Old school

On the recommendation of a Twitter friend, I recently watched a film from 1948, The Guinea Pig, starring Richard Attenborough. It follows Jack Read, the 14 year old son of a London tobacconist, as he takes up a scholarship at Saintbury, a (fictional) English public school, under a scheme to encourage what we’d now call social mobility.  

As you might expect, Read faces bullying and snobbery (the latter from masters as well as other pupils). He struggles to adapt to the social expectations of Saintbury, and his Housemaster, Mr Hartley, a long-serving reactionary, makes life difficult for him. Back at home old friends joke that he might get above himself. Read does eventually manage to flourish, with the help of a sympathetic master, Mr Lorraine.

It’s an old story; it had been done before and it’s been done since. I'm not sure this is a particularly brilliant iteration of it. The script doesn’t give Attenborough a great deal to do with the Read character, and his story gets a bit crowded out by another plot strand about Hartley.  

However, one thing that is interesting about the film is its overall moral attitude to Saintbury. At one point, Read is subjected to a nasty initiation ritual – it’s not made clear whether this is something that all new boys must undergo or whether he is singled out for it because of his background – and when he protests to Hartley he is put rather firmly in his place. Who are you, says Hartley, to come here and question our ways? And Read is not given a good answer to this question.

Fagging is presented with a certain ambivalence. On his first day Read is instructed by the school captain, or head boy, to take his suitcases to his study. The captain (who is later closely involved in the initiation) and one of his cronies are unkind and dismissive towards Read; later a senior boy canes him for a trifling error. This is all portrayed as unpleasant but not monstrous, an onerous discipline to be endured rather than a vile abuse to be eradicated.

Later, a boy in Read’s form who has persistently given him a hard time picks a fight with him. The fight is interrupted by Lorraine, who wants to know why it started. Read refuses to incriminate the other boy, presumably maintaining the traditional schoolboy expectation of omerta on such matters, and Lorraine suggests they take it in to the boxing ring and sort it out by Queensberry Rules. They do so and after a longish bout leave the ring as friends. This is all presented as normal, natural and healthy.

Perhaps most curiously of all, Hartley is presented rather sympathetically. His long and loyal service to the school is valorised. The climax of the film is not Read’s successful integration into the life of the school and his winning of a place at Cambridge, but Hartley’s decision, before his forced early retirement on grounds of health, to use his influence to create further scholarships of the kind from which Read benefited. A chat with Read’s father, a retired Sergeant Major who sympathises with Hartley’s struggle to form his boys into men of character, is integral to this decision. Lorraine, who has spent the film sparring with Hartley over his undoubtedly insensitive treatment of the boy, becomes engaged to Hartley’s daughter and buries the hatchet with the old man. Even Read seems to view Hartley with considerable warmth by the climax.  

It would not be fair to say that the film is complacent about the cruelties and failings of old-fashioned public schools. Many of Saintbury’s inmates are shown as being unthinking and unkind to Read – the problem is institutional, as we would say nowadays. Read tries to leave during his first term, and breaks down in tears when Lorraine catches him and asks him about his misery.

But it is curious what Lorraine says during this exchange – he is not given a barnstorming liberal speech about how ghastly the place is, but rather he encourages Read to show fortitude and perseverance, taking as an example Read's much-admired father, an ex-soldier who played football for the Army. And this reflects something about the tone of the film which I do not think would be replicated in a similar film made today, i.e. its approach to the school is broadly respectful and balanced. While the cruelties and frustrations faced by Read are not glossed over, Saintbury is also shown as a place of learning and wisdom and the development of character (not least on the rugger field); as a pathway for the boy to a life of the mind that he would not otherwise have found. It is even hinted that such institutions, that represent the transmission and continuation of a great culture and form the elite of a great nation, must be allowed their strange ways and the odd unpalatable tradition.

A modern version of this story, I suspect, would have a much more unambiguous moral vision. Read would be an eloquent critic of The System and his reforming zeal would sweep all before him. Hartley and the sixth-form bullies would be much more sinister figures, and the conclusion would have Lorraine defeating Hartley in argument or undermining his reactionary schemes. Maybe the school would abolish fagging or admit girls or stop teaching Latin in favour of sex ed.

Perhaps that would be better. I am certainly not an uncritical defender of traditional public schools (speaking as a veteran of all-male schooling and some mild if unpleasant bullying). Nevertheless, I do think it is worth reflecting on some of the nuances that the 1948 film captures, about character and grit and the relative importance of individuals and institutions.