Word: etonisms
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Such ringing conviction was the last thing his critics expected when Home took office last year. In fact, some were unkind enough to hold that his life had peaked 39 years before at Eton, where Classmate Cyril Connolly remembers him as "the graceful, tolerant, sleepy boy who is showered with favors and crowned with laurels, without any apparent exertion on his part. He appeared honorably ineligible for the struggle of life." At Christ Church College, Oxford, Home could not earn his blue at cricket, never matching his brilliant 66 on a sticky wicket for Eton against Harrow. He caught Neville...
Britain's famed public schools have long believed in the efficacy of corporal punishment (during this century at Eton, boys were held by two of their schoolmates over a flogging block to be beaten by teachers). The present Home Secretary, R.A.B. Butler, is on record "in favor of parents using the cane" on their offspring. A recent Gallup poll showed that 70% of British men, and a whopping 76% of British women, urge the flogging of young criminal offenders. Said a dejected British doctor: "Instead of feeling a sense of horror on hearing of some father brutally belting...
...combat paratrooper he was in World War II. "I eat, sleep and breathe the idea of trying to develop a literate public," says Kirchanski. He dislikes "snob" private schools as much as he does progressive public ones. "I'm not trying to form a precious little Groton or Eton. This is for kids, rich and poor, who want to learn. And what do we teach that's so damned unusual? Only the classics-reading, writing and arithmetic, the tools a human being needs to survive. We tell them not to worry about 'adjusting.' Get the tools...
...Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton...
Lamb then notes the well-known fact that Arthur Wellesley's real remark was far less martial, and last week Eton's Headmaster, Robert Birley, produced his own version. After Waterloo, according to Birley, Wellington visited his old house at Eton, where boarders in his day had been looked after by a Mrs. Naylor. Asking to see a stream in the garden, the Iron Duke explained : "I really think I learned my spirit of adventure jumping over the big black ditch at the bottom of Mrs. Naylor's garden...