ii) Lord James's Speech

This season culminates what in years to come might be known as the Nettleton era. Nettleton now leaves us after four years in the team, and in two years of captaincy he has lost only two School matches. His individual runs to date are 775, the highest since Norman Yardley.

W. R. Pickersgill might well not agree with the term—the Nettleton era—for it was he who claimed all 10 wickets for 13 runs in the match against Giggleswick this term. (56 wickets to date; only once since the war has this total been surpassed, in 1951 by J. J. Youll with 61 wickets).

Prospects for the future remain as bright as ever, for our Senior Colts team have had a quite outstanding unbeaten record this term.

The Squash team has had its best season for many years, being undefeated in school matches. Three of the team, J. J. Vooght, R. D. Harding and G. A. Willstrop, won all their matches against other schools. The Colts team was also unbeaten. J. J. Vooght retained the Northumberland Junior Squash Championship.

I have tried to give you a picture of the activities, achievements, hopes and aspirations of a large family of boys—certainly by no means conforming to any pattern or mould, but a group of individuals united in a common interest which makes our School. It is not fashionable today to beat the drum of "loyalty", "school tie" or what you may call it, to rest on privilege or to sit back on tradition. But I have never been more conscious in my long years in this responsible office of the enormous endeavour and selfless service of the staff I have the honour to lead, and of the devoted work of all at St. Peter's for the good of the School.

We look forward with confidence whatever the future may hold, and will continue to try to deserve that support with which our parents, old boys and friends encourage us in so rich measure.

LORD JAMES'S SPEECH

The Dean, Mr. Sheriff, my Lady Mayoress, Sheriff's Lady, Headmaster, Ladies and Gentlemen:

May I first say, in all sincerity, what a great honour it is to have been asked to distribute these prizes, partly because St. Peter's is an old and great School, but mainly, I think, because those of us who know something about the educational history of the last twenty-five years will know that it is the truth that there are, in fact, few schools in England that owe more to their present Headmaster than does this; although I expect everyone knows that, there is no harm in saying it again and explaining why I am particularly glad to be here.

The second thing I must do is to thank the speaker of the Latin oration for the kind things which he said. It is really a tribute to the human mind in its power of forgetting things which it wishes to forget. I think I was reasonably good at Latin in the London matriculation, but I listened to that speech in almost complete incomprehension. There were only four words I understood, and one of them was manifestly inappropriate since not even my best friend would associate the word "equitatis" with me. I should have thought that more people would have understood that joke in a school of this classical tradition, but although I paid tribute to the human mind I must also pay a tribute to the speaker, because even without the translation one has gathered from his manner that he was, indeed, saying kind things even if they were concealed in what can be called the decent obscurity of a learned language. 10

The problem of speech days is, as the Headmaster has said, always with us, and it is particularly difficult for me to-day, because I see so many of my friends in the audience, a number of whom could do speech day much better than I can. Speech day speeches tend to fall into one of four classes. There are the political that deal with academic policy, but on the whole I do not approve of those, because my views on academic policy are not always the same as other people's. Then there are the facetious, which I still do my best do avoid. Thirdly, there are the hortatory, and fourthly there are the completely disastrous. Mine will fall somewhere between the third and fourth categories. And if you think about it, of course, it is an almost impossible task that a speech day speaker is set. The age range with which he deals is considerable. On one hand he has got what we call in the educational racket "thirteen plus", on the other he has—well, years of discretion. And it is impossible, it is completely impossible, for any speaker to make a good speech that will cover that age range, and he had better make his mind up to it from the start. There are one or two other handicaps of course. There is the handicap that there is no form of oratory more euphemical than speech day oratory, by which I mean—over there—that you forget it faster than I forgot my Latin even. I remember asking a valued and truthful colleague at Manchester Grammar School once—he had been saying what great speakers they had had in the past before my day, great scholars and so on—and I asked him to remember a single sentence said by any of those great men, and the only sentence he was able to remember was, "Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen." which, although a valuable utterance in itself, is not something that one would wish to treasure over the years. One does stand up here knowing that by this time to-morrow morning, mercifully, everything that one has said will have been forgotten by everyone.

I am going to be quite honest—I am not going to bother about the parents, and I am certainly not going to bother about the staff or the governors. I am going to talk to the people I like talking to most and enjoy talking to most—the Sixth Form. Those who are leaving or those who are leaving next year, and the younger generations can—well they can sit there looking as though they were awake, really thinking about the things that they do think about when they are not really listening at all. I shall not mind a bit as long as you keep your eyes open. It is to the Sixth Form that I want to say a fewhoratory words, or explanatory words if you like, and I wish that afterwards we could go away somewhere and discuss them, because that is what I should really enjoy most.

My sort of speech day speech always begins by saying 'When I was in the Sixth Form", and I left the Sixth Form in 1927, not in the nineteenth century as some of you obviously think; but it is thity-eight years ago—not long in the history of a nation, but long in the history of our nation, because a lot of things have happened since then. The impact of science has grown more rapid. We have had a disastrous revolution in the world, the war, the face of the world has changed; and so, inevitably, have the problems facing the Sixth Forms. In many ways your life is a great deal easier than mine is. I know the scramble for University entrants and all that and yet, in fact, we know that if you do get into a University there are no financial barriers. In my day, unless your parents were reasonably well-off, you had to win not one scholarship, but two. Life is easy—it is easier in more obvious ways. You can travel much more freely; you have got more money; you have resources that we had not got. The radio was just beginning in my day, the telly did not exist, and that is plain advantage 1 1

in some ways for you. It has made many of you half illiterate, but I mean, in other ways, let us face it, you know more about music; you have a wider general knowledge, and you probably know more about the world; you have much more liberty: that is a fact. Those are advantages that you have got, but in some ways of course, the world is a great deal more difficult, I think, for you. The very facts of affluence have put more choices in your hands. The opportunities you have got make it more (rather than less) necessary for you to have better judgment than I. It makes, in other words, your education even more important for you than mine was for me. The world is more complex, it is richer, it is more precarious, and faced with this world I know that a lot of you feel as a lot of us feel at our age : how can anything we do make any difference whatever? Isn't the whole thing so complex that it is determined by affluence, over which we have no control at all? It is so easy for you, and for any of us, to drift into this Room-at-the-Top attitude in which one feels, "I really cannot affect the world, but I myself am going to be pretty cosy in it". That is an attitude but, inevitably, it is very easy for the intelligent young man of seventeen or eighteen to adopt, and his choices and his idealism is made more difficult, because there are all sorts of forces at work which make it far harder for you to think straight. The ad-man has come, you are bombarded by propaganda of one kind and another. How do you resist those kinds of approaches? This is a new and genuine difficulty, and faced with those difficulties there are four things that I would like to put into your mind—and it sounds as though I were going on for a long time, but I would remind the chap who is running the stopwatch for the Fourth Form sweep-stake on the length of my speech that bogey is sixteen minutes.

These four things are not things which I am going to discuss in any detail, but are four things which I am going to put into your mind. The first is that you have got to remember always that society is based on individuals. Some have more power and more responsibilities than others, and this is right and proper, but nevertheless all of us together constitute society. There is no mysterious "they" hidden away in C. P. Snow's "Corridors of Power" who can take your decisions for you. Ultimately, the kind of world which your children are going to live in, which you are going to live in for the next fifty years, will be determined by the accumulation of your choices, aesthetic choices, choices as regards truth, above all choices as regards morality. You are not simply a tiny cog in a big machine that has no effect on how that machine works. Secondly, if you turn to me and say, "Oh, what can the individual do?" 'What do you want us to do, having thrown these sort of woolly questions at us?" The first thing, of course, that you have got to do, is to be good at your job, because the future ultimately depends on that. It depends on all of us trying to do our particular job as well as we can, to develop our talents as highly as we are able. One of the greatest of modern philosophers, Whitehead, said forty years ago, "In the conditions of modern life the rule is absent. Not all your wit, not all your determination, not all your victories o'er land and sea, can move back the finger of fate. The nation that does not value tried intelligence is doomed." That was Whitehead forty years ago and now, of course, this is a platitude, but we know it was not a platitude when he said it. It is true now, but let us remember what it means for us now. It means that we have got to be good if we are to survive. We are a poor country; we are one of the poorer of the great countries in our natural resources. If we are to accomplish the visions which we have for 12

the kind of country this could be; if we are to put into operation our schemes of social improvements and all that, then everyone of us has got to develop that intelligence that he has, whether it is highly academic, whether it is practical, whether it is high or whether it is low; it has got to be trained absolutely to its limit, and any scheme of educational reorganisation has •got to have Whitehead's words in mind. The nation that does not value tried intelligence is doomed. Truer to-day than it has ever been. I am not saying that everyone should go to a University, because they should not; but I am saying that if they go they have to become good chemists or good doctors in so far as they can, and if they do not, then they have got to be good farmers or good chartered accountants or good engine-drivers. But the basis of education, the first basis, is intellectual; but the second thing is not only to develop oneself and one's own intellect and to prepare for the things of the mind to follow rightly. The second thing, of course, that you have got to do is to determine, not necessarily at this stage, but at some stage, to do something beyond your job, to do something probably for which you are not paid.

I would ask you to think—Sixth Form—to think for a moment about how much of the work of this country is done by voluntary effort. I want you to think, not necessarily of spectacular voluntary activities, although those are terribly important, I mean things like V.S.O. I want you to think of the day-to-day rather dull sitting on unpaid committees or benches, or whatever it may be, of people who know that their duty to society is not finished when they have done their job well. As soon as we cease having voluntary activity in this country, as soon as people like you are going to cease having the sense of obligation to do something for which you are not paid, then I will really believe in national decline. That, I think, is very important, and thirdly, the third point I want to put into your mind is this, and it has been put dozens of times, but it is true. In a place like this you have •got a particular responsibility, you are privileged—let us be honest about it. This is a good school, you come from good homes; on the whole, although your teachers are reluctant to realise it, you are above the average in intelligence—difficult to grasp but true—well now, grasp it. It is nothing to be proud of. In a way you were born like that, but the fact that you are more intelligent, the fact that you are privileged does mean, of course, that you have got more responsibility. It is not cimply an opportunity for you to do better in life because, quite obviously, if your values fail, if you do not recognise truth when you see it, if you prefer the cheap to the worthwhile, then what can one expect of the rest of society? I am not presenting you with a dull life, but I am saying, whatever you like, whatever you go for, let it be the best of its kind. I am not saying we have got to listen to Mozart's String Quartets all the time, but if you do listen to something else, then make it good. Make it Dave Brubeck or something, but not the Rolling Stones. Go for the best, not necessarily, I allow, not necessarily dull, but the best, because society, ultimately, whether we like it or not—let us be realistic— society is going to be influenced unduly as it were, according to your tastes and by your judgements and your leadership.

And the last thing I want to put into your mind is the most difficult of all for your generation. I have spoken about the "hidden persuaders", as one American writer called it—the people who are trying to affect your minds from propaganda, from advertisement, trying to persuade you on the telly that cigarette smoking is really good for the lungs after all, and it helps you float down the river in a punt. How is one to withstand not 13

only that, but much more insidious forms of propaganda? You have got to be tough, you have got to develop a tough mind in scepticism. And the good school, and this is a good school, encourages you to do that to question everything, to accept nothing, to go away from the hall this morning taking my arguments apart—and I hope you will, finding out the inconsistences. do it—splendid—but there is a danger, and this is where the difficulty comes in. There is a danger of being sceptical, in which scepticism becomes cynicism, in which you cease to believe that there is any ascertainable truth at all, in which all standards of value deliquesce in a general air of smartness—the sort of "Private Eye" approach to the world. What you have got to do is to walk that narrow, difficult edge between scepticism on the one side, and an ingenuous idealism on the other. You have got to be tough and yet somehow you have got to keep your ideas. And remember that one of the two greatest teachers who ever lived, Socrates, who taught people to question as no-one has ever taught them to question before, to take every great word and deflate it, to say "What does he really mean?" Socrates, with all his cepticism, had an idealism for which he was prepared to die—in fact, as you know, did die. It is possible to combine scepticism and idealism, scepticism and some kinds of belief, but it is difficult and it will need your toughest and greatest efforts. All these things, of course, that a good school does. You have heard it dozens of times, but because they are platitudes it does not mean that they are no longer true. A good school does teach them, but they are so difficult that they do demand, of course, life-long effort. There is so much to know, the problems are so great in the world of to-day, that you do not finish your education at sixteen—you should not finish your education at seventeen, eighteen or twenty-three. You are really, at eighteen, at the beginning of what one hopes will be a life-long educational process.

The funny story that I always tell on these occasions appeared in "Punch" years ago, and it was a girls' school, and the Headmistress was there, and the distinguished stooge who was presenting the prizes was there; and he turned to her and said, 'What do I do? 'Say that I never won any, ask for a half holiday and tell them that the future of the world rests on their shoulders?" I won't say I never won any, but I am not sure what the tradition of this school is about half holidays or semi-days, or whatever we call them (but you are probably too superior to go in for them). Anyway, it is the end of the term, but I will find this out afterwards, and enter into negotiations on your behalf. But the other thing, of course—the ultimate bromide—the future rests on your shoulders, and of course it is true that on your value of judgments, on you fighting for what is true and disinteresting, on that kind of eternal battle that one fights with oneself, on you winning it in some degree, does depend the kind of country this will be, the kind of world this will be. Because the world will continue to shrink in the next forty, fifty and sixty years; and that is why the last picture I will leave in your minds is the picture that was drawn of education by the greatest of all writers on education. In the Republic, Plato outlines an education, not in some ways dissimilar from yours, except that he was ahead of his time and his education was co-educational, in more correspondence with the University of York—but anyway, an education similar to yours. It was academic, it combined the academic with the athletic. He possibly overdid the athletics (I would not know), but at any rate, there was this hard core of the intellectual life that he believed in, education that would go on or off throughout life—an education founded on Mathematics and leading ultimately to Philosophy, because he 14