Hard Times

I promised some more about RL Ashcroft's Random Recollections of Haileybury. It is a collection of articles for the Haileyburian written in the 1950s and designed to be amusing and interesting for the pupils of the day. Some of it is frankly no longer funny, if indeed it ever was, but it remains a mine of information about the school and its community in the second quarter of the twentieth century.

It is sometimes quipped that the regime in the Public Schools of the day was deliberately hard so that the boys would be prepared for life as prisoners of war. Ashcroft, writing in 1954, states with a frighteningly straight face that this was in fact the case:

"Many years ago when I visited the lower Lawrence houseroom (where the West Portico now is) and found all the boys in it absorbed in watching a boy eat a live worm. Before I arrived he had dealt with one already, after passing the hat round and collecting 9d for the feat. The one I interrupted was priced at 1s. 2d. he hadn't even the excuse of Luther who is reported to have said at the Diet of Worms: "Great Heavens, there is no other course!" However you never know what good may come out of anything. The same boy spent about six months in hiding behind the German lines, after having been captured as a parachutist and escaped from captivity: and then he had to live as best he could from what he could get from the fields. "