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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 is due to his time at St
Cyprian’s and the contributions made by Mr and Mrs Vaughan Wilkes. Thanks to his uncle’s friendship
with Vaughan Wilkes, Blair was taken on at St Cyprian’s at
significantly reduced fees. Without the generosity of the Wilkes’ in
the first place, he would not have been able to attend as high quality school
as St Cyprian’s. He is unlikely to have found more caring proprietors
and conscientious staff at any other school. Mum 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”. Old Boys have recognised her teaching
in Orwell’s work. 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. Similarly Mrs Wilkes enthusiasm for
history translated itself into Blair’s interest in the tide of history Mrs Wilkes inculcated a sense of decency
and fair play in her pupils and insisted on good manners – characteristics that
have been seen as particular strong qualities that Orwell possessed. Blair made a school friend in Cyril
Connolly who was to provide very concrete help to Orwell’s career Thanks to the dedicated coaching of L C
V Wilkes, Blair achieved scholarships at two leading public schools. Vaughan
Wilkes judged that the collegiate intellectual atmosphere as a King’s
Scholar of Eton would be more suitable for Blair and put in considerable
efforts to make sure he got there.
By his own account (if anything in it
can be believed) Blair was invited to stay with the Wilkes in the holidays
– a rare privilege. He was allowed to stay on at St Cyprians for an
extra term (on reduced fees) when he should have been packed off 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. Arguably Blair never left St Cyprians -
he spent his life writing feverishly and always sought approval from women
for his work. The boy who enjoyed the nature rambles on the Downs, was
happiest in his nature rambles as an adult; the bugler in the school Officer
Training Corps played soldiers in Spain and in the Home Guard; the boy who
read under the bedcovers in the school dormitory in the early morning, was
reading incessantly on the rooftops in Barcelona; the boy who grew vegetables
on his school allotment, loved planting and growing his own plot in
Hertfordshire; the boy who swam, played cricket, fives and football at
school, continued playing games as long as his health allowed him; the
performer in the school play wrote the school play when he himself was a
teacher; Orwell dressed like a prep school master, lived on a prep school
diet and was firmly attached to traditional values; the good manners
inculcated at St Cyprians, remained to impress strangers in all walks of
life. Vaughan Wilkes was a good golfer and in 1911 was
captain of the Royal Eastbourne Golf Club which was situated opposite the
school grounds. In 1904 most of the trophies at the club were won by Charles
Limouzin who was the uncle of Eric Blair. It was Limouzin who arranged for
his nephew to go to St Cyprians and claimed later to have paid for his education.
Doubtless Limouzin drew on the friendship and respect of the headmaster,
giving a good account of the boy’s abilities, and was able to negotiate
the half-fees. 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, although she had tremendous respect for his abilities. This perception
might be confirmed by reading Orwell’s distorted description of the
school in an introductory story he wrote for an extended essay. In the essay Orwell 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 Orwell’s writing is almost invariably a
combination of narrative and critical writing – sometimes a brief story
introduces a polemic essay and at other times a novel will veer off into
pages of opinion. In his stories, he could only write settings based on the
physical environments which he had actually experienced. He relied on real
people as the basis for his characters, stole their identity and turned them
into grotesque caricatures. He jumbled up incidents of his own experience and
anecdotes that had been reported to him and re-arranged them in an order to
fit the story. He stoked up the atmosphere with highly emotive linguistic
tricks to drive home his message. His arguments relied on wild
generalisations, unsupported statements, pseudo-precision and excessive
exaggerations. This makes for effective and convincing writing but it fools
the reader into believing that
things must be so because Orwell said so. SUCH SUCH WERE
THE LIES Orwell wrote the essay “Such Such were the Joys” about childhood
and used an account based on his prep school life to introduce it. He
insisted the essay was about the absurd misunderstandings of childhood.
Unfortunately his observations on childhood are overlooked by those who
concentrate only on the story to search
for biographical details. There
is not space to address all the inaccuracies and misinformation contained in
Orwell’s account on a line by line basis. Robert
Pearce, has done just that in “Truth
And Falsehood: George Orwell’s Prep School Woes”. Pearce researched the school for
biographical details of Robert Hepburn
Wright, and found the facts did not stack up with Orwell’s account. He undertook
a painstaking enquiry and found little or no truth in all Orwell’s
allegations and identified several very
definite
lies. It is also worth quoting the Scottish hockey international Colin
Kirkpatrick, who was an exact contemporary of Blair at St Cyprians. When
making marginal comments on the essay, he was still on the first page when
prompted to scrawl “NOT TRUE!, You sod!!!, LIBEL!”. Throughout his life, Orwell rejected educational
discipline, and found it difficult to relate to others, so a boarding school
was inevitably never going to appeal to him. 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. In part VI of the essay, Orwell
reports a case “not known to me personally” of a
clergyman’s daughter who was publicly humiliated and punished for
wetting her bed. He then wrote “I do not suggest that Flip and Sambo
would actually have done a thing like this, but I doubt whether it would have
much surprised them”. And yet Orwell does suggest precisely this when he
opens his essay with a personalisation of the anecdote! Orwell creates this 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. A critical reader may wonder why Orwell left in the essay both his
derivation and its obvious origin, except as a way of refutation. 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. Peter Davison, compiler of the Complete
Works of Orwell wrote of Orwell’s essay “If one is looking for a
factual account for life at St Cyprians, this is not the place to seek
it.” Interpreters have not been privy to all the background,
and here are interesting examples that show how Orwell changed and distorted
events. In his essay he creates an absurd situation when he suffers terrors
because he is spotted by a school “spy” when buying sweets. In
reality, the schoolboy Blair built up an enormous collection of saucy seaside
postcards, recalled by Buddicom as being in his possession when he was a
child and which were to feature in the essay “The Art of Donald
MacGill”. These were sold at newsagents in The Eric Blair that turned up at St Cyprian’s
came with baggage. His mother had turned him into a snobbish prig, banning
his friendship with the plumber’s daughter and her disparaging
conversational comments about men as beasts may have affected his
self-esteem. His earlier education in the convent from nuns had given him a
hatred of religion. He was a child that could be rude and offensive to
strangers, and happy to kill animals. His future brother in law recalled him
before St Cyprians as “A rather nasty fat little boy with a constant
grievance”, and as “stinking little Eric, full of “Nobody
loves me” and torrents of tears”. When Eric Blair first arrived at St Cyprian’s
Mum Wilkes tried to comfort him but received no reaction. She concluded he
was not an affectionate little boy –“there was no warmth in
him”. Another boy recalled
of him “There wasn’t any loophole where I could get in and make
friends. He wasn’t forthcoming – unlike the other Anglo-Indian
boys at the school, who were very easy to make friends with and very
attractive people. I thought he was deadly dull. By his own account Blair resented
authority, and was given to bouts of unwillingness to study. The process of
knocking the rough edges off him, as well as keeping him up to the mark in
his studies was clearly painful for both sides. Even after Blair had
been through the St Cyprians experience, his tutor at Eton said of
him that he ”made himself
as big a nuisance as he could” and was “a very unattractive
boy”. Orwell’s one-sided 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? Orwell’s essay was clearly written for personal
consumption. It was too untruthful to have withstood the challenge had the
original version been published when there were plenty around to condemn it.
Orwell’s wishes were that it should not be published until all concerned
were dead - which would have kept
it hidden until at least 1984. Any polemic intent of the time was likely to
have lost its relevance by then. Orwell’s wishes were overridden when,
against the advice of his literary executor, a version was published in On one level, the essay is simply a schoolboy spoof,
resembling the joking parodies that Connolly wrote while at school.
Orwell’s description of the physical surroundings, claimed by shutting
his eyes and thinking “school”, is in fact a crude inversion of
the school brochure which Orwell may have had before him, as his text follows
it almost line for line. For example, the “airy” dormitories
become “draughty”, the public “ 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”. While mocking the
Wilkes and the prevailing ethos, he presents a witty and
almost affectionate recollection of his time at St Cyprian’s against a
horrific account of his early days at “Such Such were the Joys“ contains a
succession of wild and unsubstantiated assumptions about the Wilkes in which every
good or generous act is given a cynical interpretation. These demonstrate a
complete misunderstanding of intentions. The essay describes a child with
poor or inappropriate behaviour in social interactions, physical awkwardness,
low self esteem, apparent victimisation, bouts of reluctance to work and
violent and angry outbursts. Interestingly, problem behaviour for pupils on
the autistic scale includes, along with certain intellectual brilliance, very
poor social skills, inability to interpret other people’s intentions
correctly, clumsiness, one-sided verbosity, and low tolerance for tasks such
as homework. Consequences can be violent and angry outbursts and withdrawal,
and sufferers tend to mask their feelings. Child psychiatrist Michael Fitzgerald
has suggested that Orwell may have suffered from Asperger’s
Syndrome. Orwell considered the work important and spent much
time reworking it. However he describes a school experience that none of his
contemporaries experienced and which does not accord with Buddicom’s
perceptions of the child she knew. He made many general assertions about
childhood which a reader who stopped to think about honestly would ask
“What is he talking about?” Is childhood really an “age of
disgust”, for example? He concludes his essay referring to the
misunderstanding of childhood.
Perhaps the eccentric social misfit that was Orwell saw the essay as a
way of describing the inner landscape of his life, explaining the behaviour
which he himself knew to be odd. If this is so, then perhaps “Such Such were the Joys” is
important than it at first appears as it gives a window pane onto the world
of Orwell’s inner life. Such Such were
the Joys is one of three notable works that Orwell, a sick and
dying man, produced in his final years. Most obviously Orwell was working on Nineteen Eighty-Four and the direction
of influence between the two works has been a long-standing topic of
interest. 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, spies and informers, and the backdrop of warring superpowers.
Orwell was developing another document at the same time - an infamous notebook of people he
considered communists and crypto-communists, containing very poisonous
remarks about some well-known individuals. This formed the basis of a
blacklist he supplied to the government’s anti-communist propaganda
unit, the Information Research Department. The list contained coincidently
Mrs Wilkes second cousin, the Nobel prize-winner Patrick, later Lord Blackett
(who after brilliant war work was denied any part in the post war Labour
government) and the boy who virtually stepped into Orwell’s shoes at St
Cyprians, Alaric Jacob (who was denied pension rights when he joined the
BBC). One of Orwell’s other targets on the list noted “Tubercular
people often could get very strange towards the end”. Taken literally, however, 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 naiive
teenagers have lined it up with Catcher in the Postscript St Cyprian’s has been ill-served
by Orwell’s biographers, whose failures to establish the facts have led
to even greater outrages. The pretty despicable Bernard Crick in his highly
speculative biography (“he must have” appears on almost every
page) clouds his account with an extreme prejudice against private education
and invents even greater untruths than Orwell. He insists, for example,
without any justification, that Blair endured “long hours spent in the
classroom”. In fact lessons
were less than five hours in a day which was largely given over to
recreation, sport, reading, and other extra-curricular activities. Other such
misinformation permeates a chapter based on prejudice rather than honest
research. Crick’s chapter
on St Cyprian’s raised a “storm of correspondence, mainly
indignant old gentlemen defending the old school” but instead of
quoting from these he quoted a malicious fabrication by a teacher from a
rival prep school that accorded with Crick’s own distorted perceptions.
Crick left his papers to Cecil Beaton “
Beaton in the Sixties” 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 Bernard Crick
“George Orwell: A Life” “ Michael
Fitzgerald
“Genesis of Artistic
Creativity: Asperger’s Syndrome and the Arts”
2005 Robert Pearce “Truth And Falsehood: George Orwell’s Prep School
Woes” The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol.43, No. 171
1992 Aug Last Updated September 2011 © Tim Tomlinson. All Rights Reserved |
