brooke’s generation. Evelyn used the phrase ‘old men’ for the first time in a speech he gave in his final year at Lancing. He would advert to it repeatedly throughout the next decade in his advocacy of the younger generation at odds with the old. This was his manifesto: ‘No generation has ever wreaked such disasters as the last. After numerous small indiscretions it had its fling of a war which has left the civilised world pauperised, ravaged, shaken to its foundations.’ Evelyn later described his last editorial for The Magazine, entitled ‘The Youngest Generation’, as ‘a preposterous manifesto of disillusionment’:

      The men of Rupert Brooke’s generation are broken. Narcissus-like, they stood for an instant, amazedly aware of their own beauty; the war, which the old men made, has left them tired and embittered. What will the young men of 1922 be? … They will be, above all things, clear-sighted … very hard and analytical and unsympathetic … They will not be revolutionaries and they will not be poets and they will not be mystics … they will have … a very full sense of humour … They will watch themselves with … a cynical smile and often with a laugh … They will not be a happy generation.

      He would become the voice of that unhappy generation.

      Evelyn’s panegyric to Eton as a school sui generis was written at a time when his male friends were almost exclusively Old Etonians. Eton was then, and perhaps is still, considered to be the best public school in England. It had, and continues to have, an unsurpassed record of future prime ministers. Its aura of elegance and tradition was, and remains, the stuff of legend. Even George Orwell wrote of his old school that it had ‘one great virtue … a tolerant and civilised atmosphere which gives each boy a fair chance of developing his own individuality’.

      When one of Evelyn’s friends, the writer Cyril Connolly (whom he nicknamed ‘Smarty Boots’), sat his entrance exam at the school, he was utterly entranced. Eton was ‘splendid and decadent … the huge stately elms, the boys in their many-coloured caps and blazers, the top hats, the strawberries and cream, the smell of wisteria’. When he overheard a boy with a top hat call out in a foppish drawl a remark to a passing sculler, it all seemed ‘the incarnation of elegance and maturity’. For Connolly it was a paradise built of ‘wine-dark brick’. He was mesmerised by a huge chestnut tree in Weston’s Yard. ‘I was long dominated by impressions of school,’ he wrote in his memoir Enemies of Promise; ‘The plopping of gas mantles in the classrooms, the refrain of psalm tunes, the smell of plaster on the stairs, the walk through the fields to the bathing places or to chapel across the cobbles of School Yard, evoked a vanished Eden of grace and security.’

      Eton College was at the pinnacle of the English social system. It had received its royal charter in 1444. For many it embodied quintessential Englishness. ‘The Headmaster of Eton has more to do with the soul of England than the primate of Canterbury,’ quipped Winston Churchill’s Irish cousin, Shane Leslie. Running in and out of School Yard, dominated by Lupton’s Tower and the crumbling cloisters, the boys hurried past the statue of the school’s founder, Henry VI: ‘the past history was there … all this mellowness was continuously sinking into them, a beneficent influence’, recalled another old boy, Harold Acton. It was the school where the English aristocracy sent their boys. No school had a higher proportion of titled young men on the roll. It had close links with the royal family. Windsor Castle lies at the far end of the street.

      The masters or ‘beaks’ were in many respects lesser beings than some of the boys. The more servile of them would long to be asked to the boys’ great homes, sometimes long even for the mere opportunity to talk to the most important boys.

      Yet Cyril Connolly and Anthony Powell (another Old Etonian who would become a novelist and a friend of Waugh’s) both stressed that a boy’s status depended not on family money or rank, but rather ‘on a curious blend of elegance and vitality … and the gift of being amusing’. Powell thought that this made Eton different from Oxford, where he too went on to become an undergraduate: ‘I recall no sense of inferiority on account of many boys’ parents being richer and grander than my own, though of course many were. Indeed the first powerful impact of snobbery and money was brought home to me, not at Eton, but at Oxford.’

      Nevertheless, this small and exclusive world existed on a finely graduated but keenly felt code of manners. Editorials appeared in the school magazine on such subjects as ‘The Top Hat’. Rules were strict. Boys were prohibited from driving in motor cars on Sundays, for example. One wonders at how many other schools a sufficient number of boys would have had motor cars to make such a rule worth writing.

      The education of the Honourable Hugh Lygon and his older brother Lord Elmley at Eton and then Oxford followed a pattern that had endured in the family since the early nineteenth century. They were considered ‘important boys’ by the masters, since their father, Lord Beauchamp, was a prominent establishment figure. Despite the great wealth and social standing of their father, the boys were lacking in pretension and snobbishness. Anthony Powell thought that it was impossible to conceive a lord less snobbish than young Elmley.

      Hugh Lygon went to Eton in 1918. Then as now, there were seventy scholars or ‘Collegers’, known as ‘tugs’. The fee-paying boys were ‘Oppidans’. Housemasters were called ‘m’tutor’. A ‘new-tit’ was a new boy. A ‘Scug’ was a boy who didn’t have his colours. A ‘dry bob’ played cricket, a ‘wet bob’ chose rowing, a ‘slack bob’ did neither. Each school term was known as a ‘half’. ‘Tuck’ was known as ‘sock’, ‘messing’ was cooking tea together in groups of three (who took turns to eat in each other’s rooms). There were no dormitories: each boy was given