Joseph Banks. Patrick O’Brian

Joseph Banks. He was an exceedingly active boy, much given to play, and no persuasion could keep him to his book; although he was by no means a fool he never learnt to spell, nor did he ever master the use of capital letters or punctuation; his Latin left much to be desired, and he knew no Greek at all. In 1756, when he was thirteen, his father took him away and sent him to Eton.

      There was much to be said against Eton: it lay in low, damp, unhealthy ground rather than upon a salubrious hill; in many respects it was more like an ill-managed bear-garden than a school; and even then there were people who felt that Etonians spent more time than was necessary in thanking God that they were not as other men. But with all its faults it was not in a state of transition. Eton had settled into its “public school” stride at least as early as the seventeenth century and in any case from the very beginning its founder, Henry VI, had laid down that as well as the seventy poor and indigent scholars there should be as many as twenty commensals “sons of noblemen and special friends of the College” and an indefinite number of other commensals who were to dine at the third table in Hall with the choristers and scholars.

      In 1756 the Collegers, or most of them, still slept in the Long Chamber that had been provided for them in the fifteenth century, and the two sorts of boys, the Collegers and the fee-paying Oppidans, the descendants of the commensals, lived reasonably well together. The unscrupulous rapacity, not to say the downright dishonesty, of successive provosts and fellows had already deprived the Collegers of much of the food and many of the benefits intended by the founder, but the boys had not yet been so reduced that their Long Chamber was a byword for squalor, cruelty, bullying and sexual immorality, notorious to such a degree that candidates for election were hard to find and a scholar was looked upon as an inferior being: that belonged to the later part of the century.⁵

      Long Chamber can never have been a comfortable berth for the half-starved little boys, the fags, even when the Lower Master lived at the far end of it, within earshot of their screams; but in Banks’s time College was still regarded as a reasonably desirable place for one’s son; apart from anything else there were the closed scholarships to King’s College, Cambridge, and the possibility of becoming a Fellow of Eton, even the Provost, both places being reserved, at least in theory, for former Collegers and members of King’s. Somewhat earlier than this, Robert Walpole’s father, a wealthy man but with a keen eye for a job, falsified his son’s age to get him in; and it was not considered extraordinary that the particular friend of Charles James Fox (nearly contemporary with Banks) should be a Colleger named Hare, the son of a Winchester apothecary.

      Banks came to Eton at a fortunate time. Dr Barnard had been the headmaster for some years, coming after a disastrous person who believed that respect, Latin, and even Greek could be driven into boys with a birch. Barnard was no great flogger, though he was an admirable disciplinarian; he was also an uncommonly amiable man,^* at ease in any society, particularly that of Windsor Castle, and he succeeded in bringing the school’s numbers up to 522, more boys than had ever been seen before and more than were ever to be seen again in the eighteenth century. The school, then, was flourishing; and although the same could hardly be said for the other and originally more important side of Henry VI’s foundation, the splendidly endowed chantry in which Mass should be said for the soul of Henry V and eventually for that of the founder, it nevertheless existed, living on in spite of the Reformation and many other crises, providing comfort for the provost and fellows if for nobody else. They were not a strikingly distinguished body of men at this time, but they were there, a visible link with an ancient past, giving a certain air of learning and even of civilization.

      In the middle of the eighteenth century Eton could do with all the civilization it could come by. Until 1747 the school had the custom of chasing a ram (supplied by the butcher) and beating it to death with clubs made for the purpose; but, and here I quote from Christopher Hollis’s Eton, a History, “It was a few years after this [1730, when the Duke of Cumberland had joined in the fun] that the ram broke loose from the hunt, ran up the High Street over Windsor Bridge and through the market with the boys in hot pursuit until eventually they caught it and beat it to death. This was disapproved of not because of the public killing or of the cruelty to the ram but on the curious grounds that the exercise might make the boys too hot and thus endanger their health. Therefore for the future, as a reform, the ram was hamstrung and made to hobble round and round School Yard with the boys in pursuit and beating it until it was dead.”

      But though the ram was abolished before Banks’s time there was still badger baiting, bull baiting, bear baiting, cock fighting and – why not? – small boy baiting. William Pitt, the first Lord Chatham, who was there from about 1720 to 1726, said that “he had scarce observed a boy who was not cowed for life at Eton; that a public school might suit a boy of turbulent, forward disposition, but it would not do where there was any gentleness”; and many, many other witnesses could be brought to show that in a rough and often cruel century Eton and public schools in general were also rough and often cruel.

      Yet there was another side to it. Gray, Horace Walpole, Richard West and their friends can hardly be said to have had turbulent, forward dispositions, nor were Gray or West devoid of gentleness; yet they looked back on their schooldays with pleasure.

      No doubt a very great deal depended on a boy’s house, and no doubt Banks fell lucky. He was of course an Oppidan, and at that time the Oppidans were divided among thirteen houses, ten kept by Dames and three by Dominies: none of these housekeepers, female or male, had any teaching duties at all; their function was to provide board and lodging. Housemasters in the modern sense there were none, for although some assistants were allowed to have a few boys living with them this was not the same thing at all, and the domestic authority that they later came to possess was then exercised by the Dames alone. And in the nature of things a kind, attentive Dame with plenty of inherent authority ruled over a happy house.

      But even if Joseph Banks had chanced upon an overworked, harassed, inept Dame incapable of keeping the rougher, more brutal boys in order, it is probable that he would have come through fairly well. He was not a sensitive plant; he was thoroughly used to public school life and he was not given to any offensive degree of application; he was big for his age, uncommonly strong, active and brave – some years later he showed remarkable courage when he was faced with angry cannibals in the Antipodes. Then again he was quite good-looking, and generally speaking people liked him, particularly when he was young. Even though he was not of a particularly aggressive disposition, and even though there was a fair amount of gentleness in his nature, Eton suited him: he made many friends, and in a tolerably extensive view of his correspondence I have not found him say an unkind word about his time there.

      Yet on the other hand he did not suit Eton. At least he did not suit Eton particularly well, and there were complaints that he was not profiting from his education as much as he should. These complaints were certainly justified, for as Lord Brougham, the son of one of Banks’s school friends, observed in his Lives of Men of Letters and Science who Flourished in the Time of George III, “My father … always said that his friend Joe cared mighty little for his book, and could not well understand any one taking to Greek and Latin.” Though indeed when one considers the official education offered by the school it is difficult to see how any but a gifted boy, already well grounded in Latin and Greek, could possibly have profited from it. Masters were few and their classes were intolerably big: Dr Barnard took the whole of the sixth and fifth forms as a single division of more than a hundred boys, and he led them through Homer or Virgil in one part of a fair-sized room while in the rest of it, under other guidance, the remove and the fourth form were going through Virgil or Homer. When a couple of hundred boys are gathered together under one roof there is bound to be a certain amount of din: even under such a devoted flogger as Dr Keate somewhat later “the boys occupied their time by singing songs and choruses”, and this cannot have helped reflection. Things were much the same in Lower School, where the first, second and third forms met, except that some of the voices were higher pitched. It was no doubt great fun, particularly for the undetectable boys at the back, but it did not bring them forward very fast nor was it much use to them in their other tasks. For quite apart from the formal lessons, prayers, roll-calls and the like, the upper boys were required to produce three exercises a week: an original theme in prose of not less than twenty lines, a copy of verses of not less than ten elegiac distichs and five or