Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

In other words, they had added a metalwork division and a screen-printing room to the carpentry shop.

It was Very Much Uppingham’s Philosophy to develop the potential of every pupil.

In other words, the school’s A-level results and Oxbridge success rate were well below the average.

It was Very Much Uppingham’s Philosophy (even in my day unironically expressed) to turn out polite, cheerful, all-round chaps.

In other words the average Uppinghamian is a well-mannered, decent fellow with a stout heart but not too much between the ears.

If all this sounds like mocking criticism, it is not meant to.

Well-mannered, decent fellows with stout hearts and not too much between the ears were the gravy and potatoes of two world wars. The well-maintained memorials in Uppingham catalogue a greater roll of the dead than the size of the school warrants. If other, smarter schools provided the brilliant generals and tacticians who moved counters on maps at Staff HQ, then Uppingham served up the gallant young fellows who sprang so cheerfully and so unquestioningly up the trench ladders, leading their men into the certainty of muddy, bloody slaughter. What is more, Uppinghamians who survived would never be so unsporting or so tasteless as to write clever sceptical poetry about the experience afterwards.

There is a word which still means much to the English and which was for many years a rod for my back, a spur to prick the sides of my intent, a Fury from which to flee, a nemesis, an enemy, an anathema, a totem, a bugaboo and an accusation. I still recoil at its usage and its range of connotation. The word stands for everything I have always wanted not to be and everything and everyone I have felt apart from. It is the shibboleth of the club I would never join, could never join, the club outside whose doors I might stand jeering, while all the time a secret part of me watched with wretched self-loathing as the elected members pushed through the revolving doors, whistling, happy and self-assured. The word is

HEALTHY

– a word that needs some unpicking. Its meaning derives from whole and hale and is cognitively related to such words as holy and healing. Heal is to weal (as the Eleven Plus might say) as health is to wealth. To be healthy is to be whole and holy. To be unhealthy is to be unclean and unholy, insanitary and insane.

For the English the words healthy and hale, at their best, used to carry the full-bellied weight of florid good cheer, cakes and ale, halidom and festive Falstaffian winter wassail. By the end of the seventeenth century, the hale health of pagan holiday was expelled from the feasting-hall along with Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch by the sombre holy day piety and po-faced puritanism of Malvolio, Milton and Prynne. ‘Health!’ became no longer a bumping boozer’s toast but a quality of the immortal soul. Health no longer went with heartiness, but with purity.

‘For your soul’s health’s sake…‘ said the priest.

Thomas Arnold, and behind him Edward Thring and a squadron of other great Victorian pioneering headmasters, whiskers flowing in the breeze, found a new meaning for health. They twisted a poor Roman satirist’s cynical hope into the maxim of the Muscular Christian: Mens sana in corpore sano.

‘A healthy body makes a healthy mind,’ became the wilfully syllogistic mistranslation upon which a 'philosophy’ was founded. Cleanliness, generation upon generation of Britons were led to believe, was next to godliness. Health of body was to be looked upon as an outward and visible sign, to misappropriate the glorious poetry of the Eucharist, of an inward and spiritual health.

Thring had some reason to believe in Health, where health meant hygiene. During his headmastership of Uppingham School he had become infuriated by Uppingham Town’s refusal to do something about its sewers, whose antiquity and medieval inefficiency were causing regular outbreaks of typhus and typhoid amongst pupils and staff. With the furious energy and implacable will of all great Victorians, he moved the entire school hundreds of miles away to the seaside village of Borth in Wales until such time as Uppingham’s local economy suffered enough to force its burghers to do something about their sanitation and, literally, to clean up their act. Thring and the school returned in triumph to a hygienic Uppingham and the school’s Borthday is annually celebrated still.

It is one thing to build sanitation systems that inhibit the breeding of unhealthy bacteria and bacilli, but it is another to build educational systems that inhibit the breeding of unhealthy ideas and beliefs. Besides, while we can universally agree that cholera, typhus and typhoid are unhealthy we are unable to come anywhere close to consensus as to the healthiness or otherwise of ideas. I suppose today, the fashionable word to apply is ‘meme’, the evolutionary scientist’s new buzz-word, a concept that applies the model of the selfish gene and the greedily self-replicating virus to movements in thought, to philosophies, religions, political tendencies, trends in individualism and sexual licence, to growth, development, change and ideo-diversity in everything from the rights of animals to the rights of man. One model is as good as another, but today’s memologists kid themselves if they think they were the first to look on ideas as diseases. Their twist is to call religion the virus, where their predecessors looked on atheism, humanism and free-thinking as the contagions. Scientists bring the pure neutrality of φυσις and the beautiful self-working holiness of nature to bear upon the problem. Their grandfathers, Charles Darwin s furious contemporaries, invoked the Bible, the edicts of Empire and that curious Victorian morality that believed worthiness to be the same as worth and healthiness the same as health.

The religiosity of the public schools had sown into it, praise the Lord, the seeds of its own destruction, for the cornerstone of public school education was a study of the languages of classical antiquity, Latin and Greek, and a study of the classics leads the alert reader away from the revealed claims of ecclesiasticism and towards the beauty and holiness of Socrates, Plato and Lucretius.

Uppingham School has very few alumni of whom it can boast in terms of that fell whore, Fame. The odd politician (Stephen Dorrell being the current foremost example), the even odder explorer and eccentric (the Campbells, Donald and Malcolm, for example) an odd actor or two (William Henry Pratt was in my House and achieved eternal glory under the wisely altered name of Boris Karloff), the great director John Schlesinger was there too, but very few writers and artists. Indeed the best known writers to have attended Uppingham include a most exotic trio of early twentieth-century minors. James Elroy Flecker for example, a poet and dramatist whose best known work Hassan was set to incidental music by Delius and contains splendid mock Arabian felicities like, ‘Shall I then put down the needle of insinuation and pick up the club of statement?’ and the couplet that should be the motto of every unhealthy schoolboy:

For lust of knowing what should not be known, We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

Flecker’s contemporary at Uppingham was the exotic Arthur Annesley, better known as Ronald Firbank, whose books included Vainglory, Valmouth and Sorrow in the Sunlight, unfortunately retitled as Prancing Nigger. Firbank remains even today near the top of the essential reading list of every well-read literary queen. He was a great favourite of ‘better’ writers like Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and his writing exemplifies par excellence that style of poisonous, luxuriant prose that Cyril Connolly defined as the Mandarin. As E. M. Forster wrote of him and his louche created world of birettas, lace-stays and pomanders, ‘Is he affected? Yes always… Is he himself healthy? Perish the thought!’