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The Sunday Telegraph {Seven}
Keyword:
Bethlem Royal Hospital
UK
Sunday 27, October 2013
34,35
651 sq. cm
ABC 440388 Weekly
page rate £34,000.00, scc rate £80.00
020 7538 5000
Television
Your complete seven-day guide
The week ahead
Whatever happened to the Radley
boys of 1980’s ‘Public School’?
A VERY ENGLISH EDUCATION
BBC Two, Sunday, 9.00pm/NI, 11.25pm
‘C
ome along you vile boy,”
says Mr Goldsmith as a
pupil walks into his very
first lesson at Radley College. He
then throws a stern look at the TV
camera observing the scene.
For better or worse, a few things
have changed since the BBC’s very
first education-related fly-on-thewall documentary. Made in 1979
and shown in 1980, Public School
followed pupils at the all-boys
boarding school in Oxfordshire,
where, as headmaster Dennis Silk
told the boys in their first
assembly, young men acquire the
“right habits for life”. What were
these habits, did they stick and
were they worth £3,000 a year?
This week a one-off film, A Very
English Education, finds out what
became of the “vile boys” from
that documentary.
On one level, the new film is a
good excuse to dig up archive
footage of a world in which
schoolmasters poured out glasses
of cider for 12-year-old boys and
said things like: “Well done,
you’ve got a full scholarship to
Radley… Now I’m not going to let
you have more than one glass of
cider because you’ve got a hockey
match tomorrow.”
There is a satisfaction too, in
catching up with gregarious
schoolboys like Paige Newmark –
“everybody w---s here, nobody
h
has any qualms about saying it” –
who is now a theatre director in
Perth, Australia; and precocious
ones such as Rupert Gather, who
fancied himself a “cultured
intellectual”, didn’t quite know
the meaning of terms such as
“ivory tower” but used them
liberally anyway – and who is
now an investment banker.
Coming two weeks after the
depressing conclusions of the
State of the Nation report on
social mobility in Britain, the
one-hour film inevitably has a
more probing side. It sets out,
gently, to examine the pros and
cons of the system. In 1979 public
boarding schools such as Radley
were “a club”, as one mother now
puts it in the film. Now they are
internationally famous both for
delivering top education, and for
contributing to the nation’s
insoluble divide.
Among the chosen six alumni is
David Roper-Curzon, the eldest
son of the 20th Baron Teynham.
Aged 16, he refused to go back to
school because he was “fed up of
being told what to do”. RoperCurzon went to boarding school
at eight. “I remember clinging on
to my parents’ car as they drove
away. It was a shock to the
system. You know.” RoperCurzon says he was a “bit of a
loner” at school. “Those who
were into the arts like me – and
the two or three others at Radley
– would have sat separately at the
lunch table, and probably got
scowled at.”
His best memories of Radley
now are “the bacon sandwiches,
and the chapel organ which had
just been built and made a terrific
noise”. Roper-Curzon is now a
sculptor, and he and his wife
work hard every day to prevent
his inherited mansion (with
“about 15 bedrooms”) from
crumbling. There are certain
things that still haunt him from
the termly grammar tests. “Every
time somebody on the news says
‘ha-RASSment’, I scream at the
telly, ‘HARASS-ment’.” But despite
voting with his feet as a youth,
Roper-Curzon sent his youngest
son to a private boarding school,
and seems to have no strong
feelings about Radley or the
public school system.
By contrast Tim Huxley, a vicar’s
son from Newcastle who was
“down the list” on the pecking
order at Radley because of his
Geordie accent, has a great deal
to say about his school days.
“Pivotal,” he says, calling
headmaster Dennis Silk “the
most influential man on my life
besides my father”. In the school
holidays Huxley returned to the
North where the coal mines were
closing. “At the time I thought:
there’s something quite unjust
here… I wanted to make people
more aware of what the world
was.” He turned his anger at what
he calls a “sense of entitlement”
that was ubiquitous at Radley to
his advantage, becoming
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The Sunday Telegraph {Seven}
Keyword:
Bethlem Royal Hospital
UK
Sunday 27, October 2013
34,35
651 sq. cm
ABC 440388 Weekly
page rate £34,000.00, scc rate £80.00
020 7538 5000
secretary of the debating society.
“The time is ripe for a
revolution!” he shouts in some
1979 archive footage. Perhaps
unexpectedly, Huxley, now the
CEO of a shipping company,
turns out to be the biggest
advocate of the private school
system (probably the least
enthusiastic is former scholar
Donald Payne, whose interview is
very moving). So what happened
and why does he now think that
the private school system is
“fundamentally not unfair”?
“When I shook off the 18-year-old
radical I realised the best way to
help the world was to create
jobs.” Speaking to me from a bar
in Hong Kong, his home of 25
years, he says, “A lot of people
leave those schools with a sense
of social responsibility.”
Huxley is the most frank about
how boarding school affected the
boys’ characters. “You don’t show
emotion. I don’t show emotion.
People still criticise me for that.”
Why? “It’s a sign of weakness. I
suppose somebody might have
exploited it.” Unmarried and
childless, Tim quotes his former
headmaster saying he’s acquired
“good habits for life” – and can
look after himself (“I’m always
out of the office by midnight”).
It’s followed by one of the most
telling questions in the film: “Do
you think you look after yourself
too well?” This is followed by a
long silence before the reply,
“Maybe.” Florence Waters
told what to do’
DON’T MISS
RIPPER STREET
BBC One, Monday, 9.00pm
A second series for the police drama.
Matthew Macfadyen’s DI investigates
a gory crime in Victorian London.
THE ESCAPE ARTIST
BBC One, Tuesday, 9.00pm
Gripping three-part legal thriller
starring David Tennant as a cynical
barrister representing a sinister client.
BEDLAM
Channel 4, Thursday, 9.00pm
The first film in an absorbing series
about mental illness looks at the
modern face of Royal Bethlem
Hospital, Europe’s oldest psychiatric
institution.
OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
ITV, Friday, 8.00pm
Ever-enthusiatic Christine Bleakley
explores the best bits of the UK that
are “hidden from view”.
Aged 16, David
refused to go
back to Radley
because he was
‘fed up of being
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copying (including printing of digital cuttings), digital reproduction/forwarding of the cutting is permitted except under licence from the copyright
owner. All FT content is copyright The Financial Times Ltd.
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The Sunday Telegraph {Seven}
Keyword:
Bethlem Royal Hospital
UK
Sunday 27, October 2013
34,35
651 sq. cm
ABC 440388 Weekly
page rate £34,000.00, scc rate £80.00
020 7538 5000
LOOKING BACK David Roper-Curzon,
a former pupil of Radley College
Reproduced by Gorkana under licence from the NLA (newspapers), CLA (magazines), FT (Financial Times/ft.com) or other copyright owner. No further
copying (including printing of digital cuttings), digital reproduction/forwarding of the cutting is permitted except under licence from the copyright
owner. All FT content is copyright The Financial Times Ltd.
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