Jeremy Bourne (L 52) recalls joining Haileybury, his happy days there, and his thoughts on education.

In Looking West, a privately-published autobiography written for his family, OH Jeremy Bourne (L 52) devotes several pages to his years at Haileybury before moving up to Oxford and later moving into a career in education. As he writes to his prospective readers, “if you’ve never seen Haileybury you are in for a surprise – the buildings are magnificent. There is no doubt that belonging to such a noble and beautiful establishment gives one a measure of self-belief.”

(Above: a Haileybury dormitory, taken from a 1920s postcard, and yet still familiar to later generations of OHs)

Jeremy’s father and uncle had both attended Haileybury and Lawrence House held particularly poignant memories, “on my first night, in the huge Lawrence House dormitory, I found opposite my bed an honours board high on the wall, commemorating the Lawrence boys who had died in war. And there was my father’s name (Major Hubert Bourne (L 1916)). Something to live up to.“

Famous old boys

As he goes on to say, the living of the House were equally held up as an example: “RL Ashcroft, the awe-inspiring Second Master (see his own memoir in our online shop – ed) wrote an article for each issue of the Haileyburian, in which he described the great Old Boys of every House. Lawrence was the most impressive of all. Apart from sporting stars such as Stirling Moss, and public figures such as Group Captain Peter Townsend who was having a love affair with Princess Margaret at the time, there were a number of cabinet ministers such as Christopher Mayhew and Geoffrey de Freitas.”

Clement Attlee speaks

“But ahead of all these was Clement Attlee himself. One night he came round the dorm after lights out, so the prefects put them on again for his benefit. He whacked the end of my bed with his walking stick and said ‘Ah, I slept in that bed!’. Whether he really did is a moot point, since there would have been at least sixty years between the two occupancies. But it was certainly a very ancient bed.“

Fags and Fag-masters

A controversial element of public schools until the 1980s and 1990s was the tradition of “fag-masters” and “fags” – older boys with younger allotted new boys to act as servants. Jeremy’s recollection of this experience at Haileybury seems positive: “My fag-master gave me more pocket money that I got from my parents. There was no shouting “Fag!” as you read in school stories. A senior could just ask another boy to ask so-and-so to come and see him. He then, for instance, might be lolling in the bath after a hard-fought rugby match, and would say to his fag, ‘old chap, just go down to the school shop and get me six cup-cakes. You’ll find some money in my trouser pocket. Oh, and keep one for yourself‘.

This kind of fagging kept lonely little new boys busy and useful, and money and cup-cakes made it worth it. When I became a fag-master myself, I hope I treated my little fag as well as I was treated, even though it was a strain on my pocket to tip him adequately at the end of each term.”

A positive time

Jeremy’s overall reflections of his time at Haileybury are incredibly positive. As he says, “The Haileybury I knew was passing through a, remarkably civilised and cultured period. My Housemaster, E F Williams, and the Master, C P C Smith, were humane men of real vision. I was never beaten, never bullied. Although I was a little swot with hideous round National Health spectacles and a complete rabbit on the games field, nobody ever held this against me. Some sport was compulsory, however bad one was at it. With cross-country running I always came nearly last (sounds familiar – ed) but I could beat many of my contemporaries at squash, for which I could keep my spectacles on, and the same went for .303 rifle shooting.”

A life like Stalky

Nobody’s school days are ever complete without some form of rebellion against rules and authority. In Jeremy’s case, he and his friends fancied themselves as Stalky and Co – Rudyard Kipling’s famous and subversive schoolboy creations – making bombs and “getting up in the small hours of darkness, slipping out of the dorm and into the houserooms without being detected, to cook scrambled egg”.

“We also tried the time-honoured gamble, in the middle of the night, of climbing up over the terrace roofs to the dome, a highly dangerous task. In the Sixth Form we discovered the delights of alcohol. For some reason, Merrydown Cider was the preferred tipple that year. By making a false bottom with a storage box under one of the armchairs in our study, we were able to maintain a bottle store for our purchases, brought back in bicycle saddlebags on a Saturday afternoon from Hertford. This prank, however, failed. The master in charge of the Sixth Form studies had an inspection and our hiding place was discovered. There was a stink, and I’m sorry to relate that I lost one term’s seniority as a School Prefect as a result.”

A powerful message for today

Jeremy’s memories of his Haileybury days form only a small part of an engaging autobiography in which he traces the histories of the families of himself and his wife. As an educationalist himself, going up to Oxford from Haileybury and then following a career in education in India and then back in Britain, Jeremy Bourne has written a softly-spoken, engaging work which nonetheless speaks with great power, exuding the Arnoldian ideal of education. As he himself says,

“I know I was lucky. Today, I have certain misgivings. Independent schools were never intended to be private schools, and it was a deliberate obfuscation in the 1960s, to start calling them such … I am certain that in my day, if a Haileyburian were asked how he could justify the privilege of a major public school education, he would have said it gave a responsibility to use that privilege for public good. Not for nothing was Clement Attlee, with his belief in good citizenship, our most revered Old Boy. Nowadays, however, public schoolboys – and some public schoolgirls – seem to believe in self-entitlement, that the world owes them a living … if this is so, then it is time to reform the public schools, perhaps by restricting them to students who can best benefit from such an education, whatever their background, rather than students whose parents can afford the gargantuan fees.”

While this book is self-published and written for his family, this does not diminish its worth; Jeremy’s message is thoughtful and powerful. His Haileybury memories may be of the 1950s but his message for society is for today.

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Is it time to reform public schools? OH autobiography asks challenging questions