Alan Bennett on private education

you're listening to a London Review of Books podcast sermon before the university king's college chapel cambridge 1st of June 2014 preaching is a hazard when writing plays when is it supposed to preach and gets told off if one does poets are allowed to but not playwrights who if they have naked opinions do better to clothe them in the decent ambiguities of their characters or conceal them in there sometimes all truth in thickets of the plot just don't speak to the audience I've always found this prohibition difficult John Gielgud who was in my first play thought talking to the audience was vulgar then he was prevailed upon to try it and thereafter would seldom talk to anybody else I understand this and even in my most naturalistic plays have contrived and relished the moments when the character unexpectedly turns and addresses the house and in a word preaches this maybe because as a boy and a regular worship roots and Michael's Headingley I heard a lot of sermons I also used to go to Saturday matinees at the Grand Theatre in Leeds though on occasion the sermons were more dramatic than the plays this was particularly so when they were preached as they quite often were by visiting fathers from the community of the resurrection at Muirfield who were almost revivalist in their fervor and the spell they cast over the congregation so when as a young man I first had thoughts about what nowadays is called stand-up it's not surprising it took the form of a sermon like old parodies it was born out of affection and familiarity and the Anglican services that were in my bones and there is symmetry here as the first sermon I preached on a professional stage was in Cambridge 50 odd years ago across the road at the arts theater in the review beyond the fringe it was on the text my brother Esau is an hairy man but I am a smooth man that sermon apart I have never formally preached since until this morning and Here I am again in Cambridge this is where I came in I had first seen Cambridge 10 years before when as a boy of 17 I had come down from Leeds in December 1951 to sit the scholarship examinations in history staying the weekend as one did in those days in the College of my first choice Sidney Sussex the place and the University bowled me over Leeds where I'd been born and brought up with like the other great northern cities still intact in 1951 but though I was not blind to its architectural splendors unfashionable though at that time they were it was a suit blackened holy 19th century City and as a boy like Hector in the history boys I was famished for antiquity I had never been in a place of such continuous and unfolding beauties Cambridge and December 1951 being exceptionally cold the cam was frozen over when a thick hoarfrost covered every court and quadrangle giving the whole city an unreal and celestial beauty and it was empty as provincial places in those days were I see my 17 year old self roaming unrestricted through the colleges as one quoting those on franchise days standing in Trinity great caught in the moonlight thinking it inconceivable I could ever come to study in such blessed surroundings and nor could I so far as Trinity was concerned Sidney Sussex wasn't quite my taste in buildings but you had to be cleverer than I was or higher up the social scale to have the real pick of the architecture still we were examined in the senate-house the interior of which had it been in Leeds would have been sequestered behind red ropes and I went to evensong in Kings astonished sermon could just walk in and be seated in the choir stalls it was Advent or what nowadays is called the countdown to Christmas and one of the hymns was oh come o come Emmanuel which is rather dirge-like but has stayed with me all my life since interviewed by the kindly dance at Sydney I was for the first time conscious of having a northern accent if the dogs were genial some of my fellow candidates were less so that weekend was the first time I'd come across public school boys in the mass and I was appalled they were loud self-confidence and all seemed to know one another shouting down the table to prove it while also being shockingly greedy public school they might be but they were loud seated at long refectory tables beneath the Mallo portraits of children Stuart Grandy's NEET timorous and genteel wee grammar school boys were the interlopers these slobs as they seemed to me the party in possession but it was a party seemingly that I was going to be allowed to join as though I was a long way from getting a scholarship Sidney Sussex offered me a place to read history to come up after my national service this too takes in Cambridge and if you're beginning to wonder whether far from being a sermon this is just a stroll down memory lane take heart because here is where a tentative homily begins to shove its nose above the horizon having done basic training in the infantry I was then sent on a course to learn Russian the year of which was spent out of uniform and in very relaxed circumstances in Cambridge it was a heady atmosphere more so in some ways in university proper where many of my colleagues were headed after nationals servus some of them were disconcertingly clever boys from public schools who when they talked of their school days often had in the background a master whose teaching had been memorable and about whom they told anecdotes and whose sayings they remembered teachers I remember thinking bitterly who had presumably played a part in getting them the scholarships most of them had at Oxford in Cambridge for them the scholarship examination from which I just managed to scrape a place had almost been a formality they had been schooled for it and groomed for the interviews that followed with the scholarships and exhibitions that ensued almost to be taken for granted this was Oxford and Cambridge after all they were entitled if I felt this was wrong which I did it was not at that time an altruistic feeling I was thinking of myself and how the odds were stacked against me and boys like me and here I should apologize that this narrative is couched so continuously in single-sex terms but then so had my education been my school they are may my eventual college all of them at that time male institutions as I say I saw the odds are stacked against me but took some comfort and I think educators did generally in assuming that this situation must inevitably alter and that the proportion of undergraduates from state schools at Oxford and Cambridge would gradually over take that from public schools until they were both properly and proportionately represented it was only when as time passed this didn't happen that what in my case had begun as a selfish and even plaintive grievance hardened to take in not just entrance to Oxford and Cambridge but access to higher education in general with the scramble for University Place is more desperate year by year and this is to say nothing of the cost better Minds than mine have tackled this problem and can you do sell and I would be foolish if I claimed to have a solution but I know what is part of the problem and that is private education my objection to private education is simply put it is not fair and to say that nothing is fair is not an answer governments even this one exists to make the nation's circumstances more fair but no government whatever its complexion has dared to tackle private education it might have been feasible at the time of the butler reforms in 1944 but there were other things going on the Labour government in 1945 could have tried but it had a great deal to do besides there was not another chance until 1997 when Labour's huge majority would have at least allowed to start except that the Prime Minister had been a public school by himself and seemingly a happy one so that opportunity too went begging I'm not altogether sure why when the question comes up there is always talk of the social disruption that would result as it might be the dissolution of the monasteries all over again but would it I am NOT after all suggesting that public schools should be abolished but a gradual reform which began with the amalgamation of state and public schools at six form levels say ought to be feasible and hardly revolutionary if the will is there and that of course is the problem some of this lack of will can be put down to the unfocused parental anxiety summed up almost comically now in Steven spenders 1930s poem my parents kept me from children who were rough knew through words like stones and war torn clothes class in a word still less forgivable there's a reluctance to share more widely and thus to dilute the undoubted advantages of a private education smaller classes better facilities and still seemingly a greater chance of getting to university beyond that though I'm less sure the long-term social advantages which once would have included the accent but hardly today still and this is not to discount the many excellent schools in the state sector a child of average ability is likely to do better at a good public school otherwise why would they be sent there we're reforms to happen I suspect that the ones who would be the least worried by such an amalgamation would be the boys and girls themselves it would be unsurprising if you were to discount these forthright opinions as the rantings of an old man I'm now 80 an age that entitles want to be listened to though not necessarily heeded I'd never been much concerned with politics until the 1980s when they became difficult to avoid without ever having been particularly left-wing I'm happy never to have trod that dreary Safari from left to right which generally comes with age a trip writers in particular seem drawn to a miss Osborne Larkin Iris Murdoch all ending up at the spectrums crusty and cliched end if I haven't it's partly due to circumstances there has been so little as a Salmond in England since the 1980s that have been happy about or felt able to endorse one has only had to stand still to become a radical though that too sounds like an old man talking still I don't regret it and one thing it's always a pleasure to see on television is the occasional programme about ancient and persistent activists old ladies recounting their early struggles through women's rights or battles for birth control veteran campus from Greenham common cheerful good humid and radically as they ever were still though it's not a word I care for feisty after all these years that to me is wisdom as disillusion is not another reason why there is a lack of will and a reluctance to meddle a reluctance one has to say that does not protect the state sector where scarcely a week passes without some new initiative being announced is that private education is seemingly not to be touched this I think is because the division between state and private education is now taken for granted which doesn't mean that it is thought to be fair only that there is nothing that can or should be done about it but if unlike the Daily Mail one believes that the nation is still generous magnanimous and above all fair it is hard not to think that we all know that to educate not according to ability but according to the social situation of the parents is both wrong and a waste private education is not fair those who provide it know it those who pay for it know it those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it and those who receive it know it or should and if their education ends without it dawning on them then that education has been wasted I would also suggest hesitantly that I'm not adept enough to follow the ethical arguments involved that if it is not fair then maybe it's not Christian either how much our ideas of fairness out Christianity I'm not sure souls after all are equal in the sight of God and thus deserving of what these days is called a level playing field this is certainly not the case in education and never has been but that doesn't mean we shouldn't go on trying isn't it time we made a proper start unlike today's ideologues whom I would call single-minded if man came into it I have no fear of the state I was educated at the expense of the state both at school and university my father's life was saved by the state as on one occasion with my own this would be the nanny state a sneering appellation that gets short shrift with me without the state I would not be standing here today I have no time for the ideology masquerading as pragmatism that would strip the state of its benevolent functions and make them occasions for profit and why rollback the state only to be rolled over by the corporate entities that have been allowed they encourage to take its place I am uneasy when prisons are run for profit or health services either the rewards of probation and the alleviation of suffering a human profits and nothing to do with balance sheets and these there is no institution is immune in my last play the Church of England is planning to sell-off Winchester Cathedral why not as a character the school is private why shouldn't the cathedral be also and it's a joke but it's no longer far-fetched with ideology masquerading as pragmatism profit is now the sole yardstick against which all our institutions must be measured a policy that comes not from experience but from assumptions false assumptions about human nature with greed and self-interest taken to be its only reliable attributes in pursuit of profit the state and all that goes with it he sold from under us who are its rightful owners and with a frenzy and dedication that call up memories of an earlier iconoclasm which brings me nearly to the end one pastime I had as a boy which thanks to my partner I resumed in middle age was looking at old churches ruin beeping Larkin dismissively called it though we perhaps have a little more expertise than Larkin disingenuously claimed he had I do know what Rudolph's were for instance though like Larkin I'm not always able to date a roof the charm of most medieval churches consists in what history is left and one learns to delight in little the dregs of history a few fifteen century Ben Chen's and alabaster tomb chests or where glass is concerned just the leavings of bigotry with ideology weakening when it came to out-of-reach tracery the hammer too heavy the ladder too short so that only fragments survived a cluster of Crockett's and towers maybe the glimpse of a Golden City with the devil leering down in my Bleeker moments these shards of history seemed to me emblematic obviously of what has happened to England in the past but also a reminder and a warning of what in other respects is continuing to happen in the present with the fabric of the state and the welfare state in particular stealthily dismantled as once the fabric of church is more rudely was sold off farmed out another dissolution with profit taking precedence over any other consideration and the perpetrators today has locked into their ideology and convinced of their own rightness as any of the devout louts who four and five hundred years ago stove in the windows and scratched out the faces of the saints as a passport to heaven I end with the last few lines of my first play 40 years on it's set in a school with the headmaster on the verge of retirement and is what nowadays is called a play for England it ends with the boys and staff singing the doxology all creatures that on earth do dwell with before it this advertisement for England to let a valuable sight at the crossroads of the world at present on offer to corporate clients outlying portions of the estate already disposed after sitting tenants of some historical and period interest some alterations and improvements necessary thanks for listening for more go to lrb co UK

Channel: London Review of Books (LRB)

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Length: 20min 41sec (1241 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2015