A few miles down the road from Heathrow, Europe’s busiest airport, lies Britain’s most famous school. Eton College, a boys’ boarding school in the town of Windsor on the western edge of London, has captured the British imagination in films, books and TV for decades. Why should this be?
Is it because Eton is the crucible for generations of political leaders, with 20 of Britain’s 55 prime ministers educated there, including the first, Robert Walpole, and the latest, Boris Johnson? This alone gives it a level of fame that is self-perpetuating. Or is it the school’s long history (it was founded almost 600 years ago), the price of an education there (£42,500 or $58,000 a year), its traditions or even its uniform, for which top hats were worn as recently as the 1960s and tail-coats still are?
These elements encourage mythologising and a sense of the school as a world apart, a fictional fantasy of high education passed down generations of families whose wealth, as old Etonian writer James Wood put it, “stretched so far back, the origin of their prosperity was invisible.” Does the reality match the stories told – and the books written – about the school that rules Britain?
Well, not everyone who attended Eton fits the mould. This month sees the publication of One of Them: An Eton College Memoir by writer, podcaster and musician Musa Okwonga. When he attended Eton from 1993 to 1998, Okwonga was one of only a handful of black boys at the school. The book is his contribution to an “exploration of race and class” in Britain, on the grounds that “to understand where we are going as a society, we need to understand how we got here.”
I thought, this is the kind of education that takes you anywhere – Musa Okwonga
A striking fact in One of Them is that Okwonga was not sent to Eton by a family hungry to give him a leg up: instead, he urged his mother to send him after seeing it on a TV documentary and visiting on a school trip. “I was aware,” he tells BBC Culture, “of what education gets you, wherever you go, even if you leave a country.” His family were middle-class refugees from Uganda and “I thought, this is the kind of education that takes you anywhere.” Also: he shares his birthday (11 October) with the school’s founding date. “It was meant to be!” he says.
Okwonga brought an Etonian level of ambition with him: his memoir shows how he took his costly education seriously, calculating that it was costing his mother £20 ($27.50) a day for him to be there. “I basically ran or joined every single society I could,” he says. “And my day was just full of bullet points, a checklist of things I had to do that day to earn it.” One startling feature of this work ethic was that he only went home twice in his five years at Eton, despite living “closer to home than anyone else at school.”
The determination Okwonga showed is a quality we see in the old boys who have climbed the greasy pole of politics: “No one here ever tells us out loud that Etonians are natural leaders, ” he writes. “That’s what the architecture is for.” We associate Eton with wealth, so it’s the rich and famous alumni who get our attention. But the stories that add flavour to the facts are often from fiction; though given the literary world’s scepticism of material success (failure is more interesting), a novelist’s portrayal of Eton boys can be unflattering – or worse.
‘Villains and fools’
Take that amiable idiot Bertie Wooster, whose status as an old Etonian is classic PG Wodehouse: affectionate rather than cutting. Bertie attended Eton with fellow fops Marmaduke “Chuffy” Chuffnell and G D’Arcy Cheesewright, though even in Wodehouse-world the school had its standards. Asked in Right Ho, Jeeves whether he was at school with Tuppy Glossop, ineffectual denizen of the Drones Club, Bertie replied, “Good heavens, no. We wouldn’t have a fellow like that at Eton.”
A more directly villainous old boy is Peter Pan’s arch-nemesis Captain Hook (who, incidentally, went from Eton to Balliol College, Oxford, a path followed by Boris Johnson). His education is revealed late in JM Barrie’s play when Hook jumps toward death-by-crocodile, murmuring “Floreat Etona” (“May Eton flourish”), the school motto. Hook was, according to a Provost at the school in 1927, “a great Etonian but not a good one”, and in a speech given at Eton that year, Barrie wryly noted that “perhaps it was just that at Oxford he fell among bad companions – Harrovians.”
