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VI.

THE CONTINUING TRADITION 1886-1956

1.

AN exaggerated respect for the traditional is not likely to characterise a School whose history has been marked by so many drastic changes, a School which for so long lacked a habitation of it own and has only recently acquired an indisputable name of its own. Nevertheless, it must have possessed a great deal of vitality to have survived at all; and these pages must surely have made clear that it has always succeeded in securing the affection of the boys and the tough loyalty of a large body of long-serving schoolmasters. And there are traditions, too.

          Paradoxically, the School's oldest tradition is that of being untraditional. Too much traditionalism in a School can be oppressive. Woodrow Wilson had a better idea when as President of Princeton University he said, "Our aim is to turn out young men as unlike their fathers as possible." Over-much respect for old traditions, merely because they are traditions, can be productive of a great deal of humbug, and it is arguable that the blazing of fresh trails is a more appropriate activity for the young than a too respectful following of old ones. Much of the vitality of the School during its first seventy years, and most of its special character derive from the fact that it began as a pioneer school, and that it has never since lost its sense of being more concerned to meet the challenge of the present and the future than to reproduce the patterns of the past. It is a school, in short, with a tradition of starting things.

          When it began it provided secondary and technical education of a sort hardly to be found elsewhere. It began to admit boys from the board schools by means of scholarships twenty years before secondary education became generally available by this method. It pioneered school holiday travel. In the 1920's and 1930's it was in the forefront of educational advance again, making a substantial and early contribution to the social revolution by which boys from state and state-aided schools were enabled to reach the universities in large numbers, And all through its career the School has been distinguished by its emphasis on the laboratory and by its refusal to despise the practical just because it is not academic. With Q.H. himself this was almost an obsession. Repeatedly he insisted, for example, on the value of mechanical drawing and on workshop experience. The consequence has been that the School has always been a place where the visitor could find mechanical drawing respectfully treated as an examination subject. In the earliest days everybody in the Technical division had to spend part of each week in the workshop and Mr. F. Moser had testified how useful this was to him when as a dental student he found out how much better he was at practical work than his contemporaries from more orthodox schools who, as he put it, "didn't even know how to hold a hammer." Increasing pressure on the curriculum has by now inevitably reduced the number of boys who gain workshop experience in the school as well as the amount of time they devote to it, but it is worth recording that this part of the curriculum is one of the many features which mark the Quintin School as the custodian of a living rather than a dead tradition.

Educational change has of necessity transformed a school with a bias towards technical education into one with a strong science side. It comes as a revelation to the boy from the Quintin School to read that grammar schools in general lack facilities for science teaching, or to hear schoolmasters being accused of directing all their ablest boys to specialise in Arts subjects. In this respect the traditional connection with the practical spirit of Quintin Hogg and the Polytechnic has always helped to keep the School well ahead of its rivals in its responsiveness to contemporary needs. As he reads in 1957 of official plans to encourage technological and scientific education, anyone associated with the Quintin School and who knows something of its past must be forgiven for smiling a somewhat superior smile. Officialdom never quite caught up with Quintin Hogg; now it admits that it has not caught up with his School, half a century after his death. When the School was founded, the complaint was that the country was being outpaced by the scientific and technical skill of the Germans. Now it is the Russians who cause the similar anxiety. But the Quintin School has been doing its bit in this matter for a long time now. It has always produced technicians, technologists and scientists - and doctors and dentists as well. It has evidently been leading; but others have been slow to follow. Nor will there be any lack of the means to continue this tradition in St. John's Wood.

          The tradition that the majority of the boys who specialise in the School will do so in science has not had the effect of making it a one-sided community. It has always maintained a sound record in the humanities. The specialists in Art subjects in the School have gained as much as they have lost by working in an environment in which they have always been outnumbered by scientists. Their choice of non-scientific courses in the Sixth has almost always been a free and in some ways a brave choice in a School whose special facilities and special tradition have been all against their making that decision. Nor, fortunately, has there been any skimping of the opportunities available to Sixth Formers who have turned away from the sciences. It is only since 1939 for instance that modern languages have been confined to French, German and Spanish. Until then Italian was regularly taught also, being provided by the Chevalier T. Sambucetti, a gentleman of aristocratic Roman birth, a great worker for Anglo-Itailan friendship, and the possessor of the sprucest lavender-grey trilby ever seen in Regent Street. Similarly it was only with the disappearance of the old "Inter" exams in Economics and Commerce that the School ceased to cater for the full range of subjects for these examinations. As it is, this preeminently scientific school is still one of the few schools of comparable size in which Economics is an old-established Sixth Form subject.

          Comparisons are of course odious and to indulge in them would be to revive something of the old forgotten rivalries of Technicals and Commercials. All the same, it is fair to record that bearing in mind their smaller numbers the non-scientists of the Sixth Form have gained university successes which the scientists have always been hard put to it to rival.

2.

ONE tradition dates back to the beginning and still survives. Other schools have drawn their members predominantly from one social class, or one neighbourhood, or perhaps from one creed. Of our School this has never been true. Like the Polytechnic from which it sprang it has always been ready to take in all comers with only the minimum necessary questions asked. The following appeared in the Polytechnic Magazine of 4 September, 1891: -

          "It is interesting to note that the fame of our day school has extended to the regions beyond. Last term we received a scholar from St. Petersburgh and this term another follows his example having booked to join us in September."

          This willingness to welcome all comers, derived first from Quintin Hogg's cheerful disregard for doctrinal differences in matters religious, remarkable at a time when the churches were still very ready to quarrel with one another, particularly about education. It arose too from the lack, in the early days, of comparable schools anywhere in the Home Counties. From the start boys came from places as far away as Weybridge and Maidenhead and Westcliffe and from all over Middlesex, as well as from the adjacent districts, while every year the arrival of from ten to twenty scholarship boys from the board schools established a speedy mingling of the classes.

          Another reason for the school's happy tolerance was the position of the School as part of the Polytechnic, which was already world famous and was strategically situated in the heart of an empire's capital. This naturally attracted a school population as cosmopolitan as that of the city in which it was set. Here was a school noted already for its freedom from sectarian narrowness and for its disregard of distinctions of class, and which offered an education that aimed at turning out boys who were "capable and well-trained," but not transformed beyond recognition, as they might well have been by a boarding school or a traditional public school. For the sons of newly or recently immigrated families from Europe the Polytechnic Day School was an obvious choice. It was not too expensive, and since it was a Day School the boy could keep in touch with his own folk, an important consideration to those who felt themselves as yet strangers in a foreign land. Not only were the sons of first and second generation immigrants glad of the Polytechnic School; so were the sons of successive waves of refugees, Jews and Poles escaping from the oppression of the Tsars, later Russians fleeing from Bolsheviks,[50] or Greeks and Armenians fleeing from Turks; so were the sons of those who had been drawn to London by the catering, tailoring and restaurant traditions of the west end; so in later days were boys from families "displaced" by a second world war, so that, for instance, Latvia and Lithuania have contributed their sons to a School of which it may justly be said, "all the world's its catchment area." Consular and embassy officials too, aghast at what they doubtless consider the barbarous English habit of packing children off to boarding schools, have repeatedly sent their sons to the Quintin School. They have done so safe in the knowledge that once the initial difficulty of agreeing upon an acceptable pronunciation of an outlandish surname has been hit upon, no eyebrows will be raised, no credal dogmas imposed, no flag held aloft for daily salutation as would be the rule in a United States school. Instead there has been instant acceptance into a vigorous and varied community where by long tradition nobody knows or cares where anybody else's father comes from or what his income is.

          Drawing as it has done on such diverse human material assembled from so many places, classes, creeds and nations, the school has always had its proportion of outstanding and colourful personalities. This is a respect in which there has been relatively little progress over the years, but rather an oft-repeated tale. If the first generation of Poly schoolboys were not advanced as far on in their careers during their schooldays as they would be now, their quality was obviously very high. So high does Mr. Moser rate his own contemporaries that he claims that all that he has heard of the School's progress since the 1890's continuously disappoints him. "When I think of what we eventually did," he declares, "and then hear that the school has been progressing steadily ever since, I expect at every O.Q. dinner to learn that you have produced a Lord Chief Justice of England at least." And elsewhere we have quoted Mr. Lambert's somewhat similar view of the quality of some of the boys he met in the school in 1918, at a time when its history as a full-scale secondary school had hardly begun. Yet one may risk the forecast that there are at least some among the post-war generation of Quintin School boys (few of whom have yet had time to make their full mark on the world) who will not be far behind in the formidable task of competing with their predecessors.

          What makes that task formidable is the variety of the activities in which old boys of the school have achieved eminence. Almost the only career in which so far few Old Quintinians seem to have achieved notable success is that of politics[51]. The first generation of old boys seem to have been most successful as business men. As examples of these one may quote Mr. John Maclaren, and until his death in 1955 a Governor ofthe School, Mr. Russell Ross (who gave the Ross Trophy for annual competition between the school and O.Q.'s in the main sports) and Sir Isidore Salmon, who became Chairman and Managing Director of Messrs J. Lyons & Company, a Governor of the Polytechnic and M.P. for Harrow. Mr. Richard Burbidge, who was appointed general manager of Harrod's stores in 1891 sent his son R. W. Burbidge to the school (he was there circa 1888-9) and both father and son were later to become managing directors of Harrod's. Similarly, the managing directorof the old established Parker Galleries inAlbermarle Street is an old boy also. One might here also mention Mr. H. J. C. Stevens, now a Governor of the School, who has for many years been the Secretary of the Daily Telegraph.

It must be confessed that the school has not yet produced a Bishop (the hallmark of a great school, so one is given to understand), but it has, at any rate one old boy now filling the position of Principal of a Church of England Theological Training College; one past school captain has served for many years as a Baptist missionary in China, and the first old boy who left the school to read history at Cambridge is now Rabbi of the Liberal Jewish synagogue in St. John's Wood. At the present time, another old boy has a church in Barnsley and another is rector of the parish in whose church John Hampden made public his historic refusal to pay the Ship Money tax.

          And if O.Q.'s do not seem to make famous politicians, they make distinguished public servants. One is at present the youngest Deputy Under Secretary in the history of the War Office; another is Senior Military Officer of the Atomic Research Establishment; another is in charge of the B.B.C's English By Radio service; another is Director of the Federal Audit Department in the Federation of Nigeria, and his Deputy Director is an O.Q. also.

          Many O.Q.'s have had successful careers in University teaching, among them Dr. E. Sarmiento, Dr. L. E. C. Hughes, and T. R. C. Fox, Fellow of King's College and Professor of Chemical Engineering in the University of Cambridge. Others have made successful dentists and doctors, such as F. R. Moser, who generously endowed the school with a dental scholarship some years ago, G. Quist, J. D. James and H. H. Foracre Barns. The school has produced a modern poet in David Gascoyne and a modern novelist in Gerald Kersh. In the dramatic world, the school has been represented by Griffith Jones, Frank Shelley (Francelli), Geoffrey Matthews, Victor Menzies and by the late Louis Yudkin, stage director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. At an earlier time it could boast the well-known ballad singer Harry Dearth and the operatic tenor Edward Leer.

          In sport, various names are pre-eminent. Outstanding in the first era are the names of Oswald Groenings, a fine highjumper, longjumper and hurdler, and a winner of the Studd Trophy in 1907, and W. J. Bailey, twice holder of the Polytechnic Studd Trophy, and a world champion cyclist both as an amateur and as a professional. Later in time were R. G. Jenkins, who played amateur football for London University, the Corinthians, Chelsea and England, and J. F. Parker, the Surrey county cricketer. S. R. West, also a Polytechnic Studd Trophy winner, became A.A.A. Highjump champion in 1935 with a jump of 6' 3" and cleared 6' 4" when jumping for Great Britain in the 1936 Olympic Games. W. Browning may claim to be the father of basketball in England, and was organiser of the 1936 Olympic basketball competition; and among the basketball Internationals from the school are Lionel Price, Roblou and Wedge. The most distinguished swimmer in the School's history, C. C. Walkden, still at the time of writing a member of the Sixth Form, is England's breaststroke champion and swam for his country in the Olympic Games at Melbourne in 1956. At an earlier date, P. Beveridge represented England at diving. The school has also produced oarsmen, the most distinguished to date being Ralph Worsnop who rowed in one of the Cambridge Trial Eights in 1947.

3.

THE most extraordinary feature of the School's traditional life cannot survive the removal to St. John's Wood. That is the circumstance that the boys of this School have, it is safe to say, led less sheltered schooldays than those of any other English school. It is often said that the great merit of boarding school education is that it withdraws boys into a quiet, secluded environment in which their talents and personalities can be developed without the continuous distractions with which everyday life naturally tempts the day boy. One may admit that it is a system that makes the task of education easier; but it will perhaps be forever arguable whether such a system, suggesting at times the medieval monastery and at others a laboratory of social engineering, is really the best. What is certain is that it is the precise opposite of the order of things in the story of the Quintin School. Let us pause to consider how, for the best part of seventy years, the schooldays of our boys have been passed.

To reach their school they crossed neither green quadrangle nor asphalt playground. They came straight off the Regent Street pavement, to be confronted with the least academic of school entrances, a set of revolving doors, giving access to what in the original plans was grandiosely called "The Marble Entrance Hall." On the right, as he entered, the boy saw an imposing three-sided counter, behind which were a group of clerks presided over by an indistinct clock. What the clerks did and what was the deeper significance of the clock, no one ever told him. From time to time he saw slightly anxious looking persons of foreign appearance leaning over the counter while the clerks explained things to them; but what the foreigners asked and what the clerks explained seemed forever unknowable, like the thoughts of the personages on Keats' Grecian Urn. On his left was a bookstall, which supplied text-books and exercise books; but his text-books and his exercise books came from somewhere else. Scattered around were a few leather-upholstered couches, on which he was not often allowed to sit, a number of glass cases full of silver trophies he was rarely allowed to examine, and notices announcing the dates and times of lectures he would never attend. There was a small door near the counter which led to the Polytechnic Tours' office. He never went through it. Near the bookstall another small door led to the Polytechnic Cinema. This door he did use-at certain times. For, at 9.30 in the morning, the Polytechnic Cinema was not the Polytechnic Cinema but the School Hall, and into it he passed to begin the day with a hymn sung to the accompaniment of the cinema's organ. The choir and the prefects sat in the dearest balcony seats, the lower school in the front stalls. While the service proceeded, an unseen but not always unheard chorus of Mrs. Mops did down the stairs, and up in the projection box the operator wound the day's film. Long before afternoon school, lessons were liable to be conducted against a bronchial obbligato of amplified film music, the stertorous dialogue of hoarse French film actors plotting very French plots in very French villages, or the sudden staccato squawks of Donald Duck. Fifty years ago it was much the same: then, apparently, the Poly had a more or less perpetual film about the navy, accompanied by a furious pianist called Mr. Fredericks.

          If the boy then proceeded upwards to his classroom, he passed on his way a tea bar, a men's billiard room, a ladies' cloakroom and the emergency exit of the cinema. If he had an important examination to sit for, he did so in a hall used on other occasions for Masonic Meetings, annual general meetings of the Old Etonian Society or the Loyal Order of the Moose, sessions of the Polytechnic Parliament, lectures on English for Foreigners, or rehearsals for B.B.C. symphony concerts. His midday meal came from what was to all intents and purposes a public restaurant. He did his physical exercises in a gymnasium from whose gallery his contortions might be observed by anybody from a school governor to a casual passer-by who happened to have escaped the normally vigilant eye of the uniformed porters in the Marble Entrance Hall. In his movements about the building he rubbed shoulders with any number of (invariably very angry) departmental heads and lecturers belonging to half a dozen schools of further education, as well as typists and office workers administering the affairs of thousands of day and evening students or tens of thousands of holiday tourists. As he went down to the swimming bath or up to the chemistry labs he mingled (though the word is too gentle) with the students themselves, young men and girls of every conceivable shape and nationality, studying all the multitude of subjects the Polytechnic had to teach them. If he stayed on late in the evening he was surrounded by the Institute's members, people no less heterogeneous, who had come to attend a Rambling club committee meeting, arrange a football team, organise a cycle run, have a game of snooker, attend a prayer meeting, have a cup of tea and a bun or, dressed in shorts or track suit, to set off on a training run with the Harriers. Down in the gym fierce men gravely lifted weights or played perspiring games of basketball, while over in the Portland Street extension heavily padded young women fenced with ladylike daring or, less heavily covered, wielded flashing table tennis bats.

          All this is now past history. By all the best theories it was always an undesirable setting for the education of boys. Yet obvious though the disadvantages were, it was not all loss that for so long the boys of the School were made to feel conscious every minute of their schooldays of the wider adult world around them. No sheltered darlings they, but young persons occupying the place that was proper to them, that of the youngest members of a community of whom the majority were adult. This School was not a bit of make-believe conducted behind immemorial elms as far away as possible from the life for which it was supposed to be a preparation. It was a place where work was done as work is mostly done in the modern world - in the midst of the roar of traffic, of the passing of countless feet, to the accompaniment of not so distant cinema music, not far from the smell of cooking, in a place where those windows that had a view at all gave on to shops and offices and rooftops. There is much to be said for the view that the widely assorted companionship he found in a School of such universal social appeal, and the sense of reality he acquired in a School so perpetually in contact with adult life and metropolitan actualities, saved the Polytechnic boy from a little of the complacent parochialism that the traditional English system of education still tends to produce in its young men. It is something too, to have belonged in spirit to a place which has left its mark not only on educational history but on the social history of our time as well. From the Polytechnic sprang the social revolution implied by the spread of the habit of foreign travel among the various classes, so that David Woodhall and Robert Mitchell are, for Lucerne and continental holidays for the masses, what George III was for Brighton and the seaside holiday a century or so earlier. Later generations will surely schedule the cinema as an historical monument, too, for it is the birthplace of the British film industry. The Polytechnic Cinema was the scene on 20 February, 1896, of the first public exhibition of films to a paying audience ever to be held in this country.[52]

          If of Pulteney nothing good can be said, since its interior was desolate and its surroundings sordid, even from that unlovely place one may draw a final thought, in consolation for the past and admonition for the future. Even Pulteney was often redeemed by the personalities of the best of the boys to whom for over ten years it had to serve as their school. People are more than places, and character can triumph over unpropitious surroundings. For the best part of its history the education of the boys of this School has been carried on in places not designed for that purpose. There would have been adequate reasons at all times for failure. Instead there has been success.

          By virtue of its new accommodation the Quintin School is yet again to become a pioneer school, a school occupying the most up-to-date grammar school premises in the metropolitan area. Yet new buildings are less important than new ideas, and are empty shells apart from the people who enrich them with their labour. The Quintin School boy of the present enjoys advantages unknown to his predecessors. They, in their time, did very well indeed. Since he will have so much more than they, he can be their equal only by being better than they.

"New occasions teach new duties: Time makes ancient good uncouth."