The Early Public School Film (1900–1945)

Abstract

While formal education in Britain can be traced back to church-run schools set up in the latter half of the first millennium such as King’s School Canterbury (597) and Sherborne (c.710), followed by a ‘first wave’ of endowed schools such as Winchester (1382), Eton (1440), Harrow and Rugby (both 1567), the British public school system that has monopolised the British screen, and that featured at its most punitive in Frears’ opening gambit, came to fruition in the second half of the nineteenth century. This was principally due to Dr Thomas Arnold, Headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 to 1841, who introduced a number of influential reforms that arrested the near-terminal monetary and moral decline of public schools. A corporate identity to school and house, a more adult-supervised prefect system and a curriculum grounded in Chapel and the Classics was the widely followed model for a ‘second wave’ of fee-paying schools, including Cheltenham (1841), Marlborough (1843) and Haileybury (1862). These institutions emphasised sport and the games ethic, transmuting Arnold’s ‘Godliness and Good Learning’ into the realisation of a ‘muscular Christianity’ (Bamford 1967). The quote attributed to Wellington that ‘the battle of Waterloo was won upon the playing fields of Eton’ is apocryphal, but the new passion for sport—encapsulated in Henry Newbolt’s poetic refrain to ‘play up, play up, and play the game!’¹—indisputably dovetailed with the era of British imperialism and public schools became, in Edward Mack’s description, ‘mints for the coining of Empire-builders’ (1938: 400), creating a caste, though short on imagination, expert at giving and taking orders to uphold the ‘Pax Britannica’. Jeffrey Richards sees this ‘imperial archetype’ as sustained by the ‘public school code’, the result of instilling in pupils ‘first, religious and moral principle; second, gentlemanly conduct; third, intellectual ability’ (1973: 44). The priorities are significant, fitting in with a long-standing indigenous mistrust of the intellectual: Typically British, one might say.²