Word: etonians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...took a cheap room in London and spent hours each day at his typewriter, tapping out the kind of story that began "Inside the park, the crocuses were out . . ." At night, he began "tramping," haunting the slums, occasionally taking a bed in lodginghouses for the destitute, hoping that his Etonian accent would not give him away: "What I profoundly wanted, at that time, was to find some way of getting out of the respectable world altogether...
...Orwell and his wife lived in London. Cyril Connolly recalled: "He felt enormously at home in the Blitz, among the bombs, the bravery, the rubble, the shortages, the homeless, the signs of rising revolutionary temper." By then Orwell had become something of a celebrated eccentric, that gaunt Etonian who dressed like a working man (corduroy trousers, dark shirt, size-twelve boots), rolled his cigarettes from a pouch of acrid shag and poured his tea into a saucer before drinking it (there he goes, that Socialist who says such terrible things about Mr. Stalin). Eric Blair had totally metamorphosed into George...
...dimmer view of the Games. Orwell called them "war minus the shooting." The connection with war has always been up front. Coubertin, who argued for French colonialism as ardently as he did for reviving the Olympics, admired the relationship between British colonialism and sports in the public schools. Every Etonian knows how Wellington is supposed to have explained Waterloo. Hitler, who had a way with brass tacks, said bluntly in Mein Kampf: Give me an athlete and I'll give you an army -which he did, to Austria, two years after the success of the 1936 Berlin Olympics...
...headmaster McCrum nudged ten of Eton's 25 independent houses into giving up fagging voluntarily. But the rest refused. Among pupils and old boys, fagging remains popular. Indeed, ex-fags point to benefits from fagging. "You learn how to command by learning how to obey," says one Old Etonian. Beyond that, a good senior, or "fag master," helps new boys find their way around the complex campus and sometimes becomes a lifelong friend. Recalls Sir John Hogg, 62, chairman of the Old Etonian Association: "I had an extraordinarily good fellow as one of my fag masters. Our contact bridged...
...exactly enjoy being a fag myself, but thanks to some Library boys who threw their eggs in my direction when I didn't cook them properly, I know all about poached eggs." Still, the practice must go at Eton, as it has already elsewhere in Britain. Says Old Etonian Lord Redcliffe-Maud: "It's a source of misunderstanding by outsiders, who regard fagging as a brutal form of slavery. It's nothing like that of course, but people think it is, and that's enough...