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St
Cyprian’s School – Eastbourne |
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The school had many illustrious alumni, but a piece of
writing by one of them is the first and only introduction many people have to
the school. This makes it necessary to single out this teller of stories. Eric Blair
(1903-1950), as George
Orwell, became one of the most significant writers of the 20th
Century, through works including “Animal
Farm” and “Nineteen
Eighty-Four”. Much of this achievement must be due to his time at
St Cyprian’s and the contributions made by Mr and Mrs Vaughan Wilkes. Blair was one of the many children of
less well-off parents who were taken on at St Cyprian’s at
significantly reduced fees. Without the generosity of the Wilkes’ in
the first place, he would have had to attend a less successful and probably
less pleasant establishment on the fees which his parents could have
afforded. The emphasis on literature was strong in
the school, as both Cicely and Lewis Vaughan Wilkes had a love of books from
their childhoods. Pupils received positive encouragement to read good books
and even earned disfavour for reading the wrong sort of book. Cicely Wilkes’ was a gifted
English teacher who used every opportunity to correct and improve the
pupil’s written work. She emphasised the importance of writing good
clear English and her gambit of taking the Authorised Bible as a model for
good writing was used by Orwell in “Politics and the English
Language”. Similarly Mrs Wilkes enthusiasm for
history must have translated itself into Blair’s interest in the tide
of history Thanks to the dedicated coaching of L C
V Wilkes, Blair achieved scholarships at two leading public schools, and
Vaughan Wilkes put in considerable efforts to make sure he got to Blair got such a good grounding from his
time at St Cyprian’s that he became a great writer even though he made
little effort through his Eton years and as a result did not go on to
University. However Blair repaid the efforts that were put in for
him in very poor coin. “A
very small boy, with a very large chip on his shoulder”, was how Mum
Wilkes recalled young Eric Blair. This perception might be confirmed by
reading Orwell’s distorted description of the school in an essay he
wrote based on it. In it he actually wrote “I believed in God
…But I was well aware that I did not love him. On the contrary I hated
him, just as I hated Jesus and the Hebrew patriarchs.” With so much
irrational hate inside him, what chance did mere mortals stand? In spite of
or perhaps because of all they did for him, Orwell wrote about the Wilkes in
a piece so libellous it could not be published while they were alive.
Mum’s overwhelming motherliness and strict discipline and Lewis’s
conscientious work ethic must have jarred on him, but his aloofness, sense of
superiority, and intellectual snobbery earned him few friends among his
fellow students. SUCH SUCH WERE
THE LIES The polemic “Such
Such were the Joys” is a masterpiece of propaganda written by
someone who wrote propaganda for the BBC during the war. All institutions
have their good and bad points, and it is easy to start by putting on a
negative spin on everything from the hardness of the beds to the quality of
washing up. Orwell’s simultaneous repugnance for and obsession with the
“smelly side of life” provides a particular slant in a story
punctuated with urine, snot and turds. Orwell creates a fictitious situation
at the start to bring the reader to his level of hostility. Through this
device, the reader will be on his side, seeing him as a poor child suffering
unspeakable degradation, rather than just another preparatory school boy
relating what were for at least half a century the normal experiences of
boarding school life. It
is not worth spelling out all the inaccuracies and misinformation on a line
by line basis. Robert Pearce, has done just that in “Truth And Falsehood: George Orwell’s
Prep School Woes”. While researching
the biographical details of Robert
Hepburn Wright, Pearce realised the facts did not stack up with Orwell’s
account and undertook a painstaking enquiry that questions all Orwell’s
allegations and identifies several very
definite
lies. However it is
interesting to quote the Scottish hockey international Colin Kirkpatrick, who
was an exact contemporary of Blair at St Cyprians. When making marginal
comments, he was still on the first page when prompted to scrawl “NOT
TRUE!, You sod!!!, LIBEL!”. Jacintha Buddicom,
who knew young Blair well wrote a book about their childhood friendship in
which she claimed that “he was a specially happy child”.
“There was no harping on inferiority and poverty by Eric then... The
picture painted of a wretched little neurotic, snivelling miserably before a
swarm of swanking bullies, suspecting that he ‘smelt’, just was
not Eric at all. He would imitate and mimic the masters at school, but she
caught no note of bitterness, only of facetious rudeness, perhaps of a
slightly cocky superiority. He used to tell hilarious anecdotes in the
holidays,” she remarked, “and laughed at the school heads for
being prune-and-prism snobs.” On being quoted as saying that the essay
was “a pack of lies” she replied defensively “Such, Such Were the Joys is not a pack
of lies! It is a story in the form of an autobiographical sketch written in
the first person: a story so brilliantly told that it is popularly believed
to have happened word for word — as some incidents undoubtedly did.” - so brilliantly indeed that it leaves
the reader wound-up and tutting tutting with indignation like a middle-aged
reader of a middle-brow newspaper. As D J Taylor wrote “Unquestionably
Orwell intended it to be taken as literally true, which equally
unquestionably it is not. Blair’s febrile imagination, demonstrated in his
paranoid belief that casual people in the street were spy’s of the
school, led to a succession of wild and unsubstantiated assumptions about the
Wilkes. Every good or generous act is given a cynical interpretation and the
pernicious attributions he makes are all wrong. Orwell is clever in his use
of words. If Wilkes in a moment of sheer frustration let slip the secret
about the reduced fees just once, then prefixing it as “at least
once” is as good a way as any of implying repetition without saying it.
On this point it is worth quoting Walter Christie who was also
accepted on reduced fees and who wrote “I knew nothing of it until
years later, my mother told me of the act of generosity. There was no mention
of it while I was at St Cyprians…” Orwell’s little piece has blighted the
reputation of a fine school and two worthy individuals. Cyril Connolly’s regret that he
had “caricatured [the Wilkes’] mannerisms... and read mercenary
motives into much that was just enthusiasm” may have been more an
apology for Orwell than himself. WHY? The tone of Orwell’s polemic is so bitter and spiteful
and aberrant as an account that it needs some explanation. Orwell claims to have written “Such Such were the Joys” in
response to his school friend Cyril Connolly. In his classic book “Enemies of Promise”, Connolly
had written “ St
[Cyprian’s] where I now went was a well run and vigorous example [of a
preparatory school] which did me a world of good” and while mocking the
Wilkes and the prevailing ethos, he presents a witty and
almost affectionate recollection of his time at St Cyprian’s. He then describes
the torment he suffered his first two years at In 1916, the school inspector who examined Blair’s
work had observed that he was likely to bring credit to himself and St
Cyprians. Orwell by the mid 1940’s had established his reputation as a
novelist, and was in no mood to share any credit with an institution that he
had never liked. Figuratively smearing excreta over the school was an
effective way of achieving this. Further, Orwell may have been trying to
disassociate himself from any connection with the 11 year old he was when he
wrote jingoistically in the First World War “Awake! Oh you
young men of For if, when your
country’s in need, You do not enlist by
the thousand, You truly are cowards
indeed.” While scribbling out Such Such were the Joys, Orwell was working on Nineteen Eighty-Four. There are at least
surface similarities between the works - the victim status of the hero, the
total control exercised over the inhabitants, an authority figure referred to
as a member of the family, a soulless environment, spys and informers, and
the backdrop of warring superpowers (although Orwell hardly mentions the
First World War). It would be naïve to think that translating his own
experiences into bitter terms did not help his composition. The work has had a particular appeal for two
audiences. Sour socialists of the sixties and seventies, seeing Orwell as
their left-wing guru, delightedly picked up Orwell’s polemic as part of
their campaign of social envy. And nihilistic teenagers have lined it up with
Catcher in the Jacintha Buddicom “Eric and Us”
including postscript by Venables 2006 Jacintha Buddicom “The Young Eric" in Miriam Gross “The World of George Orwell” 1971 W H J Christie “St Cyprians Days” Blackwoods Magazine May 1971
Cyril Connolly “Enemies of Promise” 1938 Robert Pearce “Truth And Falsehood:
George Orwell’s Prep School Woes” The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol.43, No.
171 1992 Aug D J Last Updated February 2008 © Tim Tomlinson. All Rights Reserved |
