Fags
My English Traits, Chapter 27 - Confessions of a Sarf Efrikin Abroad
When Randolph Silliman Bourne was born in Bloomfield, New Jersey in 1886, the umbilical cord was coiled round his left ear. Clumsy forceps left his head permanently damaged and misshapen. At age four he suffered tuberculosis of the spine. He lived out the rest of his short, painful life with a stunted body and a hunched back. Knowing that he didn’t have long to think, he thought hard, quickly and deeply.
One of the questions that obsessed him was what it meant to be an American, particularly in relation to his dominantly English cultural heritage, which is how he came to my attention and why he interests me. His “moral bath”, as he would call this exercise of self-reflection, left him squeaky clean in a matter of minutes. As a South African constantly troubled by similar questions concerning my English identity, my moral bath is getting muddier by the minute, the hour and the day.
Bourne had been reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau, specifically the 18th Century French philosopher’s concept of the “general will”, which is meant by Rousseau to locate all legal principles in the natural reason of ordinary citizens: that is, by deriving a society’s codes of behaviour from a sort of democracy of common sense. Bourne’s reaction was to exclaim:
Yes, that is what I would have felt, done, said! I could not judge him and his work by those standards that the hopelessly moral and complacent English have imposed upon our American mind. It was a sort of moral bath; it cleared up for me a whole new democratic morality and put the last touch upon the old English way of looking at the world in which I was brought up and which I had such a struggle to get rid of.
The momentous revelation of a truth that significantly alters the way we see the world or the way we see our place in the world is called an epiphany. The problem with epiphanies is that they imply the intervention of someone or something outside ourselves, a bias inherent in the Greek etymology of the word itself, the influence upon us (epi) of an apparition (phan-tasm). So we think of Saul on the road to Damascus, or other examples from our Western, Christian inheritance, and we expect epiphanies to happen to us, or be given to us, if we try hard enough and sincerely enough to open our minds to the possibility of their unexpected interventions..
Randolph Bourne’s “moral bath” is something very different: firstly because it has a secular accessibility, but secondly and more significantly because it is a process not of addition but of subtraction. It’s a cleansing, a washing out: a getting rid of, let’s say, the dirt and accumulated grime of the days — and metaphorically, therefore, of the extraneous, the superfluous, the unnecessary, the incidental and the non-essential. In his case, as they were to be in mine, they were his handicapping English traits.
When he located his revelation in the metaphor of water, Bourne may have been thinking of baptism, which is supposedly a washing out of original sin. But the shift in perspective is decisive. This is the adult, not the baby, and the bath will cleanse him or her of the accumulated assumptions and distortions of perception received from the historical legacies of his or her education, religion, nationality and culture.
Bourne died in the Spanish flu of 1918, the year my father was born. In his epic novel 1919, John Dos Passos dedicates an entire chapter and this poem to him:
If any man has a ghost
Bourne has a ghost,
a tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak
hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone streets still left in downtown New York,
crying out in a shrill soundless giggle;
War is the health of the state.
How epigrammatically sharp is that? — especially that last line clearly anticipating Orwell. But that’s another rabbit hole for later.
My moral bath also began when I was reading an ancient philosophical text. I hadn't discovered Bourne at the time, so my epiphany had to wait until now.
For as long as I can remember, I thought Estcourt High School was modelled on the time-honoured traditions and the venerable institutions of English society and British parliamentary democracy.
The staff room was the House of Lords. The debating society was the House of Commons. The headmaster had a Divine Right to rule over everyone and everything. The headmaster’s wife was The Queen. She also taught Maths, the queen of subjects. The teachers were the Secretaries for Health, Justice, Geography, History, Science, English, Agriculture, Culture and Foreign Affairs. Health was in charge of the sick-bay; Justice, in the person of the hostel master, was in charge of Prisons & Punishments; Foreign Affairs was in charge of arranging the rugby and cricket tours to Vryheid, Dundee, Glencoe, Ladysmith, Newcastle, Hilton, Balgowan and Salisbury. Ricky Roper Sunshine Toffee Junior Detective was Jacob Rees-Mogg.
The prefects were the secret police, the bailiffs, the slave drivers, the factory bosses and the plantation managers.
The boarders, even the Afrikaans speaking ones, were the True Brits. We thought of our Boer brothers and sisters the way the English think of the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish. They had white skins even if they had none of our culture.
The day-scholars were the much-resented migrants who came in and out of the school grounds more or less as they pleased. At least they had visas.
The black staff who cooked, cleaned and washed our clothes clearly didn’t. They appeared with the sunrise and disappeared when the sun set like the Romanian fruit-pickers of Lincolnshire.
The error of my thinking should have occurred to me earlier. I had read enough Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope and Powell to have known better. But when I was at Estcourt High School I had little or no reason to ponder the precepts and peculiarities of English society or British politics; and for the duration of my first twenty years of living in England I had more than enough reasons not to think about Estcourt High School.
It’s clear to me now that I had it the wrong way around: English society and British parliamentary democracy were and continue to be modelled precisely on the unwritten constitution and unexamined institutional arrangements of Estcourt High School.
This is less anachronistic than you may imagine. Like a dinosaur skeleton preserved by chance in a perfect storm of shifting geological sediments, Estcourt High School in the 1960s was a living fossil, preserved by an accident of time, geography and the diaspora of empire, of the New College School founded in Winchester, England, by William of Wykeham in 1379.
In the intervening seven centuries the English may have forgotten how and why, in 2022, they find nothing extraordinary in a makeshift arrangement that invites just one hundred extraordinarily privileged people to choose the next prime minister of a country of 67 million, and who hear not a trace of irony in telling themselves and the nation at large that the constitutional vacuum that legitimises this process is a shining exemplar of democracy at work. Indeed, they would look at you blankly if you posed it as a question.
But anyone who attended a British colonial boarding school in the mid-20th century will recognise it immediately as just one of the many variations of the rituals, traditions and practices of government that were bred in the steaming hothouse of feral corruptions that is the typical boarding school hostel, the excrescences of which were normalised by the tyranny of the prefect-fag relationship.
Fags and prefects; prefects and fags. It was a tyranny that had no constitution to restrain the greed, arrogance and lechery of it, no rules except precedent to justify it, and no recourse to an impartial judiciary to contain it, explain it or blame it on anyone or anything.
All of British politics, and all of the codes and complacencies of English society, come back to the same thing — the class divide between entitled prefects appointed by virtue of their entitlement alone, and the fags beneath them foolishly believing that the more abuse they suffer with uncomplaining stoicism at their hands of their oppressors, the better their chances of being elevated to take up a position among them. In their dreams.
This accommodation between childish expectation and callous exploitation will last as long as the fags cling to that hope. In other words, forever.
Oddly, it took an American to point it out to me. That sounds too deliberate. It was just a casual observation about English society, a passing phrase in a buried paragraph in an unremarkable chapter of a little-known book by a little-read American philosopher-poet by the name of Ralph Waldo Emerson from the largely forgotten 19th century that caught my attention. Grabbed it, actually, with both inky hands squeezing its choking throat so hard it couldn’t pay attention to anything else for three long years for lack of breath.
The fagging in the schools is repeated in the social classes.
Yes, I thought. That’s what I should have felt, done, said!
It took me much longer than Bourne did to reach a similar conclusion. I say “similar” because I don’t believe there’s anything complacent about the way the English select, curate, refine, polish and project their old English way of looking at the world — their idea of democratic morality — to the English-speaking world in particular, and to Churchill’s “Empire of the Mind”, which is all of the world that speaks English. As evidenced most recently by the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, it’s a work of staggering genius and breath-taking cynicism. And it never stops. It can’t.
If anyone drew back the curtain to reveal the secrets behind it, it would all be over.
This is the curtain.
The vast majority of the British population never had the privilege of being educated at a British public school. Which means the vast majority of the British population never had the privilege of spending ten years of their lives in a boarding establishment. Which means that they never experienced life as humiliated fags or hero-worshipped prefects. Which means, to take just one trivial example, they never had the privilege of getting up at cock-crow every day of the week to warm the designated frozen toilet seats of their designated prefects with their bed-warm bums on frosty winter mornings just in time for their aforesaid hero-worshipped prefects to arrive for their regular daybreak dumps.
Nor would they, in their turn as hero-worshipped prefects, have enjoyed the inestimable luxury of having their toilet seats warmed for them every frosty winter morning by terrified, shivering fags with knobbly, shaking knees and faces pale in the knowledge that in the event of their scrawny buttocks lacking the thermal energy required to heat their designated prefect’s toilet seat to his toasty satisfaction, they would be lucky to get away with a thorough rubbing of testicular wintergreen in preference to, say, a public buggering with the wrong end of a hockey stick in the prefects’ lounge.
All of which means that the vast majority of the British population is unaware that the privileged classes are looking down on them as fags who can’t and could never become prefects. They can’t help it. It’s bred in the bone.
Yes, the less-privileged classes doff their caps and tug their forelocks in the presence of their entitled superiors. They feel it even if they don’t see it. They do it in sublime ignorance, excruciatingly blind to the centuries of boarding school rituals that have ingrained in these pompous prigs a divine right to abuse, humiliate and loathe the fags they themselves used to be.
Those Red Wall Tories think they’re prefects. They’re not. They are fags with fantasies.
It can be no accident that twenty of Britain’s fifty-six prime ministers were educated at Eton. Parents with dreams of one of their sons becoming the twenty-first will pay a fraction under £50,000 a year, excluding tuck and uniforms, for the privilege of taking part in the lottery that produces them with such impressive regularity, if not with especially consistent degrees of competency, capability or common sense.
Seven British prime ministers, among them Winston Churchill, Stanley Baldwin and Robert Peel, were educated at Harrow. I’m reliably informed that twenty Old Harrovians, as Harrow alumni are known, were awarded the Victoria Cross. This will be of some interest later.
Eighteen of the remaining twenty-nine British prime ministers were educated at other ironically-named “public” schools such as Westminster, St Paul’s, Rugby and Winchester. Only eleven were educated at non-fee-paying schools, or government schools as we would call them in South Africa. Irony upon irony.
These are the schools that manufacture the psychological glue that keeps the fabric of the Great British Project from coming apart at the seams. It’s the curtain of societal sadomasochism that hides the secrets of Oz. It’s a mass psychosis. It’s a society-wide Stockholm syndrome dressed up as education.
I experienced all of the best and the worst of it at Estcourt High School in the 1960s. The entire complex with its hostels, its classrooms, its playing fields and its Memorial Hall was Wykeham’s 14th century relic untouched and untroubled by modern ideas of hygiene, nutrition, child-abuse legislation and common decency.
And that’s to touch only on the effect on individuals of the brutalising psychology of it. The economic consequences of it, at home and abroad, go much deeper and much further. The Commonwealth countries are still the fags to England’s empire of prefects. Of the English-speaking countries, only Bourne’s America freed itself from the endless circle of longing, hope and disillusionment that chains the rest of them like slaves in His Majesty’s great ship of Eton.
Emerson saw it clearly on his second visit to England a hundred years after I had left Estcourt High School for good. This is the paragraph in full:
The feudal system survives in the steep inequality of property and privilege, in the limited franchise, in the social barriers which confine patronage and promotion to a caste, and still more in the submissive ideas pervading these people. The fagging of the schools is repeated in the social classes. An Englishman shows no mercy to those below him in the social scale, as he looks for none from those above him; any forbearance from his superiors surprises him, and they suffer in his good opinion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1856 ffs.
And Bourne’s legacy lives on:
Bourne’s ghost is with us again. The causes with which he allied himself are again at the fore of political discourse, to the extent that reformers are assembling again under the banner of Progressivism.
Celeste Brewer, Bourne Archivist, 2019
But right now Boris Johnson’s toilet seat needs warming.
Brilliant!