–In last week’s Sunday Telegraph, Rowan Pelling had an article entitled “When single-sex schools die, will we all be poorer?” Here is an extract:
…I can’t help wondering how the shelves of children will look in 20 years after all the upheavals in the private education sector. Surely the subject of single-sex boarding schools will be firmly relegated to the realms of fantasy, if it informs literature at all.
This week The Telegraph revealed that Labour’s imposition of VAT on school fees has had a particularly brutal effect on single-sex independent schools, which are closing or going co-ed at a rate of knots. Once boys public schools littered the land, including many ropey ones (think of Evelyn Waugh’s Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall, teaching at Llanabba Castle School). Now there are only four all-boys boarding schools left in the UK: Eton, Harrow, Radley and Tonbridge. Meanwhile, all-girls establishments are racing to take boys, despite studies showing girls do best when educated separately.
Not only will children’s shelves be changed by the upheaval, adult literature will be transformed too. So many books I’ve loved unlock British history and our national temperament – in particular our stiff upper lip and fortitude – by taking an unsentimental look at boarding school life. Jane Eyre wouldn’t linger long in the imagination had she not triumphed over the hideous deprivations she endured at Lowood School. Logan Mountstuart in William Boyd’s Any Human Heart has a life underpinned by the friendships and rivalries he establishes at public school.
More chilling is Sebastian Faulks’ fine novel Engleby, where the working-class anti-hero is at an “ancient university” after winning a scholarship to Chatfield, a public school for the sons of naval officers. During his schooldays he was hideously bullied and called “Toilet Engleby” for the heinous crime of not saying “lavatory”, like his posher classmates.
If you think that sounds off-putting, then I can only say that literary memoirs like Charles Spencer’s A Very Private Education and Antonia White’s Frost in May are darker still. But they’re also beautifully written, salutary reminders that a late 20th-century revolution in the field of child psychology served to revolutionise private education, introducing the previously alien concept of well-being.
Not all boarding-school lit is grim.
Look at James Hilton’s Goodbye, Mr Chips, a tear-jerking love letter to the finest teachers, while many women would kill to take refuge from modern life at Angela Brazil’s St Chad’s. The sad fact is these time-honoured avenues of escapism will slowly disappear, along with the schools themselves. Future generations, schooled by AI, will never know the worlds of nuance summoned by the phrase “chiz-chiz”. It will all be another country…
This week’s edition of The Sunday Telegraph has an article by Felicity Day entitled “Five literary houses that have been lost to history”. One of those is Plas Dulas in Wales which she notes had been visited many times by Waugh when he was teaching in a single-sex school nearby (or possibly in the house itself), as mentioned above and described in Decline and Fall. According to the Telegraph:
The author visited and dined in the house on many occasions during the six months he spend in Llanddulas in 1925 when he was teaching at the nearby Arnold House school. It is thought that it was an inspiration for Llanabba Castle, home for the boy’s school where hapless Paul Pennyfeather is employed after his expulsion from Oxford in 1928’s Decline and Fall. Waugh may have even written parts of the novel at Plas Dulas itself.
More details on this are available in a previous post. The Telegraph article posted in Yahoo Entertainment is dated Sat, April 5, 2025 at 11:15AM so may have appeared in that day’s edition of the Daily Telegraph or the next day’s edition of the Sunday Telegraph or a later issue.
—The Tatler has an article by Ben Jureidini about filming of the Downton Abbey grand finale in the country house known as Highclere Castle in Hampshire. Here are the opening paragraphs:
When writer Evelyn Waugh arrived in Georgetown, British Guyana, he was probably in need of a break. The journey overland had been exhausting, and the recently divorced writer was probably still languishing in the throes of unrequited love for socialite Teresa Jungman. This 700-mile psychomachia in the Amazonian rainforest would go on to inspire A Handful of Dust, one of Waugh’s most sinister novels. Clearly, though, between scorpion-ridden mattress, soporific rum swizzles and vampire bats, Waugh found himself in suitable comfort to employ one of his most exclusive of adjectives. ‘Darling Blondy and Poll,’ he wrote in a letter to Lady Mary Lygon, the niece of the Duke of Westminster on whom Waugh would base Julia Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, ‘I am back in Georgetown and all the world is Highclere.’
So enamoured by Highclere Castle was this most caustic of high-society cartographers that Waugh would employ the name of the seat of the Earls of Carnarvon to describe any country house or weekend of partying that he deemed to be sufficiently luxurious. Almost a century later, its Jacobean towers and Capability Brown gardens attract thousands of visitors, who make the pilgrimage from climes as far flung as Tennessee to spend a day at the ‘real Downton Abbey’…
A branch of the family of Waugh’s second wife Laura Herbert lived at Highclere, but I have never seen any reference to Waugh’s having visited there. If anyone knows of such a visit, please send a comment.
—The Tatler also has an article anticipating the release of a new dramatic TV series based on the Mitford sisters. This is by Clara Strunck. Here are some excerpts from the article:
New drama Outrageous will delve into the lives of the Mitford sisters, promising to ‘bring the full, uncensored story’ of the family’s scandalous exploits to life, according to the show description. The series – which will be based on Mary S. Lovell’s biography, The Mitford Girls – features Tatler cover star Bessie Carter (best known for her role as Prudence Featherington in Bridgerton) as the much-loved author, Nancy Mitford; other cast members include Anna Chancellor as the Mitfords’ mother.
The article goes on to offer photos and brief biographies of each sister. Waugh was a close friend of Nancy and also knew Diana and Deborah quite well. His friendship with Diana is mentioned:
Earning plenty of column inches for her political affiliations, Diana made a name for herself not just as an author and reviewer (at one point, she even contributed to Tatler and Evelyn Waugh’s famous novel, Vile Bodies, is dedicated to her) but for her controversial marriages. Although she initially wed Bryan Guinness, heir to the barony of Moyne, the partnership ended in divorce as Diana was pursuing a relationship with Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists.
In 1936, she married Mosley at the home of Joseph Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler as a guest of honour. Her choice of husband strained relationships with her family, particularly Diana’s younger sister Jessica, who became permanently estranged from the couple in the later 1930s. Nancy’s novel, Wigs on the Green, satirised Mosley and his beliefs and, after it was published in 1935, relations between the sisters were even more frosty…
They might have mentioned that Waugh dedicated both Vile Bodies and his travel book Labels to Diana and her husband, while his novella The Loved One was dedicated to Nancy.
–Finally, a TV review in The Sunday Times by Rod Liddle finds a BBC TV series that had an ending reminiscent of a Waugh novel:
… There were plenty of laughs to be had on the box this week if you were prepared to look for them — for a start, Tribe (BBC2), which had me howling with mirth. The format is simple. Take a simpering, endlessly credulous amateur anthropologist and shove him somewhere really remote — among a tribe of Lost People Who Have Never Encountered Civilisation, say — and see how he gets on. It was a scream.
The dupe was a wide-eyed Bruce Parry who, 20 years after his adventures in the first series, was deposited among the Waimaha (who hate outsiders) in the Amazonian rainforests of Colombia. His task was to be allowed to take part in the tribe’s “magical” ceremony, where they dance around a bit and get blitzed out of their skulls on yagé, a hallucinogenic plant extract. […]
It was a neat conceit for a comedy, unveiling the epic condescension that lies at the heart of these non-judgmental liberals. It seems to have been based on the final chapters of Evelyn Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust, in which poor Tony Last ends up marooned in the Amazon. One can only hope that at some point Parry is captured by a madman and forced to read aloud the entire works of Dickens. It would be a brilliant ending … I think next week’s episode is set in Sheerness.
UPDATE: 8 April 2025 relating to Telegraph article re Plas Dulas.
