As the months passed I began to feel that since I could hold my own with these boys in Russian maybe I ought to have another shot at getting a scholarship myself. Besides, I was at Cambridge already; perhaps, rather than come back there after National Service, I would be better (more rounded I fear I thought of it) going to Oxford. This first occurred to me in October 1953, and having written off for the prospectuses I found that I could take the scholarship examination at Exeter College, Oxford, in the following January.
There was no practical advantage to getting a scholarship. It carried more prestige, certainly, but no more money; there was the gown, of course, as at Oxford scholars wore a longer gown than commoners and in those days, though it pains me to say so, I aspired to be a natty dresser. A commoner’s gown, resembling as it did a sleeveless cardigan or an uninflated life-jacket, was flattering to no one. It’s true that scholars had an extra year in college rather than in digs but the gown was really why I wanted a scholarship; I wanted something with a swing to it. It was sheer vanity.
Or not quite. I had fallen for one of my colleagues with a passion as hopeless and unrequited as Posner’s for Dakin. This boy was going to Oxford on a scholarship, so naturally (or unnaturally as it was then) I wanted to do the same, and with some silly notion, again like Posner, that if I did manage to get a scholarship he would think more of me in consequence. Such illusions and the disillusions that inevitably came with them were, I see now, as significant as any examinations I did or did not take, and a sign that underneath my formal education a more useful course of instruction was meanwhile in process.
If I was to take the examination at Exeter I didn’t have much time. My history was rusty, and studying Russian during the day meant that the only time I had to myself was in the evenings, which I generally spent in the Cambridge Public Library. In the meantime I reduced everything I knew to a set of notes with answers to possible questions and odd, eye-catching quotations all written out on a series of forty or fifty correspondence cards, a handful of which I carried in my pocket wherever I went. I learned them in class while ostensibly doing Russian, on the bus coming into Cambridge in the mornings, and in any odd moment that presented itself.
When I went on Christmas leave just before the examination, I happened to find in Leeds Reference Library a complete set of Horizon, Cyril Connolly’s wartime magazine which had ceased publication only a year or two previously, but of which I had never heard. It opened my eyes to all sorts of cultural developments like existentialism which were then current and fashionable. I didn’t understand them altogether, but these, too, got reduced to minced morsels on my cards in order to serve as fodder for the General Paper.
Come the examination, everything tumbled out: facts, quotations, all the stuff I’d laboriously committed to memory over the previous three months, my only problem being lack of time. At the interview I still said, as I had at Cambridge, that I would probably end up taking Holy Orders, though in view of the existentialism I spewed out it seemed increasingly unlikely.
When the letter came saying I’d won a scholarship I thought life was never going to be the same again, though it quite soon was, of course. The object of my affections was predictably unimpressed, and after my initial joy and surprise I began to feel the whole exercise had been a con on my part. I was a promising something, maybe, but certainly it wasn’t a scholar.
Cut to three years later, when I’m two terms away from my final examinations in history. I hadn’t had a notable university career either socially or academically, and I’d never had the same sense of life opening out as I’d had in the army. Now it was nearly over. I’d no idea what I wanted to do. Just as once I’d thought to become a vicar for no better reason than that I looked like one, so now it occurred to me I might become a don on the same principle. But to do that I had to perform much better in finals than I or my tutors expected me to do.
Whatever had seemed unusual or promising about me when I’d been given a scholarship had long since worn off. I never deceived myself that I was that unappealing entity ‘a first-class mind’. I no more had a first-class mind than I had a first-class body (which I would at that time much have preferred). I worked hard, it’s true, and took copious notes but for most of my undergraduate career never had the first idea how to organise them into an essay. I must have been a dull pupil to teach, tutorials tentative and awkward affairs, punctuated by long silences – exactly the kind of tutorials I was later to give myself when I taught pupils as a postgraduate. In other colleges one met undergraduates of stunning self-assurance and intellectual maturity (or that premature middle age that often passes for such). They saw themselves, particularly those reading Greats, as destined for the First Class, the degree simply a certificate waiting in a pigeonhole with their name already on it: all they had to do was go through a few tedious days at the Examination Schools before collecting it. But not me. I was a safe, plodding Second. I knew it and my college knew it too.
It was then that I remembered how I’d got the scholarship three years before, and as I began to cram for finals I adopted the same technique, reducing everything I knew to fit on cards which I carried everywhere, just as I’d done before. There were more cards this time but the contents were much the same: handy arguments, quotations, an examination kit in fact.
I also twigged what somebody ought to have taught me but never had, namely that there was a journalistic side to answering an examination question; that going for the wrong end of the stick was more attention-grabbing than a more conventional approach, however balanced. Nobody had ever tutored me in examination techniques or conceded that such techniques existed, this omission I suspect to be put down to sheer snobbery or the notion (here ascribed to Hector) that all such considerations were practically indecent.
What we were supposed to be doing in the Final Schools was writing dry scholarly answers to academic questions. It’s Mrs Lintott’s method, with at Oxford a model answer often compared to a Times leader. In my case there wasn’t much hope of that, with the alternative journalism of a lowlier sort, the question argued in brisk generalities flavoured with sufficient facts and quotations to engage the examiner’s interest and disguise my basic ignorance. This is the Irwin method.
Once I’d got into the way of turning a question on its head in the way Irwin describes I began to get pleasure out of the technique itself, much as Dakin does, sketching out skeleton answers to all sorts of questions and using the same facts, for instance, to argue opposite points of view, all seasoned with a wide variety of references and quotations. I knew it wasn’t scholarship, and in the Final Honours schools it would only take me so far, but it was my only hope.
I duly took the examination in scorching weather, two three-hour papers a day and the most gruelling five days of my life. At the finish I’d no idea how I had done and was so exhausted I didn’t care and went to the cinema every afternoon for a week.
The results came out about six weeks later, after a viva voce examination. In those days everyone was viva’d, coming before the examining board even if it was only for half a minute, with a longer viva meaning that you were on the edge of a class and so likely to go up or down. Mine lasted half an hour and went, I thought, badly. I could see a couple of examiners were on my side and endeavouring to be kind; the others weren’t interested. I went back home to Leeds in low spirits.
A friend who was in Oxford when the list went up sent me a postcard. It came on Monday morning when I was working at Tetleys Brewery, rolling barrels. My father was ill and out of work, and he and my mother brought this card to the lodge at the brewery gates, where I was sent for from the cellars. They weren’t sure what a First was.
‘Does it mean you’ve come top?’ asked my mother, not particularly surprised, as from their point of view that’s what I’d always done ever since elementary school.
I went back to pushing the barrels around, hardly able to believe my luck. It was one of the great days of my life, but it was luck. I was right: I
hadn’t done well in the viva, but another candidate had and with approximately the same results as mine had been put in the First Class so I had to be included too. It was a narrow squeak.
With a First, a research grant was a formality, so I stayed on at Oxford and for a time even convinced myself I was a scholar, coming up twice a week to read manuscripts at the Public Records Office, then still in Chancery Lane. But I was more a copyist than a scholar, since that was all I did, copying out medieval records with no notion what to do with them, and the longer I did it – for five years after taking my degree – the more dissatisfied with myself and the bigger fraud I felt. The truth was not in me.
However, in addition to my so-called research I did some college teaching, and though I wasn’t much good at that either (and in today’s more demanding conditions would soon have been stopped), I did at least try and teach my pupils the technique of answering essay questions and the strategy for passing examinations – techniques which I’d had to discover for myself and in the nick of time: journalism, in fact.
So The History Boys is in some sense an outcome of those two crucial examinations and the play both a confession and an expiation. I have no nostalgia for my Oxford days at all and am happy never to have to sit an examination again. In playwriting there are no examinations unless, that is, you count the viva voce the audience puts the actors through every night.
What sort of school is it that can send eight boys to sit for history scholarships at Oxford and Cambridge? Not a state school, surely, even in the 1980s? I wanted it to be, partly because that’s how I’d imagined it, setting the action in my mind’s eye as taking place in my own school, Leeds Modern School as was.
This last year while I was writing the play I used regularly to pass what had been the Modern School, now known as Lawnswood School. It was, almost symbolically I felt, in process of demolition, and the more I wrote of the play the less there was of the building. Now it has completely gone and been replaced by a new school built directly in front of the old site.
The process of demolition was protracted because, put up in 1930, the building contained asbestos. This meant I couldn’t pop in for one last look or to refresh my memory, until by chance Look North arranged to film me there a week or two before it was finally pulled down. I went along expecting it to seem smaller, which it duly did, but in memory it had a shine to it which had utterly vanished. Once there had been polished parquet floors, the woodwork was of bright chestnut varnish, and particularly in the late afternoon (as was at one point mentioned in the play), the place took on a wonderful glow. Not now. It was shabby and dull and run-down.
The headmaster, whom I had in my mind somehow blamed for the abandonment of the building, turned out to be helpful and understanding while not surprisingly being anxious to get out of what he saw as shabby and restrictive surroundings. I had no reason for nostalgia as the time I had spent in the school had been pretty dull and unmemorable, but still, it was a good building, and the façade should certainly have been incorporated in whatever replaced it. Had it survived another ten or fifteen years it would certainly have been listed and preserved. Standing on the northern boundary of Leeds, it was always a handsome and decent piece of thirties architecture, designed in the Municipal Architect’s Department, which in the thirties was one of the best in the country. I don’t know who designed its replacement, but it has none of the old building’s dignity and (this is the nub of it) none of its confidence. In 1930 the future of state education seemed assured. Now, who knows?
On the stage the school is vaguely taken to be in Sheffield, and in my head I called it Cutlers’ and though there isn’t a Cutlers’ Grammar School in Sheffield I feel there ought to have been. I made it a grammar school only because a comprehensive school would be unlikely to be fielding Oxbridge candidates in such numbers. Unlikely, I subsequently found, to be fielding Oxbridge candidates at all, or at least not in the way I’d imagined.
When I was writing The History Boys I didn’t pay much heed to when it was supposed to be set. While not timeless (though one always hopes), its period didn’t seem important. It seemed to me to be about two sorts of teaching – or two teachers, anyway (characters always more important than themes), who were teaching more or less in the present; I could decide when precisely after I’d finished the play.
My own memories of sitting the Cambridge scholarship examination were so vivid that they coloured the writing of the play, with Oxford and Cambridge still held up to my sixth-formers as citadels to be taken just as they were to me and my schoolfellows fifty years ago. I knew things had changed, of course, but I assumed that candidates for the scholarship examination spent two or three days at whichever university, staying in the college of their first choice, sitting a few examination papers and being interviewed; after which they would go back to Leeds or Blackburn or wherever to await the results ten days or so later. That was what had happened to me in December 1951, and it was a time I had never forgotten.
I was well on with the play when I mentioned it to a friend who had actually sat next to me in one of the scholarship examinations. He told me that I was hopelessly out of date, and that scholarship examinations such as we’d both experienced were a thing of the past, and even that scholarships themselves were not what they were. What had replaced the system he wasn’t sure, but he thought that candidates no longer took scholarship examinations while they were at school, but at the end of their first year in college, when awards were made on course work.
I was shocked and didn’t want to know, not because this invalidated the play (it is a play, after all, and not a white paper), but because what had been such a memorable episode in my life was now wholly confined to history. What had happened so unforgettably to me couldn’t happen any more; it was as outmoded as maypole dancing or the tram. And as for the now stay-at-home examinees, I just felt sorry for them. No romantic weekend for them, threading the frosted Backs or sliding over the cobbles of Trinity; no Evensong in King’s; life, as in so many other respects, duller than once it was. I don’t imagine the candidates themselves felt much deprived, and from the colleges’ point of view it simply meant that they had another weekend available for conferences.
However, I now had to decide if I should adapt the play to present-day circumstances, but decided I shouldn’t, as much for practical reasons as any concern for the facts. The current system of assessment, whatever its merits, is no help to the playwright. Graduated assessment is no use at all. The test, the examination, the ordeal, unfair though they may be, are at least dramatic.
Accordingly I set the play in the 1980s, just before the time people seemed to think the system had changed. It’s significant that without looking it up nobody I spoke to could quite remember the sequence, which testifies to the truth of Irwin’s remark about the remoteness of the recent past but is also an instance of how formless the history of institutions becomes once its public procedures are meddled with. Fairer, more decent and catering to the individual the new system may be, but memorable and even ceremonious, no, and that is a loss, though these days not an uncommon one.
Luckily the eighties were a period with no special sartorial stamp, no wince-making flares, for instance, or tie ’n’ dye. Mrs Thatcher was more of an obtruding presence then than she is in the play, but that particular omission will, I hope, be forgiven me.
The school is not a fee-paying grammar school such as Leeds or Manchester, which are both represented at the Headmasters’ Conference and count as public schools. This, though, is what Mr Armstrong, the headmaster in the play, would aspire to, just as my own headteacher did all those years ago. I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that private education should long since have been abolished and that Britain has paid too high a price in social inequality for its public schools. At the same time, I can’t see that public schools could be abolished (even if there was the will) without an enormous amount of social disruption. The proper way forward would be for state education to reach such a st
andard that private schools would be undersubscribed, but there’s fat chance of that, particularly under the present administration. The same hope, of course, ought to animate the National Health Service, but the future for that seems equally bleak.
These days getting into Oxford or Cambridge or indeed any university is only the beginning of the story. Money has to be found, earned, donated by parents, borrowed from the bank or wherever student loans currently come from. It’s a sizeable hurdle, and one my generation were happy to be without, if we ever gave it a thought. At that time acceptance by a university or any institution of higher learning automatically brought with it a grant from the state or the local authority. The names of the recipients of such grants would be printed in the local paper, occasionally with their photographs, the underlying assumption being that the names of these students should be known because they had done the state or the county some service and would now go on to do more. There was genuine pride in such achievements and in the free education that had made them possible – particularly perhaps in Leeds, which had an outstanding Education Department.
I am told that I am naïve or unrealistic, but I do not understand why we cannot afford such a system today. As a nation we are poorer for the lack of it, the latest round in that lost fight the bullying through of the bill on top-up fees with this so-called Labour government stamping on the grave of what it was once thought to stand for. Though there is much that is called education nowadays that is nothing of the sort and doesn’t deserve subsidy, yet I still hold to the belief that a proper education should be free at the point of entry and the point of exit.
Some of these views can be put down to the circumstances of my own education but also to a book which made a great impression on me as a young man. This was Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1955), and in particular his account of growing up in the slums of Leeds, going to Cockburn High School, and eventually to Leeds University, where he was taught by Bonamy Dobrée. It was a harder childhood than mine (and an earlier one) but it was reading Hoggart forty years ago that made me feel that my life, dull though it was, might be made the stuff of literature. The Uses of Literacy spawned a series of books, one of which, Education and the Working Class by Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden, included a study of sixth form boys who had made it to university but not done well there, the conclusion being that the effort of getting to university often took so much out of working-class boys that once there they were exhausted. This is one of Posner’s complaints in the play.