Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England

I enjoyed this book as a reinforcement of the prejudices I've always held about public schools, and the moral code, or lack of it, they seem to engender in their purest products. You could argue that the now discredited British spirit of ruthless imperial conquest and dominance is still alive and well on the playing fields of Eton, more than half a century after "the winds of change" were finally recognised.The book contains many examples from rueful survivors of such schools, and some support from psychiatrists for the author's ideas of the damage the system carefully inflicts, preparing them for example for the Lord of thr Flies world of Tory politics. But I didn't think the endless evidence in support of the argument was enough. I wanted to see the counter-arguments, and how the author refuted those. If they are in the book, I missed them.However, as a warm bath for those who, like me, despise the arrogance, selfishness, and unearned successes of the worst examples - you know who I'm talking about - it does its job.And if I may add a personal whinge - there is still a strong pressure exerted throughout society that the masses should defer to people who display the trappings of public school poshness: the silly accents, the confident tones, the use of Latin tags such as obiter dicta and so on. That these people should be given forelock-touching respect and lucrative jobs. And even more dangerous, that what they say should be believed. In fact of course, many of them are mendacious immoral incompetents, and they should be revealed as such.But somehow the lie is maintained, to the detriment of us all.

Living in a flat near Radley, his alma mater, divorced and, I assume, not in employment, Beard seems to blame his boarding school life for how he has turned out. His thesis seems to be that boarding school is bad for everyone, at least in their relationships. Writing largely from experience, but backed up by writers such as Arendt, Orwell and Willans, he does not argue that the state system has been good for anyone in particular, nor even that attending a public school as a day-boy would be better. Beard frequently refers back to Molesworth, which I also loved, and '1066 and All That', which was one of those books the masters used to read to us in our last week of term at prep school. I was surprised he makes no reference to the Lindsay Anderson film 'If...' (1968) nor to 'Tompkinson's Schooldays' (1976), both of which are brilliant, to my mind, and both refer to the conflict between boys and masters, and those shadowy intermediaries, the house prefects (or school bully).One criticism I would make is that Beard flits back and forth between his prep school and his public school without always making the transition clear.Although I felt Beard went over the top in the final two chapters, I much enjoyed the book, but then I boarded at prep school and public school from 1971 to 1976, a period which overlapped with Beard. There were more similarities than differences between Radley (his school) and Oundle (mine), but the key difference is that the BBC made a documentary series about Radley, broadcast in 1980. (At Oundle our only chance of appearing on the telly was an extra in Simon Gray's 'Two Sundays', directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg.) So this book is in part a retrospective on Dennis Silk, who was Warden of Radley at the time.I hadn't realised the series was available on YouTube until Beard mentioned it in this book, so that gives me an opportunity to watch it again, 41 years later.

TBH I haven't finished reading this yet, but it is a fairly severe indictment of boarding school education, for psychological and social reasons. The more so as this is the background of most of our government, who display the emotional inadequacy induced by the system. Although the author cites various specialist sources (psychological & sociological) to back up his thesis, his own experience provides a lot of the central thread, which is both a strength and a weakness. Sometimes the text becomes rather diffuse as a result.