Etonian

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain

by Robert Verkaik  · 14 Apr 2018  · 419pp  · 119,476 words

qualified non-practising barrister, called to Bar in 2007. He lives in Surrey. ‘Did you go to school?’ The question asked of suspected Old Etonians by Old Etonians CONTENTS Prologue Part One: Selling Education by the Pound 1 Poor Schools 2 Nurseries of Aristocracy 3 Empire of the Sons 4 A Victorian

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’ failure to honour their charitable status was becoming impossible to ignore. The focus on Eton made uncomfortable reading for parliament, where 105 MPs were Old Etonians, including the speaker and the chancellor of the exchequer.3 In earlier times they could have been relied upon to quash any inquiry into their

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: ‘I pointed out to them that while people thought of the Suez policy of the Government as an “Eton” policy, because of the number of Etonians in the Cabinet, they had not recognised that both the junior members of the Government who resigned and the majority of the “dissident” Conservatives were

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Old Etonians. I said that what we wanted to do at Eton was to produce men who would hold independent views and be prepared to stick up

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for them, not men who would take an “Etonian” line.’10 Seven years later, another Conservative administration suffered a similar fate in 1963 when a privately educated politician lied to parliament about his personal

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called the verdict a score draw. By the time the three-year litigation had concluded, Suzi Leather had stepped down. Her successor was the Old Etonian William Shawcross, who demonstrated absolutely no interest in going back to court for a more favourable judgment. Shawcross said that it was up to the

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government minister, said: ‘There’s a dangerous myth abroad in some right-wing circles that Putin has been a bit hard done by. That other Etonian Boris Johnson seems to think we should press the reset button with Russia. But let’s not forget the Russian state had one man killed

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school had educated nineteen British prime ministers only heightened the embarrassment. The boys had broken the school’s unwritten rule that the only time an Etonian should have his name appear in the paper was at his birth, marriage or death – unless of course the coverage enhanced the standing of the

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support Putin or face ruin. One in ten boys at the school learns Russian and a disproportionate number of British ambassadors to Moscow are Old Etonians. More significantly, a few months before the Putin meeting, a charismatic Russian monk had been invited to Eton to talk to the boys. Father Tikhon

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It was a version of events confirmed by the Kremlin in an official statement. Before the boys set out, they were advised by a former Etonian master on how to negotiate the politics of the meeting. Peter Reznikov had been a Russian government interpreter before taking up a teaching post at

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Eton, which he held for seventeen years. This was a man who once claimed young Etonians believed he was a trained-to-kill colonel in the FSB under Putin’s command. He suggested the boys ask questions ‘in the friendliest manner

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visit. There is an understanding, however, that society events happen at the school and in term time. The Times described the boys’ ‘chutzpah’ as ‘very Etonian’.4 Afterwards, several of the boys uploaded to social media images of them talking to Mr Putin. David Wei, from Shanghai, wrote that it took

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schoolboys in Russia on a gap-year break wouldn’t have normally interested the Soviet authorities, but the fact that Cameron and his friend were Etonians gave the visit special significance and two KGB spies were despatched to the region’s capital to make contact with the boys. The naive Cameron

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down Britain’s rigid class ladder when the public schools delivered access to the top on a plate? The KGB’s pragmatic obsession with Old Etonians during the Cold War was no different to Putin’s fascination with the eleven schoolboys he had agreed to meet in August 2016. And when

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David Cameron and his fellow Etonian friend arrived in the Crimea in 1985, looking distinctly out of place on a gap-year break, it is hardly surprising that the KGB tried

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them. As it turned out they were really on to something. David Cameron’s effortless rise from home counties prep school to become the nineteenth Etonian prime minister was proof that the Kremlin’s foreign-agent recruitment policy was sound. The Soviets might have also noted that between 1900 and 1979

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Britain. The Camerons had registered David and his brother Alex (now a successful QC) on the so-called Eton List which effectively allowed an Old Etonian (OE) to sew up a place for his son while the boy was in nappies.14 By the time Cameron took his place at the

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advice to the current boys.’22 Over the years OEs have found subtle ways of identifying each other beyond the accent and the tie. An Etonian greeting between two men who suspect they were educated at the same place is: ‘Did you go to school?’ The implication being there is only

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), who talked up Cameron’s chances. He went on to win the 2005 Tory leadership election, a turn of events which some described as an Etonian putsch. Going into the 2010 election the Tories lagged behind Labour in the polls. There were many in the Tory Party who thought it impossible

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(Gordonstoun). Cameron, of course, already had the right contacts in place. The editor of The Sun, Rebekah Wade, was married to Charlie Brooks, an Old Etonian friend of Cameron’s brother Alex. In 2009 the Brooks had moved close to Cameron’s constituency home in Oxfordshire and they became frequent guests

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and the politicians he may end up stabbing in the front and back. But Dacre, who was by no means ill-disposed to Cameron’s Etonian background, having sent his own sons there, eventually came round. The Telegraph, a natural Cameron cheerleader, fell into line. The 2010 election result was not

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former Home Office permanent secretary, said that women were conspicuous by their absence from Cameron’s executive decision-making club, which she described as an ‘Etonian clique’. There were plenty of promoted OEs to support Ghosh’s claim. Boris Johnson’s brother Jo Johnson was appointed head of Cameron’s Downing

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, while Oliver Letwin was put in charge of developing cabinet policy. There were also key appointments outside government in Cameron’s gift to OEs. The Etonian son of his old headmaster, Eric Anderson, was made the independent reviewer of terrorism laws.39 By 2014, concern over the number of

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Etonians at the heart of government had become so serious that Cameron’s ally, Michael Gove, told the Financial Times that the numbers of Eton-educated

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symptom of ‘our corrupt and decaying democracy’.49 Cameron was able to walk away from Downing Street knowing that he had honoured the long-held Etonian tradition of looking after friends in need. They could now cash in on their time in government. Some set up consultancies to advise companies they

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a point on it, they bought their success. And in Britain that’s how the system works, as Vladimir Putin well knows. Betting on an Etonian successor to Cameron and Johnson, the Kremlin in 2018 appeared to have ordered its cyber army to get behind the #Moggmentum hashtag and support Tory

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friend of Donald Trump and an investor in alt-right media company Breitbart News, introduced Farage to a data company set up by two Old Etonian brothers who had cut their teeth on controversial military style ‘psy-ops’ which they ran in election campaigns in the developing world.15 Nigel and

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the Oakes brothers decided to set up another company, Cambridge Analytica (CA), which would specialise in winning elections. The brothers teamed up with a third Etonian, Alexander Nix, who became CA’s chief executive. (It was the smooth-talking Nix who was later caught in a Channel 4 undercover reporting sting

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backs’. But it was Cameron who shouldered the brunt of the blame for the unexpected vote in favour of leaving the EU. Even his loyal Etonian supporters turned on him. Nicholas Soames said afterwards: ‘If you were to ask me, do I wish David Cameron, that he hadn’t said that

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address books and contacts of the school’s alumni to help leavers to acquire internships and jobs.’9 In 1897 the Old Etonian Association (OEA) was founded to keep Old Etonians in touch with one another. Today its contacts and networks are so highly valuable, former pupils have to pay to access

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’s Admission process for your son, grandson or nephew; if so, please see Entry to Eton. We are always delighted to welcome new generations of Etonians from OE families, subject to our Entry Procedure. Approximately 40 per cent of our boys have OE connections.’10 Most public schools have set up

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staff members from another public school were among those who wrote supportive letters. None of the teachers or schools has been named. But an Old Etonian High Court judge, Lord Justice Lloyd, was identified as the author of a character reference, which he wrote after knowing that Ball had already accepted

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and clergy children were awarded £205 million in mostly non-means-tested fee subsidies. (One of Eton’s charitable foundations is still called the Old Etonian Trust and is worth £6.1 million. It was only recently that it was paying bursaries to OEs who couldn’t afford to send their

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recent years. At Eton, annual donations have fallen by £600,000 in 2016–17, down to £5.2 million from £5.8 million. Many Old Etonians and public school alumni profess themselves fed up with the begging-bowl approach, feeling plagued by phone calls, emails and letters asking for cash to

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and American audience favourite Damian Lewis. Back in Berkshire, Eton has established something called the Henry VI Society, whose sole purpose is to encourage Old Etonians ‘to make provision for Eton’ in their wills. For a minimum fee of £10 a month OEs can join the 1440 Society which holds drinks

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school’s fundraising magazine in 2017, its headmaster, Simon Henderson, said Eton was ‘committed to doing more’ for ‘those middle-class professional families, including Old Etonian families, who can no longer afford our full fees. These families have been the bedrock of support for our school over generations – they have provided

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of moral vocation is clearly demonstrated by Cameron’s class of 1984. As we saw in Chapter 10, only one of the forty-five Old Etonians went on to perform a community service or vocation in their later career. The one who did, entering the state education system, ended up leaving

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Oxford.8 Osborne is, of course, not alone in trampling over the rules that govern public servants’ behaviour. His friend and chief of staff, Old Etonian Rupert Harrison, left the government in 2015, also to join BlackRock, where he helped develop its retirement proposition. Given that Harrison was the one who

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schools remain extraordinarily powerful, and any decline in their power has stalled completely over the past sixteen years’.8 * In 1990, when Boris Johnson’s Etonian friend Darius Guppy took a dislike to a reporter from the News of the World who had been investigating his business dealings he called up

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both the judge and one of the parties went to the same school. But Leggatt, whose father also attended Eton, is not just any Old Etonian. In the same year he was presiding over the trial he was also nominated by the Lord Chief Justice to Eton College’s governing body

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old lady who had lived there for fifty years had died. But it had taken two days for anyone to notice. * In 2017 one Old Etonian published a book intended to explain to the public why our societies weren’t working like they used to in the good old days. In

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, Boris Johnson, Rupert Harrison, Jesse Norman and Zac Goldsmith, whose billionaire father James did so much to sow the seeds for Brexit. All were Old Etonians. 43 https://www.ft.com/content/3c5ebc20-1300-11e7-80f4-13e067d5072c?mhq5j=e3 44 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/02/patrick-rock

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26–7 and Rifles 52, 53, 59 and sponsorships 242 and sport 35 and town 187–8 and Wellington 33, 41–2 see also Old Etonians EU Referendum 127, 150–1, 161–3, 164–70 Evans, Chris 298–9 exams 82, 93, 257, 267–8 Fabian Society 180 fagging 22, 29

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, Brendan 198 Office of Fair Trading (OFT) 112, 113 Officer Training Corps (OTC) 52, 53, 55, 62 old boys’ networks 21–2, 289–91 Old Etonians (OEs) 136, 140–1, 149, 192, 224, 228–9 Oldfield, Bruce 68 oligarchs 129–30, 140, 194, 197, 199, 202 Olympic Games 36 Onyeama, Dillibe

Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World's Most Successful Political Party

by Samuel Earle  · 3 May 2023  · 245pp  · 88,158 words

shopkeeper’s daughter, in the late ’70s; John Major, the working-class son of a circus performer, in the ’90s; Cameron and Johnson, two Old Etonians with ancestral links to the royal family, in the twenty-first century; and most recently Rishi Sunak, Britain’s first non-white prime minister. Perhaps

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and literature, most of the nation’s favourite characters and storylines contain at least a seed of the Tory Nation: whether it’s the Old Etonian James Bond, who breaks the rules with a gentleman’s charm; the humble wizardry of Harry Potter, who risks it all to save his enchantingly

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future was Tony. The same year, in December, they thus found a Blair of their own to lead them: the ‘modernising’ David Cameron – an Old Etonian, married to the daughter of a baronet, who was young, lived in west London and was cosy with the press. Cameron explicitly dubbed himself the

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Whigs seemed implicit in the new label. ‘A Conservative is only a Tory who is ashamed of himself,’ the diplomat John Hookham Frere, an Old Etonian, quipped. The aristocrat Charles Greville wrote that Robert Peel was trying ‘to raise a party out of all the other parties’. Benjamin Disraeli, who became

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why? It surely isn’t just the thrill of winning or the glee of being in government, though there is probably plenty of that, too. (Etonians in particular seem to love the buzz of being in Number 10.) Conservatives, like any other political tribe, are motivated by something more than mere

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an imaginary consensus, to which the Tories are uniquely attuned. When the aristocrat Arthur Balfour – like Cameron and Johnson, one of Britain’s twenty Old Etonian prime ministers – was asked what his guiding political principles were, he replied modestly: ‘I suppose the principles of common sense.’ The prizing of common sense

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to believe that there is nothing so dangerous as cleverness in an administrator,’ Lord Hugh Cecil, Balfour’s cousin and fellow Old Etonian, asserted. According to Macmillan, another Old Etonian prime minister who received a first from Oxford, ‘clever people in a nation at any given moment are nearly always wrong. Distrust

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good at it.’ It isn’t hard to imagine what might have given Cameron – a third-generation (or sixth-generation, on his mother’s side) Etonian, the great-great-grandson of slave owners, with relatives and family friends in both the Conservative Party and the royal palace – that impression. * * * For all

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Harold Macmillan announced his resignation, a panel of ten Tory grandees met to decide his successor. They chose a leader in their image: an Old Etonian, like nine of the ten present, and an aristocrat, as antiquated as the selection process itself. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, or the 14th Earl of

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would never see the likes of Home again. In an age of television and mass suffrage, after all, what sensible party would elect an Old Etonian like Home to represent them? Home, far from embodying the English gentleman’s eternal rule, now looked instead like the last gasp of the old

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Home’s three predecessors all had ties to the landed gentry and public-school educations – Churchill, Eden and Macmillan, an Old Harrovian and two Old Etonians respectively – his three successors were from more modest backgrounds: Ted Heath, Margaret Thatcher and John Major, none of whom was privately educated. In 1990, when

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was running for leader of the Conservative Party, not some demented Marxist sect.’ In the Spectator, the journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft mourned ‘The End of the Etonians’.5 In Tory Britain, however, time moves forward and back, and most obituaries are premature. Any influential institution, custom or class – especially one with ties

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really goes away. Even when the public schoolboys were in retreat, they still held on to positions of influence. No fewer than sixty-one Old Etonians served as ministers in the Thatcher and Major governments, consistent with the tally in the 1950s and 1960s. Three of Thatcher’s five foreign secretaries

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between 1982 and 1983 was Ferdinand Mount, otherwise known as the 3rd Baronet Mount: his grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather were all Old Etonian Tory politicians. The party was still in safe hands. More recently, the old governing class has resumed the reins. Since 2005, two of the last

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four Conservative leaders have been Old Etonians – first David Cameron and then Boris Johnson. Both are distant relatives of the royal family. Cameron’s extended family tree includes dukes, viscounts, and old

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, Duff Cooper, was a minister in Churchill’s government. In 2015, the Conservatives’ winning election manifesto was overseen by six people – five of them Old Etonians. Even rivals for the Conservative leadership have tended to come from the same circles. Current chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who fought and lost against Johnson for

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Sir Streynsham Master, who played a pivotal role in colonising India in the seventeenth century. The Conservative elite is more diverse than it once was. Etonians intermingle with state-schoolers; the landed gentry hold hands with bankers, the bourgeoisie and the nouveaux riches; the progeny of the Empire’s rulers now

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sit side by side with the progeny of its liberated subjects. The number of Old Etonian MPs is down to eleven – less than a tenth of what it was a hundred years ago (although in the House of Lords, Britain’s

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are still there now, in the heart of Britain’s democracy, owning a collective 170,000 acres between them; thirty-nine of them are Old Etonians.20 * * * The Lords stands within British politics as an enduring monument to the resilience of the old governing class. Even now, the way in which

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2007, Gordon Brown put together the first and, to date, only British government not to count a single Old Etonian among its ranks. But more recently, in the highest echelons of British politics, Etonians have been everywhere again – not only in Number 10 (first with Cameron and then Johnson), but beyond: the

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among the 5,238 names than the next four schools combined: Winchester College, Harrow School, Westminster School and Marlborough College.25 The ‘End of the Etonians’, as declared by Geoffrey Wheatcroft two decades ago, seems some way off. * * * In a way, Britain really is still trapped in the fourteenth century: some

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biography of Thatcher, Charles Moore ultimately dismisses the theory. ‘Its details don’t add up,’ he concludes. But as an old-fashioned Tory and Old Etonian himself, he understands the fantasy’s allure. One afternoon in March 2022, during an interview at the House of Lords, Moore explained what the conspiracy

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journalist and, courtesy of his star columnist’s ascent to prime minister, received a peerage in 2020. Moore is both a throwback figure – an Old Etonian who loves fox-hunting and pheasant shooting – and perfectly in tune with the times, championing Brexit and railing against out-of-touch Remainers from the

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. One famous study, Working Class Tories, published in 1967 by the American sociologist Eric Nordlinger, found working-class Conservatives preferred the idea of an Old Etonian as a political leader to someone from an eminent grammar school by a ratio of more than two to one. ‘Politics is in their blood

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country. This conception certainly seems less plausible since the rise of Thatcher. With a grammar school girl in charge, as opposed to the standard Old Etonian, the Conservatives proved even more successful. While she took on all the mannerisms of an upper-class lady, the Conservatives also made a feature of

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opponents in this way. Disraeli called the Whigs ‘anti-national’ and denounced the Liberals’ ‘continental’ inclinations. Even the Liberals’ long-standing leader, Gladstone, an Old Etonian aristocrat, was attacked for being ‘un-English’. During the Boer War, between 1899 and 1902, the Conservatives accused their opponents of ‘taking the enemy’s

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he ‘began to wonder if I should wake up to find it all a dream’. Hugh Dalton, Labour’s post-war chancellor (and an Old Etonian), described a mood of ‘exhilaration among us, joy and hope, determination and confidence. We felt exalted, dedicated, walking on air, walking with destiny.’26 Labour

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. * * * Perhaps it was inevitable, given the arc of British history, that the nation’s self-proclaimed liberator would arrive in the form of an Old Etonian who had once edited the Spectator. That, at least, was the impression from the result’s media reception. Johnson was hailed as a Conservative hero

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Conservative Party, p. xiii. 4 Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Strange Death of Tory England, Gardners Books, 2005, p. 190. 5 Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘The End of the Etonians’, Spectator, 17 January 2004, p. 22. 6 Perry Anderson, English Questions, Verso, 1992, p. 19. 7 Linda Colley, ‘The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty

A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr  · 2 Jul 2009  · 872pp  · 259,208 words

service to the nation because of the extreme nature of Dalton’s anti-German feelings but the King saw merely Dalton as a turncoat, an Etonian who rebelled against his class and monarch. Dalton had started out as a Tory and switched, partly as an act of rebellion against his father

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many of Labour’s post-war cabinet. Parliamentary exchanges of the period are full of in-jokes about who was a Wykehamist and who an Etonian. Briefly, it had seemed such schools would not even survive the war: boarding schools had been in enough of a financial crisis for some to

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, rather than innovative leaders strong in will and personality’.48 Coal was under Viscount Hyndley, a 63-year-old marketing man from the industry, an Etonian ran the gas boards and transport was overseen by Sir Cyril Hurcomb from the Ministry of War Transport, ‘a man whose entrepreneurial experience and knowledge

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forty-two years, which remains the longest sentence ever imposed by a British court. He, of course, was not a dapper and well-connected Old Etonian with friends to tip him off. What is it about the British and spying? Other Western nations had their post-war spying scandals, particularly the

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Cooper among them). Meanwhile in India, Peter Sellers, a young half-Jewish impressionist was busy impersonating Sikh officers and RAF commanders. Michael Bentine, an Old Etonian intelligence officer and actor, would later complete the quartet, the most influential act of British comedy surrealism in the fifties, and one of the most

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he would find the ideas. The Revolt of the Chicken Farmer Ideas matter. And because ideas matter, so too does the story of an Old Etonian Christian Scientist, former RAF fighter pilot, chicken farmer and unsuccessful turtle rancher called Antony Fisher. In the high years of socialism and planning, from 1945

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generations of travelling Britons fuelled. These men are also part of the story of the fifties, alongside the more familiar images of tweed-suited Old Etonians ambling around grouse-moors. Even in government the rumbles of modernization could be heard. The hyperactive Tory minister Ernie Marples, a self-made businessman and

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relationship as most politicians. Ian Fleming is also a fine example of how British society was tightly twisted at the top. He was yet another Etonian, and yet another character who flitted between journalism, intelligence and high society. Of a Scottish banking family, he had tried Sandhurst, foreign reporting – including in

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connected member of the elite, Bond’s route to a mass audience would be through rougher trade. Fleming had pictured his agent as an Old Etonian but a working-class Scottish bodybuilder and former milkman, Sean Connery, was chosen to play the first James Bond, and he was followed by a

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there was still a notion that the chaps at the Turf Club, the old families with their stalking and salmon rivers, that web of Old Etonian cronies, could maintain British authority and self-confidence, despite the local difficulties of a disintegrating Empire and a weak economy; that they could hang together

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the last sentence went to Eton.’ As it happened, Alec Douglas-Home went on to be a tougher opponent than Harold Wilson had expected. An Etonian schoolboy contemporary, the writer Cyril Connolly, had described the new Prime Minister as ‘the kind of graceful, tolerant, sleepy boy who is showered with favours

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of the Tory years, particularly in Cornwall, Wales and Scotland. They were seen as somehow modern and classless, though in fact Grimond was another Old Etonian who was intertwined in the once-grand family alliances of strangely dead Liberal England. In Scotland and Wales, the Nationalist parties were just beginning to

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private schools and live in Hampstead, but Wilson came across as a simple and ordinary man, a breath of fresh air compared to the Old Etonians whose fumbling rule was ending. He was the political equivalent to the men breaking through elsewhere in public life – the tweed-jacketed lecturers of Kingsley

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-regarded authority figures to front radical change, so confusing the forces of tradition, was first tested over ‘Lady Chatterley’. Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC, an Old Etonian, ex-Grenadier Guard, summing up for the prosecution, was explicit about the historic nature of the choice before the jury. There must be, he pleaded

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Lynch, and the new Stormont leader, Brian Faulkner, who, as a middle-class businessman by origin, was more in Heath’s image than the Old Etonian landowner, Chichester-Clark, had been. Eventually he had even managed to get the leaders of the Republic and Northern Ireland to sit and negotiate at

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influential MP in the devolution debates of the seventies was probably the anti-devolution backbencher Tam Dalyell who later led the Belgrano inquisition. An Old Etonian left-winger, he fuelled himself late into the night with pockets full of hard-boiled eggs prepared by his housekeeper and a head full of

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votes – a majority in England – the country’s overall answer was ‘No, not really’. Michael Howard resigned and was replaced by the bright young Old Etonian David Cameron. Taking the Tories in a green and liberal direction, he won high poll ratings and looked set, by 2007, to be the Conservative

The Man Who Was Saturday

by Patrick Bishop  · 21 Jan 2019  · 351pp  · 108,068 words

Western Front, the grey wastes of the North Sea, the heights of Gallipoli and the baked earth of Palestine and Mesopotamia swallowed 1,157 Old Etonians. Various grand schemes were examined, including a tower in the style of the era of the school’s founder, Henry VI. In the end, the

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the school authorities learned of it, they were ‘vexed … However, they soon recovered their poise and fended off the indignant letters fired by blimpish Old Etonians.’ Gandhi, who wore his familiar loincloth as protection against the dank October Thames Valley weather, was ‘only a modified success. Mr Gandhi was long-winded

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who will fight for France.’ Six years later he would do just that. The essay appeared in a magazine called Sixpenny: Stories and Poems by Etonians. It had been started by Robin Maugham, nephew of the famous author, Somerset, and by the second issue Neave’s initials appear as a co

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Merton Floats, it was natural that Neave got involved. He contributed a sketch called ‘The Mystery of Wombat College’, a knockabout effort that smacked of Etonian humour. He wrote the part of Dr Calomel, the unpleasant headmaster, for himself. While preparations for the panto continued, two ardent escapers had made an

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his political profile. Neave had had a good war, but so had many other young Tory aspirants who did not write books. His fellow Old Etonian Peter Carrington, who soared through the party ranks at the same period, never publicly recorded the deeds that won him an MC. Nor did Neave

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event that coloured the subsequent lives of some of its old boys. He did not conform to any of the popular stereotypes of the Old Etonian. When a senior Tory colleague, Tom King, was interviewed for this book, he had forgotten or never known that Neave was one. Infrequent though they

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and Douglas-Home, but hit the buffers with the advent of Heath, and he belonged, it seemed, to the past. Ridley was an aristocratic Old Etonian free-marketeer, a chain smoker with a caustic tongue who did not mind making enemies, and at the time (though he changed his opinion radically

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on the gallops. But as Neave was soon telling Arthur Palmer, his Labour colleague on the science and technology select committee, and the Scottish Old Etonian Labour MP Tam Dalyell, ‘As particular friends of mine, I’d put your money on the filly.’40 During the course of the day following

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1980 appreciation of Neave in the Merton College magazine Postmaster, but extensive efforts have failed to turn anything up. 24. Sixpenny: Stories and Poems by Etonians, no. 4, 13 July 1934. 25. Robin Maugham, Escape from the Shadows, Hodder & Stoughton, 1972, p. 78. 26. Obituary of David Tree, Daily Telegraph, 28

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, 156–7 Silverman, Sidney, 161 Simon, Louis, 95 Sinclair, Michael, 45 Singen (German border town), 79–80, 84, 85, 86 Sixpenny: Stories and Poems by Etonians (magazine), 20–1 Smith, Jim (rector of St Mary at Longworth), 7 Soames, Christopher, 263–4 Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), 234, 239 Somerset

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval

by Jason Cowley  · 15 Nov 2018  · 283pp  · 87,166 words

more radical desires. Cameron’s back story is well known. He grew up in the Berkshire village of Peasemore, the younger son of an Old Etonian stockbroker, Ian, who was born disabled. Home was the Old Rectory (Cameron’s brother, Alex, who is a barrister, still lives there with his family

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the sixth form. James Wood, now a literary critic and Harvard professor, remembers Cameron as being ‘confident, entitled, gracious, secure . . . exactly the kind of “natural Etonian” I was not’. He remarks on Cameron’s ‘charm and decency [at Eton] – almost a kind of sweetness, actually’, though he says Cameron showed little

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interest in politics. (Rory Stewart, the writer-traveller, Conservative MP and another Etonian, once told me that he thought Cameron and Boris Johnson were the ‘wrong kind of Etonians’, which leads one to assume that there must be a right kind, of whom Stewart is presumably one

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associations. Eton: a word synonymous with upper class and aristocratic ease and entitlement. Eton: a word that inspires as much anger as it does respect. Etonian: a word that can be used as a statement of fact, as a signifier of status and privileges from birth and as a pejorative adjective

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’ by Psy, but also a sense of the boarding school as one of the ultimate luxury British ‘brands’, and especially desirable to international plutocrats. Old Etonian: David Cameron is of course one such, and the nineteenth British prime minister to have attended the school. Ferdinand Mount, a cousin of Cameron’s

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mother, Mary, and a writer and journalist (and, inevitably, an Etonian), recalls the young Cameron ‘abounding in self-confidence’ when as a student he visited Mount while he was working for Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street

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and was published in 1914 in the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard. Orwell did not have a private income, unlike his old friend and fellow Etonian Cyril Connolly, and his early career was scarred by rejection and hardship. From the mid-1930s until his death in 1950, he wrote compulsively. In

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young London businessman and ardent fan named David Dein invested £290,000 in the club. ‘It’s dead money,’ said Peter Hill-Wood, an Old Etonian who had succeeded his father a year earlier. In 2007, Dein sold his stake in the club to Red & White Holdings, co-owned by the

The Secret World: A History of Intelligence

by Christopher Andrew  · 27 Jun 2018

the world’.† Two weeks after its foundation the Committee wrote to one of the first of its secret correspondents, Arthur Lee, an American-born Old Etonian lawyer resident in London: It would be agreeable to Congress to know the disposition of foreign powers toward us, and we hope this object will

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’s College, Cambridge. Frank Adcock (later knighted and Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge University) arrived at about the same time as Dilly. The Old Etonian King’s historian Frank Birch arrived in 1916.78 Birch was a brilliant conversationalist and comic actor who later appeared in pantomime at the London

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for Room 40 from the moment he became DID. Hall seems to have had a weakness for Old Etonians. In December 1914 he made one of Room 40’s earliest recruits, the Old Etonian Lord Herschell, Lord in Waiting to George V, his personal assistant. Convinced that he required ‘men of wider

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experience of the world’ than the Admiralty or Whitehall could provide, he took on as a second personal assistant the Old Etonian stockbroker Claude Serocold, who struck Frank Birch as a ‘slim, well groomed creature with a black moustache’ (later removed). Through Herschell and Serocold, Hall recruited

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mostly well-connected German-speakers from a variety of professions. The Old Etonian publisher Nigel de Grey, depicted by Birch in Alice in ID25 as ‘the Dormouse’ (‘very quiet and apparently asleep’), rivalled his fellow Old

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Etonian Dilly Knox as the ablest codebreaker in Room 40.81 After the Germans’ transatlantic cable was cut by the British at the outbreak of war,

…

doing so. On the morning of 17 January 1917, however, Hall found himself faced with a difficult dilemma. One of his leading cryptanalysts, the Old Etonian publisher Nigel de Grey, who had been working the night shift, dramatically enquired of Hall: ‘Do you want to bring the Americans into the war

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

by Sathnam Sanghera  · 28 Jan 2021  · 430pp  · 111,038 words

made regular Saturday-morning visits for his own sexual gratification. In 1922, Lewis Harcourt, or ‘Loulou’, the ex-Colonial Secretary, exposed himself to a young Etonian boy, Edward James. Shocked at the sight of the ‘hideous and horrible old man’, James complained to his mother, and the story leaked into London

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announcement at the beginning of the pandemic that thousands might die, led to one FT reader remarking online that his tone was defined by the ‘Etonian mindset that caused famines across the empire’ – ‘these lords and masters are trained to shrug it off with the certainty that they are the stewards

…

shrink from either heat or cold. You will have to maintain the empire which they made.’ Meanwhile, the lingering imperial tone of the twentieth-century Etonian education was conveyed in a recent essay in the London Review of Books by the literary critic James Wood in which he recalled how first

…

-year Etonians of his generation were, for history, given a copy of Heaven’s Command, the first volume of Jan Morris’ trilogy about the rise and fall

…

a height of several hundred feet.’ Most famously there is George Orwell, who for the sake of balance I should point out was also an Etonian, and whose time as an imperial officer inspired a great deal of anti-colonial writing, not least his essay entitled ‘Shooting an Elephant’, broadcast on

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of media appearances where he wilfully played the role of a bumbling upper-class twit. Matthew Parris recently observed that ‘Regrettably, [Boris] Johnson has an Etonian distrust of intellect among colleagues,’ but might it be more accurate to say that Johnson displays an imperial distrust of cleverness, instilled in him at

…

History: Elementary Structures of Race, Verso, 2015 Wolmar, Christian, Railways & the Raj: How the Age of Steam Transformed India, Atlantic Books, 2018 Wood, James, ‘These Etonians’, London Review of Books 2019, 41:13, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n13/james-wood/diary Woolcock, Nicola, ‘To say grammar schools

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s

by Alwyn W. Turner  · 4 Sep 2013  · 1,013pp  · 302,015 words

Major coming last and being knocked out, leading to a final third-ballot showdown between the flamboyant self-made millionaire Heseltine and the patrician Old Etonian Hurd. In the real world, to the surprise of the media, it took just four days for Major to move into Number 10, having seen

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better themselves. It was widely assumed therefore that he bought into her ideology. Certainly that was her feeling. ‘I don’t want old style, old Etonian Tories of the old school to succeed me,’ she observed. ‘John Major is someone who has fought his way up from the bottom and is

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” think.’ Nonetheless, he returned to the fold for the 1997 general election, devising the controversial – if unsuccessful – ‘demon eyes’ poster. Meanwhile, Cameron (‘a suave Old Etonian’ according to the Guardian, and ‘one of the brightest young men in the party’ according to The Times) went on to become adviser to Norman

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have been to a public school. ‘The class war is over,’ Tony Blair told the Labour conference in 1999, echoing the thoughts of his Old Etonian predecessor, Harold Macmillan, forty years earlier in the wake of the 1959 general election: ‘This election has shown that the class war is obsolete.’ But

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a pair of boots’. The intention was to draw a class distinction between Martin and his chief rival, the Conservative Sir George Young, an Old Etonian sixth baronet. Martin also had a more direct appeal to backbench MPs, pointing out that his career had been as undistinguished as most of theirs

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– Times 11 April 1992 here No one reminds me – Times 1 April 1997 here He is undoubtedly – Observer 9 February 1997 here a suave Old Etonian – Guardian 2 April 1992 here one of the brightest – Times 30 March 1992 here the most powerful man – Guardian 16 July 1994 here the all

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World

by Adrian Wooldridge  · 2 Jun 2021  · 693pp  · 169,849 words

way of life’.72 But he succeeded in becoming one of the great academic figures of his generation, far more successful than most of the Etonians and Wykehamists who had been trained in Greek and Latin from the cradle: a fellow of an Oxford college, the principal of King’s College

…

fragrance,’ according to Noel Annan, whose nose for such fragrances was second to none, ‘and after his notorious 1962 reshuffle nearly half the cabinet were Etonians.’12 But the 1940s revolution resumed with a vengeance in the 1960s. Grammar-school products made it into Downing Street in the form of Harold

…

public debate. Most of Young’s fellow socialists criticized the Britain of the late 1950s because it was run by a ‘magic circle’ of Old Etonians led by that great conjuror Harold Macmillan, the prime minister. Young criticized it for being too meritocratic. Most of Young’s fellow sociologists worried that

…

of their natural leaders, raising the possibility that ‘the Trade Unions will be led by the indifferent residue, and the Labour Party entirely by Old Etonians’. ‘When socialists speak of “equal opportunity” in terms of a narrow ladder up which only a few exceptional individuals, hauled out of their class by

…

team were privately educated.7 This dominance is particularly marked in sports that require expensive equipment, such as rowing, horse-riding or cycling: an Old Etonian has won a medal in ‘sitting down sports’ in every Olympic Games since 1992. A remarkable number of Britain’s most successful actors were educated

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain

by Robert Chesshyre  · 15 Jan 2012  · 434pp  · 150,773 words

. Choice, as a campaigner for state education told me, is a nice word for an often nasty process. I passed my teens under an Old Etonian cabal, presided over by Harold Macmillan: fifty-plus years later, I live again under an OE cabal. I asked my MP, Old

…

Goldsmith, how it came about that, in Cabinet terms, we were back in the 1950s. All the Old Etonians in the present government are, he assured me with a straight face, absolutely the best people among our 60 million fellow citizens to occupy the

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north and prosperous south is wider than ever’ proclaimed a headline in Newsweek a few days before I travelled to Durham. It contrasted pictures of Etonians disporting themselves in fancy dress on the Thames with the children of the unemployed playing amidst the dereliction of a shattered housing estate. ‘Some housing

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housing for all. Harold Macmillan’s ‘never had it so good’ boom had prepared the way, but now the people, freed of Supermac’s Old Etonian cabal and his seedy Edwardianism, would, as in 1945, again truly be the masters. A few miles from where the foundations were being laid for

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by Oliver Bullough  · 10 Mar 2022  · 257pp  · 80,698 words

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by Christopher Andrew  · 2 Aug 2010  · 1,744pp  · 458,385 words

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Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe

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by Alan Rusbridger  · 14 Oct 2018  · 579pp  · 160,351 words

Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939

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No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy

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The Making of the Atomic Bomb

by Richard Rhodes  · 17 Sep 2012  · 1,437pp  · 384,709 words

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Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art

by Michael Shnayerson  · 20 May 2019  · 552pp  · 163,292 words

Operation Chastise: The RAF's Most Brilliant Attack of World War II

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War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers

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Invention: A Life

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The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund

by Anita Raghavan  · 4 Jun 2013  · 575pp  · 171,599 words

Londongrad: From Russia With Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs

by Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley  · 22 Jul 2009  · 471pp  · 127,852 words

The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq

by Rory Stewart  · 1 Jan 2005  · 407pp  · 123,587 words

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World

by Tom Burgis  · 7 Sep 2020  · 476pp  · 139,761 words

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain?

by Polly Toynbee and David Walker  · 6 Oct 2011  · 471pp  · 109,267 words

The English

by Jeremy Paxman  · 29 Jan 2013  · 364pp  · 103,162 words

Great Britain

by David Else and Fionn Davenport  · 2 Jan 2007

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else

by James Meek  · 18 Aug 2014  · 232pp  · 77,956 words

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It

by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge  · 1 Sep 2020  · 134pp  · 41,085 words

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus

by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott  · 18 Mar 2021  · 432pp  · 143,491 words

The Secret Life of Bletchley Park: The WWII Codebreaking Centre and the Men and Women Who Worked There

by Sinclair McKay  · 24 May 2010  · 351pp  · 107,966 words

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect

by David Goodhart  · 7 Sep 2020  · 463pp  · 115,103 words

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by Jon Ronson  · 1 Oct 2012  · 375pp  · 106,536 words

Chasing the Devil: On Foot Through Africa's Killing Fields

by Tim Butcher  · 1 Apr 2011  · 347pp  · 115,173 words

The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market

by Leah McGrath Goodman  · 15 Feb 2011  · 553pp  · 168,111 words

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by Benjamin R. Barber  · 5 Nov 2013  · 501pp  · 145,943 words

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom

by Simon Winchester  · 1 Jan 2008  · 385pp  · 105,627 words

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible

by Simon Winchester  · 14 Oct 2013  · 501pp  · 145,097 words

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Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World

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The Marches: A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland

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Jennifer Morgue

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Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself

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The scramble for Africa, 1876-1912

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The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer

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The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class

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Why We Can't Afford the Rich

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The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way

by Steve Richards  · 14 Jun 2017  · 323pp  · 95,492 words

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