‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful’!
The Luftwaffe used at that time to drop their bombs in sticks of four or five. In the middle of the raid, we heard a stick of bombs moving towards our shelter, which would certainly not stand a direct hit. The first bomb was loud enough, the second louder, the third louder still. The fourth was loudest of all, in fact about 50 yards away, and threw stones and earth on top of the shelter. It was apparent that the stick of bombs was falling in a straight line. If there was a fifth, it would land on top of us. We waited for it. It did not come. Although I was to be bombed again later in the war, in Somerset and London, that was the nearest I came to being killed.
After the previous night of the Bristol Blitz, my parents had thought of taking me away from Clifton. There was no question about that the second time, for them or for the school. I was driven out to Cholwell by one of the housemasters, Mr Hope Simpson, on his motorbike. We passed the burnt-out churches and the broken glass. My father had driven in but missed us on the way. The school evacuated itself to Cholwell House, sleeping on mattresses. The boys ate us out of the drums of Canadian honey which my mother, ever mindful of the Irish famine, had laid up in the cellar. After a few days most of them dispersed to their homes, and remain only as names in the Cholwell visitors’ book. My last two terms at Clifton Preparatory School were spent at Butcombe Court, a pleasant country house about ten miles from Cholwell, within bicycling distance on Sundays.
In late May 1941 I was in my last term at Clifton Preparatory School when the German battleship Bismarck sunk the Hood in the mid-Atlantic. Only three of the Hood’s crew of 1421 survived. My mother and I were taken into Temple Meads Station in Bristol by my father; we went by train to Windsor where I was about to sit the Entrance Scholarship for Eton. Most public schools were by that time sending their scholarship papers to be taken at the preparatory schools, but Eton’s only concession to the problems of wartime travel was to put up the scholarship candidates in the boys’ houses. My mother stayed at the White Lion in the High Street; I was sent to Lyttelton’s House.
The three days of the scholarship examination were interwoven with reports of the pursuit of the Bismarck by the Royal Navy. On the last evening, the Bismarck was torpedoed from the air and sank the following day. The Hood had been avenged. I found the exam papers rather too difficult for me. My Latin, thanks to my father, was tolerable, though hardly up to scholarship standards; my Greek was negligible; my French was of Common Entrance standard; my mathematics was scarcely up to that. However, I enjoyed the history paper and romped away with the essay, which was set on Satan’s fall from Heaven as described in Milton’s Paradise Lost. It was just my subject:
Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition.
I did not need to be asked twice to describe the fires of Hell. Lyttelton later told my mother that my essay was the best of them all.
Before we went back he had a long conversation with her, which she recounted to me on the train. He did not know whether I would get the scholarship; no Eton scholarship had ever been given to a candidate as weak in the classics. In any case, he thought that I would find the atmosphere of College too tough. He said he would be very pleased to take me into his house, whether I got the scholarship or not.
We discussed this with my father when we got home. I was also entered for the Charterhouse scholarship. My father suggested that I should go to Eton if I got the Eton scholarship, go to Charterhouse if I got the Charterhouse scholarship, and go to Lyttelton’s House if I got neither. I was happy with that proposal. The Charterhouse scholarship would pay half my school fees, and I liked the idea of being a scholar. On the other hand, I much liked the atmosphere of Eton, and had been impressed by Lyttelton himself. I had even been measured for my top hat.
A few days later we received a sympathetic letter from Lyttelton saying that I had not been awarded a scholarship. Everything therefore depended on the Charterhouse exam. Fifty years later my son, Jacob, who had himself gone to Eton, heard a somewhat different story from a visiting Eton master in Hong Kong.
By this account, the 1941 examination was the last time the Provost of Eton played a part in deciding who was to receive a scholarship. The provost was Lord Quickswood, earlier Lord Hugh Cecil, son of the Lord Salisbury who was Queen Victoria’s last Prime Minister. The provost, it is said, objected on quite other grounds. He did not take his stand on the fact that I knew little Latin and less Greek, true though that was. He argued that I should not have an Eton scholarship because I was a Roman Catholic. The examiners wanted to award a scholarship; the provost prevailed; no provost was ever again invited to join in the scholarship proceedings. No Roman Catholic was ever barred again.
In the meantime, my papers were written at Butcombe Court and sent to Charterhouse. They followed the same pattern; an excellent essay, good on history, weak in Latin and French, negligible in Greek and Mathematics. Indeed, in one mathematics paper I got three marks out of a hundred. I do not know why I was so bad at elementary mathematics since in my adult life I have used them more than most people do.
Robert Birley was the Headmaster of Charterhouse. The examiners spent the Friday discussing the various papers. They found it easy to award the first scholarship, which went to Simon Raven. They awarded ten others. They came to mine, and the weight of feeling was that my classics and maths were simply not up to scholarship standard. Birley, who was himself a historian, wanted to get a potential historian into the list. On Friday evening, he was not getting his own way. If they had decided then, I would not have got the scholarship.
Robert Birley was, however, a skilled chairman of a committee. He used a device which I remember using later on a critical occasion as Chairman of the Arts Council. Because he realized that he couldn’t get the decision he wanted, he postponed it. On the following day, the examiners met again. I was nodded through for the twelfth scholarship. When the telegram arrived I was delighted.
There is no doubt that Lord Quickswood’s intervention and Birley’s persuasiveness changed my life. I know that I would have enjoyed Eton, and would have been happy in Lyttelton’s House, possibly happier than I was at Charterhouse. Indeed, I might well have been too happy, too much of an Etonian; Charterhouse presented me with greater challenges. The difference extends beyond the schools themselves, to my Oxford life, to my career. If I had gone to Eton, I doubt if I would have gone on to Balliol; I might have opted for a more sympathetic political environment at Oxford. I would probably have found my political progress easier; there were plenty of Old Etonian chairmen of safe Conservative seats in the 1950s, though few are left now.
I am grateful to Charterhouse for many things. But I felt more at home at Eton, both in 1941 and later when my son Jacob was enjoying his time there. Perhaps the real advantage of going to Charterhouse was that it did not have the same dangerous charm for someone of my interests and personality. If I had entered the world of Eton, the world of Luxmore’s garden and the College Library, of the cricket fields, of Thomas Gray and Horace Walpole, I might well have found it too much of a lifelong lotus land. Cyril Connolly, with whom I was later to work on the Sunday Times, regarded nostalgia for Eton as one of ‘The Enemies of Promise’. It was so for him, it might well have been so for me. Jacob has become a loyal Old Etonian, and Eton suited him extremely well, but he did not become addicted to its ancient charm. For myself, I think Charterhouse was probably for the best, but there were aspects of Eton, including the personality of Lyttelton himself, a remarkable and scholarly housemaster, which I would clearly have enjoyed very greatly. In the words that Senator Bill Bradley used of basketball, Charterhouse did ‘teach me to use my elbows’.
Chapter Four
A Peak in Darien
As soon as I knew how to read, I delighted in reading. I still have the copy of H. G. Wells’ Outline of History which Anne bound in a canvas jacket in 1934. It is a chunky book, of some six hundred pages. I may never have finished it, but I waded through several hundred pages. My first fascination was with the dinosaurs, but I was also interested in history as such. Before reading Wells, I had read Our Island Story, which was very imperialist, and Dickens’ Child’s History of England,