I agree that much of it was experimental, but whether it was or not, you will find in Alisdare Hickson’s The Poisoned Bowl: Sex & the Public School, the clear testimony of hundreds that during the first two-thirds of the 20th century, huge numbers of future heterosexuals indulged in homosexuality in public schools. The extent varied greatly by time and place, and at Eton there were great variations between houses, but it is clear that at peak periods the majority of boys engaged in some kind of sex play, which makes it impossible that it had much to do with being gay.
I am a Flashman fan, but as an American I don’t have any personal experience with British schools. But I seem to recall Flashman – or maybe some other book(s) – treated it as more of a punishment than a sexual thing? A power play by bullies.
No problem, the truth of the matter being discussed has absolutely no bearing on what we, the filthy State Schooled shit-munchers, believe. We WANT to believe, and so we do. As I said above, it makes us feel better.
To us here in the gutter, we see Mr Cameron et al, the ex-Public Schoolboys who rule our lives, as a dirty, incestuous clique. We know that they are all in each others’ pockets, eating live rats and poor peoples’ babies at their dinner parties*, and worst of all, sliding in and out of each others’ arseholes at every possible opportunity. They learned it at Public School. This is fact, as far as we are concerned.
Hey, even their own side say they are “arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of a pint of milk” (Nadine Dorries. This is what happens when you let common birds have a say, eh?)
However, this isn’t a pop at the current Govt, it matters not which political party, and indeed, is not limited to the world of politicians. Heads of corporations, quangos, anyone what talks all posh and stuff, and plays golf with his old schoolmates, the Landed Gentry, and so on, all ex-Public School.
It is down to the Old Boys’ Network, we can never join in, we aren’t intimate enough with that lot, literally. We won’t be starting a revolution, though - we don’t want to join in any club where our donut takes a shredding. The status quo remains intact (erm, so to speak).
Whether it is degrading punishment which brings Little David & George down to size, or good old-fashioned Upper Class perversion, it matters not to us - Public School = Buggery.
Who lets the truth get in the way? 
- Like the end of the 1989 film “Society”.
Please believe me: I really do understand what you are getting at. Many Old Etonians can. By a big coincidence, I have just come online from watching the film Another Country, recently mentioned in this thread, for the third time in my life. What do you make of it? In case you are not familiar with it, it is set at Eton in the thirties and offers a credible explanation of how Guy Bennett (aka Burgess) came to hate the establishment, ie. his own class, so much that he became a communist dedicated to betraying them, and precisely because of the topic under discussion: homosexuality. I am intrigued now. Do you despise or sympathise with Burgess?
I recall a review of a memoir by one of the defectors to the Soviet Union decades ago - one of the Philby gang or something, IIRC. Anyway, the reviewer made mention of the author’s point that many of the British spies joined the Soviet cause because in their early 20’s burst of egalitarianism, the Bolsheviks proclaimed homosexulaity was Ok and legalized it. He mentioned this, more than socialist ideals of the brotherhood of man (poor choice of words?) or other ideals of social justice, was why they embraced the soviet ideal. A few years later Stalin cracked down on internal “perversion” but by then they were compromised and it was too late to back out of the spy game. They had been recruited at British universities (no indication of the role of public schools, but presumably that’s where these upper class types got started…)
Burgess?
I think we need to get back to ‘how it is today’ rather than how schooling was in the distant past, which many people make the mistake of assuming has not changed at all.
The OP was about a line in a 1994 movie spoken by a character in late middle age, who presumably was in a public school in the late 40s-early 50s. So it’s germane.
*I was at school with his brother Bufty. Tremendous bloke. He was head of my house. Buggered me senseless. Still, it taught me about life. *
[QUOTE=Chez Guevara]
Does it happen? It’s a tradition. .
[/QUOTE]
Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash. – Winston Churchill
When asked if he’d said this, he said that he wished he had.
But in this case it is only by understanding how things have been done and felt differently by people in a different age that we may understand a phenomenon that has largely disappeared. Failure to understand such things can surely only be impoverishing for us.
We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us, but what if we’re only an after-glow of them?
He was 50ish, so would have been at public schools from 67 or so.
But it is still interesting to read about how these young men and boys dealt with their sexual urges when no females other than the matron were around - in Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves describes how his affection (hinted at as sexual, but possibly not) for a younger boy was looked upon as wrong, because there were strict rules about how close you could be with younger students. Even back then it seems that actual homosexual relationships were discouraged, contrary to popular belief.
Discouraged by whom?
I’m afraid there is a big misunderstanding here. You seem to be unaware of the gigantic conflict between what the authorities wanted and what the boys in public schools were inclined to do. After centuries of seeming indifference or indulgence, the authorities in the second quarter of the nineteenth century suddenly awoke to the “need” to extirpate schoolboy romances, and they brought in huge changes to this end.
If you look at early nineteenth century editions of books about public schools such as Tom Brown’s Schooldays, you will see illustrations of boys holding hands etc., which were soon to become unthinkable. The shocking (by today’s standards) fact is that boys then were left to sleep together in dormitories and even beds completely unsupervised with no adult interest in the consequences. In classes, stupid 18 year-olds sat alongside clever 12 year-olds.
The mid-Victorians went to great lengths to try to remedy this. Open affection was outlawed, a rigid hierarchy of classes by age was instituted, rules were introduced against boys associating with those more than a year apart in age, and spare time was severely curtailed in favour of compulsory manly activities such as football and the army corps. And discovered cases of sexual relations were suddenly brutally punished.
For more than a century, there was great conflict. These measures were effective, but to a very limited extent. There was much resistance until the legalisation of homosexuality in 1967 cast an entirely different light on the matter. Then, suddenly and ironically, homosexual liaisons switched from being a naughty indulgence to an insufferable slur on a boy’s normality, and it was this new stigma that proved infinitely more effective than coercion by the authorities in killing boy/boy romances.
Discouraged by everybody at school, including the headmaster. Just like you talk about in your second paragraph.
He only mentions it once that I know of, in passing in Flash For Freedom! when he is propositioned by the ship’s boy, who offers to let Flashy bugger him for a shilling:
“‘Get out, you dirty little b__d,’, says I, for I knew his kind; Rugby had been crawling with 'em.”
For a fictionalised account of this change from anarchic early 19th century schools to the tightly regulated world of the late 19th century public school trySons of Fortune by Malcolm MacDonald. Without commenting on the whole book (or the four part saga of which it is a part) the description of the experiences of two brothers sent to a fictional public school in the late 1840s is very convincing and, I think, well researched. It charts the introduction by a new Headmaster of just the controls **Edmund **describes and the reaction of the boys to the changes.
Thanks for a fascinating reference. I’ve just ordered Sons of Fortune and much look forward to its insights.
I was in a minor English “Public School” in the period 1960-64. It was a long way short of Eton although it tried to model itself along Etonian lines. And homosexuality in various forms was rife and endemic in that school.
Several of the teachers were known to have favourites, young boys usually 14-16, who would spend time in the master’s private quarters - nobody would say precisely what went on.
There was fagging, of course, (for those who don’t know about fagging, it is a form of slavery whereby a senior boy would oblige a younger one to do his chores - boot cleaning, washing up, cleaning his study, ironing his uniform, running messages, seat warming on the outdoor lavatories, etc.) and at the start of each year, the prefects would eagerly look over the new boys to choose the best looking ones. Many of the seniors would have a favourite “little boy” a pretty boy with whom they would spend private time - a few chose not to and were rather regarded with contempt for their high moral stance. I was one of the uglier boys in my first year and so was largely (but not completely) left alone, but several of my contemporaries were in very heavy demand. Little was said about what happened in private, but in my case, the older boy who befriended me advised me to stretch my bottom using a piece of broom handle carefully sanded, polished and lubricated.
I don’t think that boys in their teens in the 60’s were overly concerned about moisturising their hands, but the school tuck-shop sold large quantities of a certain make of hand-cream, which the older boy purchased to lubricate himself. The smell of that cream, even now, brings it all back. This wasn’t all that went on - there was mutual masturbation and oral sex as well.
Privacy was an issue; there was almost no privacy at the school except for the prefects who had their own studies (my friend was a senior but not a prefect) we had to pretend an interest in photography to use the dark-room - the one place you could lock yourself in and not risk intrusion. Most of what went on was largely consensual - for me I went for it because in return I got some valuable protection from bullying - bullying was also rife and endemic.
I remember two instances where disciplinary action was taken. In one case a prefect and rugby captain had been caught having sex with one of the young Irish girls who did the cleaning - he was expelled although she was over the age of consent, and there was no doubt that she was a willing partner, however, she had got pregnant. A few months earlier, however, another prefect and cricket captain was found to have been forcing himself on a much younger boy (13 or 14) - there was no question of consent, and the boy had suffered some injury requiring medical attention - which is how it was discovered. The younger boy was withdrawn from the school by his parents. The older boy was suspended for a month, (but allowed back during this time to do his A-levels (university entrance exams)), and the whole thing was carefully hushed up. The whole school was assembled and instructed not to mention anything about it to anybody outside the school, especially the press - we didn’t want to bring the school into disrepute.
The contrast between the school’s responses to these two instances just summarised to me the warped logic of the whole system. I was glad to get out of there; bright enough to gain University entrance early, I left before I got senior enough to have my own “little boy”.
This is absolutely priceless as a piece of social history, and deserves to be published. Thank you very much, Peregrine. I at least am extremely grateful. I’ve studied the subject and read and heard enough to believe your story is far from untypical for the early sixties. Sadly though, very little has been written about it because openness about such goings on was largely impossible for boys in those days.
Most of the posts on this thread show complete ignorance that boarding-school life was so different a generation or two ago, and, more frighteningly for our understanding of the human condition, a genuine inability to imagine set-ups in which most older boys and most younger boys chose to have sexual relationships. It is very important because it shows a latent capacity for sex with boys has sometimes been an ordinary part of being male and nothing to do with being gay.
Cultural change can be so profound there is a serious danger of a gulf of incomprehension opening up between the generations if no one will record how things were, as you have done.
I have tried to do this for Eton in the 80s with my novel Alexander’s Choice, but Eton by then was already very different from what it had been in the 60s. I largely became aware of this through being one of very few who read the old “house books”. These were descriptions of every boy by the successive house captains. Many of the older ones down to the 60s were quite lurid analyses of which new boy was prettiest with obscurer references to which were being seduced by whom.
I’ve never bought that argument for a minute. I lost my virginity pretty late, and have had some pretty dry spells, but I can’t say that I ever considered getting any sort of sex activity from other men as a result.
Any number of prison documentaries make the existence of “situational homosexuality” pretty well established. And the Spy magazine article, while as snarky as Spy usually was, they also did well-respected investigative journalism.
Or as Lenny Bruce put it, men would “…fuck mud.”