An Old Boys’ Dinner

Between an annual Old Boys’ dinner in England and a class reunion in America there is no real parallel. An American, after all, enrolls in his class at college at the age of about eighteen, while an Englishman goes to his public school—a boarding school—at thirteen or fourteen and leaves around eighteen and a half. There is a parallel between the English public school and the private schools of the Eastern Seaboard. But Andover, Groton and St. Paul’s are for the very few whereas nearly every Englishman of the upper and middle classes goes to a public school. His school is more personal to him than his college or a university. His record there is a permanent entry on his professional and social passport. The system, indeed, has been the object recently of some acrimonious criticism from a certain section of the British Labor Party. There is another major difference between the English Old Boys’ dinner and the American class reunion. The English public school is, numerically, small. Sherborne when I went there in September 1911 had barely 250 pupils. Now it has five hundred. Only forty-three other new boys assembled on my first day there, and we were divided among the six boarding houses that were scattered throughout the town. Boys, until they are fairly senior, rarely mix with members of other houses, so that it would be impossible to talk of a Sherborne class of 1911. The phrase was never used. I have thought of myself as a Shirburnian between 1911-1915, who made his friends among the boys who had enrolled in and after 1909 and left around 1917—an eight-year cycle. The annual dinner is for members of the old Shirburnian society. There will be an octogenarian or two and a certain number of young men in their early twenties. Usually 150 or so turn up. I shall not have been at school with more than ten of them. I doubt if I shall know more than twenty of them by name. I have, obviously, never been to a class reunion in the United States. My impressions are based on guesswork and on hearsay: but I have assumed that when a class with an enrollment of five hundred meets for a reunion every fifth year, there must be a great curiosity to see how each has fared in the interval, and that the rivalries which began in college will have been continued into adult life. That is not so, at an English Old Boys’ dinner: an ambitious boy of fifteen is anxious to pass this boy in class and to win his cricket colors before the other. But such rivalries are contained within the framework of school life and do not pass beyond it: The “rat-race’ of adulthood lies far ahead, with the interval of a university set in between. What brings me back year after year to these Old Boys’ dinners is a need not so much to see and compare notes with my contemporaries as to restore contact with the school itself. There were about seventy boys in the schoolhouse—it was double the size of the other houses—in September 1911. I sat, on that first evening with my twelve fellow victims, at the bottom of the dayroom table. The prefects were seated on a raised dais under the statue of Edward VI who had founded the school in 1550. I looked at the other tables—at my seniors of one or two years’ standing. They were ahead of me now. Would I, in a few months, have caught up with them in field and classroom? Would some be my rivals, some my enemies? Somewhere in this room were boys who would be my friends all my life. As two of them, indeed, have proved to be. I asked myself many questions on that first evening. But there was one that it never occurred to me to ask: “Who among these seventy boys will be turning up for the old Shirburnian dinner in 1967?” I could not have known then how few of us would be still around in 1967. I could not have foreseen that only a few months away the mud of Flanders and the meadows of the Somme were waiting to take their toll of us, and that half of my contemporaries would not reach the age of forty. a Of my two special friends—they were my seniors by a year—neither was ,spectacularly successful. One was described by his headmaster in his last report as “the ideal Public School Boy,” but though he was a house prefect, he never reached the top form, and never got his colors at football or at cricket, while the other adopted from his days as a fag an attitude of ‘passive disobedience.” He did not join the Officers’ Training Corps, not because he was a pacifist—he promptly on the outbreak of war applied for a commission —but because he could find better employment for his leisure. He was an individualist. He did what he wanted and because he never questioned other people’s preferences, no cne interfered with him. He was never ragged. In later life he became a Buddhist. He had without knowing it been a practicing Buddhist while he was a schoolboy. He was very happy at Sherborne. That is why he returns year after year to these annual dinners. That is why we all return: to swap anecdotes about this or that form master; to applaud the headmaster’s speech on the school’s achievements during the last year, to sing the Latin Carmen “Vivat Rex Edwardus Sextus,” to drink a glass or two too many. Next morning we go to the school chapel for eight o’clock communion, attend the formal parade of matins; probably take sherry with one or other of the housemasters, then after lunch scatter to our separate lives and interests; and somehow we find that having been there will have made a difference to us through the year.

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Alec Waugh

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Between an annual Old Boys’ dinner in England and a class reunion in America there is no real parallel. An American, after all, enrolls in his class at college at the age of about eighteen, while an Englishman goes to his public school—a boarding school—at thirteen or fourteen and leaves around eighteen and a half. There is a parallel between the English public school and the private schools of the Eastern Seaboard. But Andover, Groton and St. Paul’s are for the very few whereas nearly every Englishman of the upper and middle classes goes to a public school. His school is more personal to him than his college or a university. His record there is a permanent entry on his professional and social passport. The system, indeed, has been the object recently of some acrimonious criticism from a certain section of the British Labor Party. There is another major difference between the English Old Boys’ dinner and the American class reunion. The English public school is, numerically, small. Sherborne when I went there in September 1911 had barely 250 pupils. Now it has five hundred. Only forty-three other new boys assembled on my first day there, and we were divided among the six boarding houses that were scattered throughout the town. Boys, until they are fairly senior, rarely mix with members of other houses, so that it would be impossible to talk of a Sherborne class of 1911. The phrase was never used. I have thought of myself as a Shirburnian between 1911-1915, who made his friends among the boys who had enrolled in and after 1909 and left around 1917—an eight-year cycle. The annual dinner is for members of the old Shirburnian society. There will be an octogenarian or two and a certain number of young men in their early twenties. Usually 150 or so turn up. I shall not have been at school with more than ten of them. I doubt if I shall know more than twenty of them by name. I have, obviously, never been to a class reunion in the United States. My impressions are based on guesswork and on hearsay: but I have assumed that when a class with an enrollment of five hundred meets for a reunion every fifth year, there must be a great curiosity to see how each has fared in the interval, and that the rivalries which began in college will have been continued into adult life. That is not so, at an English Old Boys’ dinner: an ambitious boy of fifteen is anxious to pass this boy in class and to win his cricket colors before the other. But such rivalries are contained within the framework of school life and do not pass beyond it: The “rat-race’ of adulthood lies far ahead, with the interval of a university set in between. What brings me back year after year to these Old Boys’ dinners is a need not so much to see and compare notes with my contemporaries as to restore contact with the school itself. There were about seventy boys in the schoolhouse—it was double the size of the other houses—in September 1911. I sat, on that first evening with my twelve fellow victims, at the bottom of the dayroom table. The prefects were seated on a raised dais under the statue of Edward VI who had founded the school in 1550. I looked at the other tables—at my seniors of one or two years’ standing. They were ahead of me now. Would I, in a few months, have caught up with them in field and classroom? Would some be my rivals, some my enemies? Somewhere in this room were boys who would be my friends all my life. As two of them, indeed, have proved to be. I asked myself many questions on that first evening. But there was one that it never occurred to me to ask: “Who among these seventy boys will be turning up for the old Shirburnian dinner in 1967?” I could not have known then how few of us would be still around in 1967. I could not have foreseen that only a few months away the mud of Flanders and the meadows of the Somme were waiting to take their toll of us, and that half of my contemporaries would not reach the age of forty. a Of my two special friends—they were my seniors by a year—neither was ,spectacularly successful. One was described by his headmaster in his last report as “the ideal Public School Boy,” but though he was a house prefect, he never reached the top form, and never got his colors at football or at cricket, while the other adopted from his days as a fag an attitude of ‘passive disobedience.” He did not join the Officers’ Training Corps, not because he was a pacifist—he promptly on the outbreak of war applied for a commission —but because he could find better employment for his leisure. He was an individualist. He did what he wanted and because he never questioned other people’s preferences, no cne interfered with him. He was never ragged. In later life he became a Buddhist. He had without knowing it been a practicing Buddhist while he was a schoolboy. He was very happy at Sherborne. That is why he returns year after year to these annual dinners. That is why we all return: to swap anecdotes about this or that form master; to applaud the headmaster’s speech on the school’s achievements during the last year, to sing the Latin Carmen “Vivat Rex Edwardus Sextus,” to drink a glass or two too many. Next morning we go to the school chapel for eight o’clock communion, attend the formal parade of matins; probably take sherry with one or other of the housemasters, then after lunch scatter to our separate lives and interests; and somehow we find that having been there will have made a difference to us through the year.