Their upbringing was affluent, both their father and their grandfather having prospered from shipbuilding. The family were leading Baptists, and had moved to Loughton because it was a stronghold of Protestant non-conformism, with a Baptist church erected in 1813. The three sisters were baptised into the Church in 1898.
The arrival of the railway saw Loughton become a popular destination for East Enders. It soon became known as ‘Lousy Loughton’, a reference to the lice and fleas the impoverished visitors supposedly brought with them.
In her early teens, Muriel occasionally travelled through the slums by train when returning home from London. From the window of her first-class carriage the sight of shoeless children in ragged clothes playing in front of homes that were little more than hovels (and the unsympathetic comments of her fellow travellers) profoundly influenced her. She decided to become a social worker in the East End. Around this time she read the works of Tolstoy, notably his non-fiction masterpiece The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), which was to become a vital text for Christian pacifists, second only to the Bible. Muriel later wrote, ‘It changed the very quality of life for me. Once your eyes have been opened to pacifism, you can’t shut them again.’
The Fellowship of Reconciliation, established in December 1914, gave Muriel Lester an international platform for her pacifist ideals. The organisation had been formed following a chance meeting at Cologne station in July that year between an English Quaker, Henry Hodgkin, and a German Lutheran, Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze. The two men talked while waiting for a delayed train, and found common cause in their detestation of the coming war. They parted with the words, ‘We are one in Christ and can never be at war.’ By the end of the war the Fellowship of Reconciliation had become an international body, with the three Lester sisters enthusiastic supporters. The ideals of the Fellowship and the moral imperative of pacifism were drummed into the young George Hogg from an early age.
The Hogg family moved to Harpenden before the First World War, and lived first in the rented house, ‘Red Gables’, where George would be born. Later they would build their own house in the town, ‘Wayfarings’. Harpenden changed little as the Hogg children grew up through the war years and the 1920s. It was a tight-knit commuter community, just thirty-five minutes by rail from central London. George’s father, like many of his friends, took the early train to London every day, leaving Kathleen and the nanny in charge of the children. With a population of only ten thousand, Harpenden still called itself a village at the time when George was growing up. The main street and surrounding residential areas quickly gave way to the green fields of Hertfordshire. Harpenden was well known for its school, St George’s, but was otherwise an unremarkable county town.
A group of families who shared the Hoggs’ Christian outlook formed the social world in which the children grew up. The Hunters, Nelsons and Proctors lived close to the Hogg home, and their children were in and out of each other’s houses at weekends. From an early age George formed close friendships with a group of boys with whom he went through school. David ‘Dippy’ Proctor, Robert ‘Bosh’ Nelson and Roger Hunter were sporty, naughty boys, typical of their generation. The honorary girl of the group, Bosh’s sister Winifred, known as ‘Muff’, was to become George’s first serious girlfriend.
The political views of George’s parents were something of a joke among his friends, and probably an embarrassment to him, since he recalled having to hide the family’s regular newspaper, the left-wing Daily Herald, when they came round.
Kathleen Hogg brought up her family in a strict, almost puritanical regime that would be regarded as repressive today. She is remembered by her nephews and nieces as a difficult, somewhat eccentric woman, who insisted on the observance of strict rules of behaviour, especially on Sundays and religious holidays. The Hogg family attended three services at Harpenden’s Methodist chapel on Sundays, and for the rest of the day were required to read improving books – the Bible, the prayer book or works by well-known missionaries. Any other book they chose to read had to be covered in brown paper and read well out of their mother’s view. As well as religious attendance, Sundays meant homework and piano practice. Kathleen was well remembered by her children and grandchildren seated at the top of the stairs brushing her hair and offering a stream of critical comments while listening to one of the children playing the piano.
This was an obviously loving family, but by all accounts Kathleen showed little emotion towards her children ‘There was no kissing and no hugging of the children,’ George’s great-niece Hilary Jarvis says. ‘It was very much a family of its time; showing emotion was not the done thing at all; manners were important, it was on the surface very stiff.’
George was very much his mother’s boy. He grew up as the adored youngest child, and can be seen in the family album dressed in velvet suits with a shining aureole of golden curls standing in a well-kept garden with various much older brothers and sisters. He soon learnt how to get round his mother’s stricter rules. He had a natural sense of fun, which bubbled through the gloomy Sundays with their required reading and long silences. George and his sister Rosemary, who was three years older, and to whom he would always be closer than to any of his other siblings, would frequently skip the longer Sunday-morning service at the Methodist chapel and go to play with neighbours’ children. Aware of this mischief, Kathleen, who stayed at home to prepare the lunch, would begin the meal by quizzing the children on the nature of the lengthy sermon. Fire-and-brimstone sermons were very much to Kathleen’s taste and she was determined that her children should benefit from them. George and Rosemary persuaded their elder brother Stephen, who had to attend chapel because he was in the choir, to report on the highlights, which were then dutifully repeated at lunch.
For all the strictness of the regime at home, George Hogg had a very happy childhood. He was once overheard saying to Rosemary, ‘If heaven isn’t much nicer than earth I shall ask God to let me come back.’ He was remembered by his nephews and nieces as the ‘the golden boy’ who was marked out by his parents at an early age for success. Given his later achievements this might be attributed to hindsight, but from the observations of his teachers at the time, and later those of the Warden at Wadham College, the great Maurice Bowra, it seems clear that there was something special about the youngest Hogg.
From the age of six George was taught at home by a governess. At ten he was sent to a school at Gland, on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, which had been set up on pacifist principles. Rosemary was returning for her second year, and had begged to be allowed to take her brother with her. The school’s aim was to break down all barriers of age, sex, class and nationality. All the staff shared the housework with the children.
The main effect on George of his Swiss education seems to have been liberation from the strict regime at home. At weekends he would go off hiking, bicycling or skiing with other boys, while Rosemary remained behind to wash and mend his clothes. Once a week there was a school meeting at which the pupils were free to criticise their masters and mistresses, and even the head, and to express their views on anything they thought unfair or wrong. To the young George Hogg this was revolutionary, and he was to introduce exactly the same practice when he became headmaster of his own school in China.
The year of emancipation ended with George’s return to England, where he joined his siblings at the co-educational St George’s school in Harpenden. The headmaster, Cecil Grant, was one of the great educationalists of his time, and his school provided imaginative teaching, designed to bring out and develop talent.
George showed promise as a writer for the school magazine. His parents were already convinced he had a gift for words. When he was ten his father had read him aloud Tennyson’s ‘The Eagle’ and asked him to describe an eagle. After a moment’s thought George replied: ‘A whirring mass of fierce glory.’
All the Hogg children had done well at St George’s, but the youngest child proved the ablest pupil. He was nicknamed ‘Pig’ at school – not because of his surname, but because of a characteristic sinal snort. The other name given him by his rugby-playing friends was self-explanatory: ‘Tuff’. Both on and off the playing field George proved a natural leader. His sixth-form master wrote of him many years later:
I sensed in him great reserves and a high sense of purpose. He was modest to a degree and showed true humility.