Five characters in search of their author’s alma mater, David Warnes Cradle of Writers by Patrick Humphries

–Reviews Five characters in search of their author’s alma mater

David Warnes reviews…

Cradle of Writers by Patrick Humphries, Dulwich College Quatercentenary, London, 2019. ISBN 978-0-9539493-6-6. Our School Stories, by multiple authors, Dulwich College Quatercentenary, London, 2019. ISBN 978-0-9539493-5-9.

I always leave the reception-room unlocked. In case I have a client. That morning I had four. Which was four more than in the last month. Four clients and a hangover that had me feeling a small rodent had settled down in my mouth and died happy. The red settee and the two armchairs were occupied, leaving one client standing by the library table. He was tall, stiff and thin, like one of those well-pruned cypress trees they have in tubs on the sidewalk on Sunset Boulevard. Brown hair, greying at the temples and receding faster than the tide on Hermosa Beach. He was wearing an old-fashioned naval uniform. A Hollywood bit player, I guessed. He’d picked up a well-thumbed of the New Yorker and had the puzzled look of a man whose expectation of entertainment has been disappointed. So, not a regular reader of the New Yorker. The sofa was accommodating a woman. It had the capacity to accommodate a man as well, but none of the three had chanced it. She was wearing a lovat tweed skirt, and shoes so sensible they looked as though they’d rather be in Boston. Her expression, hawk-nosed and hard-eyed under a floss of grey hair, suggested that she and the shoes were in full agreement. At least she wasn’t in costume, unlike the sailor and the two characters who had opted for the armchairs. One had come in a scarlet military uniform. He had the muscles to fill it, but his long legs were shifting uneasily across my carpet. His dark hair didn’t match an unconvincing blonde moustache, but at this distance there was no way of telling whether the moustache was a home-grown mistake or the work of a less than competent make-up girl at MGM. The other guy – I guessed it was a guy on the basis of his bulk, his costume being the biggest attempt at a cover-up since Teapot Dome – was wearing clovenfooted leather boots, a hairy body suit and a goatish face mask with curly horns.

“Did you come together?” I asked. They nodded. “So, what is this? A class action against Warner Brothers?” They shook their heads. “Some beef with Central Casting?”

They shook their heads a second time. About as communicative as Trappists in Lent.

“OK. Let’s start with names.” I pointed at the navy guy. “Captain Horatio Hornblower”. “And you, lady?”

“Agatha Gregson, Bertram’s Aunt Agatha”. Said in a voice that was all sour and no whisky. Bertram had my sympathy, whoever he was.

I turned towards the one in regimentals. “Lieutenant Harry Feversham”. The goat needed no prompting. “Our name is Legion”. “So, what brings you here?”

“We have but one shared interest” said Aunt Agatha. “Our writers were all educated at Dulwich College.”

Of all the shamuses in all the towns in all the world, there had to be a reason they picked me.

“That figures” I said, “I guess it’s the one thing we all have in common.”

There can be few schools which have shaped such diverse creative talents as C.S. Forester, P.G. Wodehouse, A.E.W. Mason, Dennis Wheatley and Raymond Chandler, a truth entertainingly explored in Cradle of Writers by Patrick Humphries, one of a number of volumes published by the College to mark its Quatercentenary in 2019. More recently, the far from mean streets of SE21 have seen writers as diverse

as Graham Swift, Michael Ondaatje, Tom McCarthy and Tom Rob Smith making their way to school. Their work is briefly and perceptively explored in a pendant chapter by the current Master, Dr Joe Spence.

Humphries, who has also written the definitive biography of Lonnie Donegan, provides the reader with a brief life of each of his subjects, a colourful sense of the contexts in which they were educated and in which they wrote, and a lively critical appraisal of their work. The volume is illustrated with photographs, reproductions of book jackets and cinema posters. It contains much interesting detail, and it is regrettable that there are no footnotes to enable the reader to explore this more fully, and no index.

Two of the writers, Wheatley and Forester, spent little time at Dulwich and loathed it. Mason and Chandler, there for longer, were more appreciative. Wodehouse revelled in his schooldays, revisiting the College frequently until his wartime indiscretions made him an exile. For the rest of his life he pored over the sports reports in The Alleynian, which he had edited in his youth, complaining when he thought them insufficiently detailed. His juvenilia, to be found in its back numbers, showed few signs of incipient comic genius and failed to impress A.H. Gilkes, one of the College’s most distinguished Masters, who wrote of the 18 year-old Pelham that he was ‘a most impractical boy who found difficulties in the most simple things’ with ‘the most distorted ideas about wit and humour’.

Few people contrive, as A.E.W. Mason did, to be a prolific author of novels, plays and stories, a Member of Parliament and an Army officer. He lied about his age in order to enlist, and Humphries suggests that the account that he gave to his biographer Roger Lancelyn Green of the secret work that he did for the government in the First World War owed more than a little to his novelist’s imagination. He is chiefly remembered for The Four Feathers, a ripping yarn which has been filmed no fewer than seven times. That his work has fallen out of favour suggests that Oscar Wilde was right when he damned one of Mason’s early efforts as ‘cold, boiled mutton’.

Dennis Wheatley endured a miserable year at Dulwich and plotted with a friend to run away to Canada. They got as far as Bromley, and Wheatley was expelled soon afterwards. He turned to writing when the bottom dropped out of the family wine business during the Great Depression. The Forbidden Territory (1933) was an immediate success, and a few years later came The Devil Rides Out, the first of several novels on the theme of Black Magic and, in Humphries’ view, ‘Wheatley’s best’. The crisis of 1940 saw the writer using his imagination to assist the General Staff. He wrote a paper, The Invasion and Conquest of Britain, from the point of view of the German High Command. It advocated the bombing of public schools ‘because these contain Britain’s officer class of tomorrow’. He continued to write best-sellers in the austere decade and a half that followed the war. A man of his time, his novels contain racist and homophobic elements and have fallen out of fashion, but he was, as Humphries acknowledges, ‘on occasion, capable of telling a rattling good yarn’.

C.S. Forester was, like Patrick O’Brian (a far subtler writer, with a deeper understanding of the period in which his novels are set), cagey about his personal life and inclined to fictionalise aspects of it. He was born Cecil Lewis Troughton Smith and his childhood in Camberwell was marred by separation from his father, who remained in Egypt, and his mother’s taking to

–Reviews drink. He attended Alleyn’s School for a while, transferring to Dulwich College in 1915. He hated his brief time there, perhaps because discipline was uncongenial to a sexually precocious teenager who had parted company with his virginity at the age of 13. His earliest literary success was a crime novel, Payment Deferred, published in 1926. The first Hornblower novel, The Happy Return, followed in 1937, by which time Forester had done time in Hollywood as a scriptwriter. Humphries rightly suggests that Hornblower is withdrawn, humourless, and fundamentally unhappy. ‘Quite why the books were so successful remains a mystery’, he wonders. Nevertheless, writers as diverse as Hemingway, Raymond Chandler and Roald Dahl have admired them. Perhaps their attraction lies in the way that their author, schooled in Hollywood, cuts to the chase, a point that Boris Johnson made in a Daily Telegraph article asserting the superiority of Forester’s sea stories to those of Patrick O’Brian and celebrating the enjoyment of ‘those of us who spent their nights with a torch under the bedclothes reading of the salt-spumed scourge of the French fleet’.

To P.G. Wodehouse success seemed to come effortlessly. Great events such as the First World War scarcely impinged on him. ‘It was’, Humphries shrewdly observes, ‘as if Wodehouse the man was still inhabited by the boy Pelham’. In agreeing to make wireless broadcasts to America while he was interned in Nazi Germany during the Second World War, Wodehouse displayed the naiveté of an escapist, a man ruefully aware that time and change were sweeping away the privileged milieu of which he wrote. Evelyn Waugh predicted that ‘Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in’.

Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler might seem to have little in common yet, as David Cannadine suggested, ‘both had an unparalleled ear for dialogue; both effectively deployed humour and both operated under the same moralistic umbrella they would have encountered at Dulwich’. Born in Chicago in 1888, Chandler arrived at Dulwich in 1900 and remained grateful for the four years he spent there, returning for a year as a supply teacher. After war service he moved back to the USA, taking up writing when his career as an accountant was undermined by alcoholism. In Philip Marlowe, the worldweary, cynical but fundamentally decent private investigator, he created an archetype. Plotting was never his strong point. When the film of The Big Sleep was in production, he received a desperate telegram asking ‘Who killed the chauffeur?’ to which, legend has it, he replied ‘Damned if I know’. Despite this, Hollywood beckoned and turbulent creative relationships with Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock resulted in memorable screenplays for Double Indemnity and Strangers on a Train. All five writers left a significant cinematic legacy, and Humphries devotes a chapter to this. The palm is surely shared by Chandler and Forester, whose books inspired two masterpieces, Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946) and John Huston’s The African Queen (1951), the second of which earned Humphrey Bogart a long-overdue Oscar.

Forester, Chandler and Wodehouse have deservedly secured an enduring readership, though Chandler is arguably the greatest of the Dulwich quintet. W.H. Auden praised his ‘powerful but extremely depressing books’, suggesting that they ‘should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art’.

That Dulwich continues to be a cradle of writers is evidenced by Our School Stories. Most of the authors, including Simon Brett, are Old Alleynians, though there are also contributions from a current pupil, Jack Probert, and the present Master, Joe Spence. It is a varied and interesting collection, with illustrations by Dulwich pupils. The cast includes Simon Brett’s Mr Glossop, a schoolmaster whose ‘once broad mind narrowed to the dimensions of a catheter’, and David Henry Wilson’s Okonko, the president of an unnamed country where his authority is so absolute that the goalkeeper who has the temerity to save a penalty he has kicked is jailed for five years. He tortures the English language in an effort to get it to reveal his meaning, reflecting on his years at a public school where they played the oval ball game and from which he was expelled for an assault on his Latin master, ‘a fragrant injustice which pleased me greatly’. Most moving of all are the two nameless soldiers in Alfie Keenan’s How Times Change, for whom ‘there will be no more first times’ because a bursting shell ensures that they will be boys forever. ‘A month later two mothers will read two tear-stained letters over and over, praying each time that the words might be different.’ David Warnes is the author of Russia: A modern history and Chronicle of the Russian Tsars

&THERE HERE Young musicians meet Maestro

The chance to take part in a masterclass with an internationally renowned conductor was an opportunity not to be missed for young musicians from schools in Bournemouth, Dorchester, Blandford, Ringwood and Winchester. Sir Mark Elder CH CBE, the Music Director of the Hallé Orchestra and former Music Director of English National Opera, hosted two special masterclasses during a recent return visit to his former school, Bryanston near Blandford.

Pupils from Thomas Hardye School and St Osmund’s CE Middle School in Dorchester, Ringwood School, Bournemouth School for Girls and Perins School near Winchester joined young music scholars from Bryanston as Sir Mark shared his passion for music and his experience as one of the world’s most respected conductors. As well as dedicated masterclasses for woodwind and strings, he hosted a compelling Q&A session and discussed the career aspirations and opportunities for talented musicians. His visit to the school concluded with a special ‘Desert Island Discs’ evening in a packed Sir Mark Elder Concert Hall where he outlined his life story and time at Bryanston and provided a candid and enlightening insight into the music that holds a special place in his heart.

“Musical education for every child, regardless of their background or circumstances, has such an important role to play in the healthy development of young inquisitive minds and in promoting emotional awareness as well as imagination and creativity,” said Sir Mark during his visit to Bryanston.

“We need to encourage and nurture today’s young musicians at every opportunity. Their skills and determination will, after all, underpin the continuation, future development and appreciation of music as a source of inspiration, surprise and comfort. It has been wonderful to meet so many talented and enthusiastic young musicians at this formative stage of their musical odyssey. And, for those aspiring to a professional music career, they have every reason to feel confident about the future. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this return to my educational roots and will be watching the progress of many of the young musicians I’ve met today with a great deal of interest.”

“Sir Mark’s visit to the school will live long in the memory of everyone he met,” says Stephen Williams, Bryanston’s Director of Music. “His enthusiasm and passion for music is truly infectious and it was a pleasure to see all of the young musicians who attended the masterclasses respond so positively to his warmth and attention to detail. It really was an inspirational experience for youngsters aspiring to a fulfilling life and career in the world of music and we are indebted to Sir Mark for giving so generously of his time. At a time when Music Education is under threat, this visit demonstrated how important music is in the development of rounded, imaginative individuals.”

Building on the success of the masterclasses with Sir Mark Elder and the school’s ongoing commitment to The Richard Ely Trust and the Dorset Rural Music School, Bryanston will be hosting an important Music Education Conference in the autumn. With a clear agenda to help stem the continuing erosion of music education in the region and to explore new opportunities for engaging young people in the world of music, teaching staff from both maintained and independent schools across the region will be attending the special event.

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