The Rest Is History: 367. The Real Harry Potter: Magic, Empire and Beastly Bullies

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Terms apply.

Dear Mr. Potter, we are pleased to inform you that you have a place at Hogwarts School

of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment.

Term begins on the 1st of September.

We await your all by no later than 31st of July.

You're a sincerely Minerva McGonagall, deputy headmistress.

So that, Dominic, as the half a billion people who I gather have read Harry Potter Across

the World Will Need No Telling is from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's

Stone, published in 1997.

And as the author of The Great British Dream Factory, The Strange History of Our National

Imagination, a book that looks at the impact of British culture on the imagination of the

world, how would you rate the impact of J.K. Rowling?

Well, first of all, everybody, I'm so sorry.

I actually suggested to Tom that he do that in a Scottish accent.

And now I've paid the price, I suppose.

Well, it was the accent of Maggie Smith.

Right.

So, of course, plays Mrs. McGonagall in the film.

Is it Miss McGonagall?

Miss McGonagall, it must be.

Professor Tom.

Professor McGonagall.

Give her a title.

You're doing that thing that people always do with female academics, aren't you?

You're downgrading them.

Yes, I am.

I apologize.

It was a more sophisticated impression than I gave it credit for, because, you know, you're

doing Maggie Smith doing a voice, aren't you?

Yes.

So, Harry Potter, it's an extraordinary phenomenon, isn't it?

And I underrated it, actually, in that book you talked about, The Great British Dream

Factory.

And I think I was wrong.

You're very rude about it.

I was wrong, because Harry Potter has a claim.

It's one of the single most important stories in the minds of people under the age of, what,

30, 35, who've grown up with these stories in regard...

I mean, one of the reasons J.K. Rowling is now so controversial is that for some people,

she had the status of a kind of moral teacher, didn't she?

Yes.

And a lot of people will say, I got my moral code from Harry Potter.

Yes.

So, it's not just entertainment.

It carries this kind of charge, which has always been the case with some children's

stories, as we will see in this podcast.

Because Dominic, a question.

There are two stories about people going away to boarding schools that carry a hefty

moral charge.

Is this something that J.K. Rowling has invented?

No.

Or does it have a long lineage?

That's a lovely link, Tom, absolutely beautifully unscripted.

It does have a long lineage.

So when you advertised this episode on social media, he said we were going to be talking

about the origins of Harry Potter, the stories behind Harry Potter.

I saw there are stream of replies, which people were saying, are you going to talk about this?

So you can talk about that.

And there's a whole load of books that people have pointed to in the past.

So the stories of Ena Blyton, the Narnia stories of Tolkien.

The Dark is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper.

Have you read that, Tom?

I have.

In your book, you also cite Sword and the Stone.

Sword and the Stone by T.H. White.

People point to The Worst Witch by Jill Murphy, the Crestamansi stories by Diana Wynne Jones,

or the Discworld stories by Terry Pratchett.

And I think one of the reasons for J.K. Rowling's success, actually, is she wove lots of elements

of those stories.

Or you could say that she is drawing on the material that all those other authors are

also drawing on.

Yes.

So at his heart, I think, I would argue, and I'm not the first person to argue this by

any means, at the heart of Harry Potter is a school story.

I mean, that is the essential trajectory of the story.

It's a coming of age story in which, I mean, who listened to this doesn't know that Harry

is an orphan who grows up under the stairs in his kind of foster family's suburban house,

and he has this remarkable letter that you read out so beautifully at the beginning of

the program.

And off he goes to school, to a boarding school to learn witchcraft and wizardry.

And that device, the boy who goes from kind of obscurity discovers the school, this extraordinary

medieval building is introduced to new friends, to the school bully, to scary teachers, to

new codes, to a secret language, all of that kind of stuff.

That is a very old device in British fiction.

So Dominic, could I just read a passage from a novel that I read over the weekend in preparation

for recording this episode?

Do Tom, I'd love that.

And it describes a boy going to a boarding school very like Harry Potter goes to Hogwarts.

Tom followed his guide through the schoolhouse hall, which opens into the quadrangle.

It is a great room 30 feet long and 18 high or thereabouts with two great tables running

the whole length and two large fireplaces at the side with blazing fires in them.

Obviously, I don't need to tell you of all people that that comes from Tom Brown School

Days written by Thomas Hughes, published in 1857, and a book of which you say it is hard

to think of many other Victorian books, indeed, many other books of any era that have left

such a deep imprint on the British imagination.

Yeah, I'd stand by what I said.

Are you agree with yourself?

I agree with myself.

Shocking scenes.

So Tom Brown School Days, for people who don't know, as I said, written in the 1850s, it

is a foundational text of the kind of Victorian Britain, and not just a Victorian Britain

of schools all around the world.

It's a foundational text of the culture of international sports.

Yes.

The Olympics and all that comes from this, doesn't it?

Organized sports of the idea of manliness, the idea of service of moral character, all

of these things.

It's one of the bestselling books in any genre of the 19th century.

As late as 1940, it was still one of the top four books read by British children after

Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, and I think it's something that maybe Gulliver's Travels

or something like that.

So I had never read it.

I have read Flashman, who is the bully in Tom Brown School Days, who tosses Tom Brown

in a blanket and roasts him in front of a fire and all kinds of things like that.

And it becomes the hero of George MacDonald Fraser's series of novels in which Flashman,

this coward, paltrune and bully, becomes a much garlanded hero.

And so I had always assumed from that that Tom Brown himself was a terrible kind of wuss

and a wett.

But actually, he isn't at all.

And the story is great.

Yeah.

I mean, it's very, very gripping.

I really enjoyed it.

Well, it's effective with the story.

It's all school stories.

It is, yes.

So Tom arrives.

Well, just to give you a sense of the story, I suppose, before we talk about the story

behind the story.

So Tom is from rural Berkshire.

He's a kind-hearted, athletic boy, a bit of a sort of a rascal.

His father, the squire, when Tom is 11, decides to send him to Rugby School to make a gentleman

of him, I suppose.

And to make a man of him.

And to make a man of him.

And Tom goes to Rugby.

He falls in with a friend straight away, his version of kind of Ron Weasley, Harry Potter's

friend.

His friend is called Harry...

Scud East.

Scud East.

Yeah.

There's a school bully, a Draco Malfoy, who is Harry Flashman, who then becomes the

hero of his own series of novels.

Tom goes through a series of trials.

He cheats, doesn't he, in his lessons, and ends up performing.

He adopts a boy called George Arthur, who is a cross between, if you've read Harry

Potter for the Harry Potter fans, he's like a cross between Dobby the house elf and Neville

Longbottom, so Harry's useless friend.

He's a kind of angelic swat, isn't he?

Yes, he is.

I was hoping you could see that evidence for his swatishness is that he reads Herodotus

for pleasure.

Well, not only that, Tom.

Most famously, he prays, doesn't he?

Yes, he does.

He prays by his bedside.

He shamed the other boys into praying by their bed.

This is a tremendously transformative moment for Tom Brown.

So he previously hasn't been praying.

He's been embarrassed to do it, and he is shamed by this weedy little wretch into praying

every night.

It's a very...

I find it quite a moving scene, Tom, because I kind of admire that moral earnestness.

Well, now I find out after whatever 350 episodes of you believe me like Flashman.

Exactly.

You just mentioned this.

You bring a tear to my eye.

See, there's the final scene, which is a cricket match, isn't it?

The climax is a cricket match where Tom puts George Arthur into bat, doesn't he?

And he does really quite well.

He does all right.

They lose, though, don't they?

They still lose.

Yeah, they still lose, but that's fine.

You know, it's playing the game.

And also, they have a brilliant boxing match, don't they?

They do.

With Slugger Williams.

Huzzah!

There's going to be a fight between Slugger Williams and Tom Brown, and the Slugger is

massive.

Yeah.

Absolutely, you know.

Yeah.

But the Slugger looks rather sodden as if he didn't take much exercise and ate too

much tar.

Oh, no.

That's shocking scenes.

So the story behind the story is that this is written by a guy called Thomas Hughes.

Thomas Hughes, you would love Thomas Hughes, Tom.

He's a fascinating man.

He himself had been a pupil at Rugby School.

He went on to become a lawyer and a liberal MP.

And would you believe he tried to set up a kind of utopian society in Tennessee?

Did you know this?

God, so many of our people are doing it.

Ignatius Donnelly.

He wrote about Lantus.

Did something very similar, didn't he?

He did.

So Thomas Hughes tried to set up a utopian society in Tennessee with its own library

in Croquetlawn and Newspaper.

But not Croquetpitch.

But do you know what he called it, Tom?

No.

Rugby Tennessee.

Rugby Tennessee.

Brilliant.

And he was a great enthusiast for muscular Christianity.

So this idea that you would teach Christian principles and kind of sporting prowess side

by side, a healthy mind and a healthy body, and Thomas Hughes would tour the land, not

just the land, but he would go up specifically to northern towns, the kind of towns actually

that ended up having football clubs later on, kind of Premier League championship football

clubs.

He would go up there and preach the gospel, not just to Christianity, but of sport.

And that's of course why I think sport is such a major part in sport as forming character.

Well, so many of the earliest football teams derive from churches.

One thinks of Aston Villa, for instance.

Yes.

Bounded by Methodists.

Wolves, my team, I think was founded by a church.

Everton were founded by a church.

Sports and religion were very, very closely interwaven in the 19th century.

It's thanks to the preaching of people like Thomas Hughes.

It doesn't seem to me that it's about becoming too much of a Christian.

It's also about becoming a decent chap.

Yes, it is, absolutely.

And the key about Tom Brown is right from the beginning, he is a decent chap.

So scud East when he meets him says, you know, this is on his first day, a great deal depends

on how a fellow cuts up at first.

If he's got nothing odd about him and answers straightforward and holds his head up, he gets

on.

That is basically the kind of ideal that underruns all of it, that you don't want to be actually

too brilliant at anything.

This is Harry Potter, Tom.

Yes.

Harry Potter is actually, he's not especially academic.

He is brilliant at sports.

He's extraordinarily gifted at Quidditch.

We'll come on to talk about Quidditch.

Cock of the School is the slang in Tom Brown's school days for Chief Jock.

Yes.

Cock of the School is probably not a nickname you would welcome now at a British public

school, is it?

Another expostulation, which is what the senior boys say to the young boys is, you young

moth.

And of course, shall I tell you how Tom Brown is described?

Do.

And this will be particularly shocking to our American listeners.

The most reckless young scapegrace among the fags.

Yes.

So, fagging is a very important part of school stories.

Do you want to explain what fags are for our American listeners?

A younger boy will act as basically a servant to an older boy and they'll become, they'll

be assigned to the older boy as his fag.

That means they will have to bring him toast.

They'll have to shine his shoes.

They'll have to do errands for him, carry messages, all of these kinds of things.

So, fagging, yes, our American listeners will find this hilarious because of the connotations

of the word, but fagging persisted in British schools until after the Second World War and

then was eventually phased out.

So, Tom Brown is very obviously the template for Harry Potter.

He's a slightly bland, but generally decent and admirable boy who goes through this

rite of passage to make him a man through a series of trials.

But the other thing, of course, is that a key part of Tom Brown's school days is the

influence of the headmaster.

So, you mentioned Dumbledore.

Dumbledore is a huge figure in Harry Potter.

The Gandalf Merlin-like figure who is the headmaster of the school.

And Tom Brown's school days has its own Dumbledore in a character called Dr.

Arnold, a real life person.

So, the person who had been Thomas Hughes's headmaster.

Dr. Arnold lived from 1795 to 1842.

He was head of rugby from 1828 to 1841.

And he really...

Do you think I'm exaggerating, Tom?

When I say he's one of the absolute founding fathers of the Victorian age, the Victorian...

No, not at all.

I mean, he is absolutely a towering figure, isn't he?

And influential, as you said earlier on, not just on Britain, but on the ideals of sport

and manliness and all that kind of thing that the British Empire exports.

Yeah.

So, he becomes a myth, Dr. Arnold.

So, for those people who are listening to this podcast and think, well, this is two public

schoolboys talking about public schools, and they think this is terribly interesting,

but it's not very important to anybody else.

Dr. Arnold would have been a name recognizable to almost any educated person.

And certainly in Britain and beyond Britain, actually, his influence was carried into the

colonies, into the United States and so on.

Because Baron de Kubita is directly influenced by his example in setting up the Olympics,

isn't he?

Baron de Kubita, Pierre de Kubita, who set up the Olympics, when he visited England in

the 1880s, he made a point of visiting the public schools to see how they operated.

And he carried with him, one historian calls it like a kind of spiritual bydeca guide.

He carried with him Tom Brown school days.

And he said, what Dr. Arnold did at Rugby School is one of the great transformations

in all, in all cultural history.

De Kubita was obsessed with Thomas Arnold, as so many people were.

How does he have this stature?

I mean, you know, ahead of a school.

I mean, it seems an old, yeah, you couldn't imagine that happening now.

Arnold had been himself educated as a boarding school at Winchester, arguably

the first true public school, which we'll talk about much later on.

Arnold himself on his first night at Winchester, which you believed him,

he had knelt and prayed by his bedside and he'd been physically attacked by the

other boys for doing so, which is very heartening.

Was he tossed in a blanket?

Yeah, roasted over a fire.

Arnold became one of the great kind of advocates of political liberalism and

Anglicanism, broad church Anglicanism in the middle of the 19th century.

He's appointed to be head of Rugby School in 1828.

He almost quintuples the number of boys at the school.

And he has this extraordinary project, which now, into some degree, I think,

because so many schools are not just private schools, bear Arnold's imprint.

We take for granted, but the time is truly radical.

He argued that schools should be laboratories to turn out little Christian men.

And that the important thing in school was not to fill your mind with, you know,

with with stuff, with education.

It was to form your character, your moral character.

So he says his first comment on being appointed to the headmaster of a rugby,

he said, my object will be, if possible, to form Christian men.

And in his book, Tom Brown School Days, Thomas Hughes writes of the tall,

gallant form, the kindling eye, the voice now soft as the low notes of a flute,

now clear and stirring as the call of the light infantry bugle of him who stood

their Sunday after Sunday, witnessing and pleading for his Lord.

And this idea that the headmaster of the school was going to become this kind

of great, almost this evangelist, this idea of Christian manhood.

And he would send out legions of boys to be Christian men, to govern Britain

and its empire, this absolutely caught the imagination of of the Victorians.

So Arnold was an inspirational figure.

And the interesting thing about him is, you know, when Harry arrives at Hogwarts,

he's already been told that there is this sort of this undercurrent of danger

in the character of Voldemort, who is the dark Lord and there's the dark arts

and there's this kind of evil. But Arnold absolutely believed this.

I mean, he didn't call it Voldemort. For him, it was sin.

So he thought that all teenage boys were threatened by sin.

And actually, to be a teenage boy was kind of sinful in itself.

So he said there are six sins endemic among schoolboys, profligacy,

falsehood, cruelty, disobedience, idleness and the bond of evil.

I thought there was going to be another sin.

Go on, Tom. I know the way your mind works to which teenage boys were particularly

prone. No. So people don't care about this in the 1840s.

I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking about teenage boys being beastly, aren't you?

I'm thinking of owning this and beastliness.

Don't worry, you'll get your beastliness.

I'm worried about beastliness at this stage because they're not over obsessed

with sexuality. So for Arnold, it's kind of it's more amorphous than that.

It's kind of telling lies and not doing your bit and cheating and all these kinds

of things. And he believes that that life is a constant struggle

to overcome this sin.

I mean, this is obviously what lots of Christians believe and that he can guide

the boys towards a sort of higher state.

And the way he would do that is through a character called Percy Weasley.

Do you know the Parry Potter books very well, Tom? Do you know Percy Weasley is?

I can't. How they all blur.

So Percy Weasley is Ron Weasley's older brother.

And at the beginning of the book, he's introduced to us.

Harry's cashing the train and the Weasleys are there.

And the Weasleys are all giving Percy a bit of grief because he's actually going

to be a prefect and Arnold wanted to use the prefect system.

So being a prefect is very important.

So being a prefect is being a senior boy who acts as a kind of conduit

between the headmaster and the other boys.

There had always been prefects.

So in the 14th century, when Manchester College was set up, there were prefects

there, senior boys who kind of represent the boys.

Derived from Merton College in Oxford.

Exactly. Yes.

Arnold's idea was that the prefects would actually now be instead of leading

revolts against the headmaster, they would be working for him.

And he calls them or his disciples call them an aristocracy of talent and worth.

So the prefects would dine with Arnold and they would sort of marshal

the other boys and lead them towards better behavior.

So a question then to go to a public school, you have to pay for it.

That's why they're called public.

They're open to everybody who can afford it.

Who can afford it? Yeah.

So by definition, people who go to these public schools are from the elites.

Yeah. Is Arnold self-consciously training them to go out and

govern Britain and to govern various parts of the world that have been painted pink.

Is that an idea that he is training a moral elite?

I don't think it's an obsession for Arnold, but it becomes an obsession for

as it were, the myth of Arnold.

So Arnold himself is not, I think, as interested in the empire as his successors are.

Not looking at the empire then, just looking at Britain.

Yeah. Is he thinking, it's important that I do this, not just for the sake

of the souls of the individual boys, but for the good of the entire country.

Oh, yeah. Undoubtedly.

Undoubtedly, all public school headmasters are conscious that they are training

an elite of boys who are going to become cabinet ministers, churchmen.

I mean, if you look at the kind of people who go to public schools in the 18th and 19th centuries,

they all go on to become generals, to become the governors of colonies,

to become MPs, all of these kinds of things. Absolutely they do.

So in Harry Potter, Dumbledore has a host of kind of disciples.

They call themselves Dumbledore's army, the people who kind of worship Dumbledore,

who want to carry on his example.

So does Arnold.

So the heads of schools like Mulbrough and Harrow, the headmaster of our producer,

Jack's old school, King Edwards Birmingham, he was a disciple of Arnold's.

And these people go out and for the next 50 years or so,

they create this kind of regime of Arnoldian schools.

So almost every school in Britain, every private school in Britain,

is true to Arnold's ethos.

And grammar schools, right, as well.

So to explain for overseas listeners, grammar schools are open to everybody,

but you have to get in on basis of exams.

Yes. So grammar schools will be in a small,

where they'll be in a town Shakespeare went to a grammar school.

They're initially set up to teach really Latin.

But, you know, you're not necessarily boarding as a grammar,

well, you're not boarding as a grammar school.

But the grammar schools increasingly kind of ape the rugby look.

Oh, absolutely. They do prefect.

In the second half of this episode,

we're going to go through lots of the aspects of the Harry Potter stories,

the sport, the boarding houses and talk about the history of those schools,

not just in Britain, but across the world,

copy what they see as Arnold's formula.

And where they're getting Arnold's formula from is from Tom Brown's school days.

So it came out as we said in 1857.

It sold 11,000 copies in its first year.

And it's been through 52 editions within about 35 years.

You mentioned Pierre de Kubota already.

He talked to the powerful figure of Thomas Arnold,

the glorious contour of his incomparable work.

I mean, de Kubota absolutely obsessed with Arnold, as we said.

Just two more examples to give you a sense of the massive impact.

One, in 1911, so this is after Britain has set up state schools,

which at this point didn't exist.

In 1911, the British Board of Education

recommended that every single school in Britain must have a copy of Tom Brown's

school days in its library as an example to the pupils.

The other example, one of the first most influential boarding school

set up in India, which is Rajkumar College, founded in 1870.

The headmaster of that school used to read out, Tom,

it will please you, the cricketing passages from Tom Brown's school days

at school assemblies instead of Christian sermons,

because he thought it would better influence the boys to become upstanding gentlemen.

I was reading that Tom Brown's school days was used in Japan

after the Japanese had opened up to the world

and were trying to learn English.

Yes, boys would be set to translate Tom Brown's school days into Japanese,

but they would emit the detail of the cricket match because that was too challenging.

Oh, really? Yeah, I can see that.

So that's where Japan went wrong.

So Tom Brown's school days, just a sort of the last few minutes of this half of the episode.

Tom Brown's school days becomes the template for a host of stories

that are, I would argue, by far the most influential stories on children in Britain

and indeed in the British Empire more broadly between, let's say, 1860 and 1950 and 1960 or so.

And these are the school stories that are colossally, colossally popular.

So the most famous examples of this in something like The Boy's Own Paper.

The Boy's Own Paper.

We still talk, don't we in Britain, of boy's own stories,

kind of stories of pluck and daring do.

The Boy's Own Paper sold a quarter of a million copies

and each copy was read by about four children.

So its readership was about one million, extraordinary.

And the weird thing about that is that it's being read by children

who have no prospect of going to an ivy clad gothic public school.

Yeah, I find this absolutely fascinating.

So the other two great publications that sort of embodied the school story

were the Magnet and the Gem.

So these were Boy's Papers, by the way, they are read by girls

and there are girls' equivalents of them.

And they are in the 1900s, 1910s, 1920s.

George Orwell wrote a brilliant essay about them, about school stories

and about their influence.

The most famous series of stories that run in them

are the Grey Friars School Stories starring Billy Bunter.

And those stories are read by people from all across the social spectrum.

As you say, Tom, they have far more readers

who will never, ever go within a 10 miles of a boarding school

than they are boarding school boys.

And they're being read in the colonies, aren't they?

So I think of C.L.R. James, the great Marxist historian of cricket.

And there aren't enough Marxist historians of cricket.

But he was hugely influenced by them in his approach to...

I mean, he's influenced by Marx and he's influenced by Thomas Hughes.

It's such a weird blend.

I'm glad you mentioned C.L.R. James.

So C.L.R. James went to a school called Queens Royal College in Port of Spain.

He's arguably the greatest intellectual that the Caribbean,

well, one of the greatest intellectuals that the Caribbean ever produced,

you know, his brilliant book, The Black Jacobin.

You know, as you say, great Marxist historian, great writer on cricket.

And in his autobiography, Beyond a Boundary,

he talks about Thomas Arnold's legacy and he says,

one of the most fantastic transformations in the history of education

and of culture.

And he says of the code of kind of manliness, decency, fair play,

team spirit, that he got from the school stories.

He says, from the eight years of school life,

this code became the moral framework of my existence.

It has never left me.

I learned it as a boy.

I have obeyed it as a man.

And now I can no longer laugh at it.

It's it's it's such a kind of odd fusion, isn't it?

That the Marxism that that inspired him throughout his adult life

seems absolutely to have interfered with that public school spirit.

Yeah. So, Tom, just before we go into the break,

lots of the younger people listening to this will think back

with similar fondness, I would say, to the Harry Potter stories.

Thomas Hughes said at Tom Brown School days

that he wrote it to get the chance of preaching.

And the Harry Potter stories are quite preachy books.

So the moral lessons that each book kind of provides.

J.K. Rowling was doing nothing unprecedented at all.

There were lots of stories in between school stories

that did exactly the same thing.

So the Greyfriars stories, for example, the stories of Harry

Wharton and his friends. So we will be talking about them, by the way.

I'm obsessed by these stories, as you know, I'm absolutely obsessed.

I do. And I will be talking more about them

in our bonus episode for Restis History Club members,

which will be out either tomorrow or Wednesday.

So if you are not a member of the Restis History Club

and you pine to hear me talking about Billy Bunter.

The fat owl of the remove. The fat owl of the remove.

This is your chance.

So these stories were enormously influential on working class children.

In his brilliant book, The Intellectual Life of the English Working Classes,

Jonathan Rose, a great historian, has loads of examples of incredibly

implausible people who found these stories, their equivalent.

These were their Bible.

They drew their moral code from these stories.

I'll give you two examples.

One, a boy growing up in the South Wales

Coldfield called Niren Bevan, the founder of our beloved National Health Service,

Tom, and Niren Bevan worked as a butcher's boy.

And he would go to the news agent every week to pick up his copies

of the magnet and the gem full of boarding school stories.

His father, a minor, banned them from the house.

This was very common because they were seen as being badly written

or because the kind of moral lessons were disapproved of.

Often parents would regard the misbehavior of boys in the story.

Stealing jam, fighting.

Yes, boarding out of windows.

Yerou, wrestling with with tramps and foot baths.

Billy Bunter says when he's being beat,

he's being beaten by Mr. Mr. Quelch.

Stealing jam.

Always stealing jam or other boys' hampers, Tom.

So lots of parents would ban them.

They said they're not you should read something better.

You should read something more improving.

Bevan would sneak out and buy them anyway,

and he hid them under a railway bridge near his house.

I mean, it's extraordinary that somebody who is thought of as being

one of the absolute titans of socialism did this.

And the other example is a great working class historian called Robert Roberts,

who grew up in Salford and wrote a book about it called The Classic Slum.

He said for boys like him, he said,

Greyfriars became for us a true alma mater to whom we felt bound

by a dreamlike loyalty.

Over the years, these simple tales conditioned whole generations of boys.

The public school ethos distorted into myth and told among us

weakly in penny numbers, set our ideals and standards.

And in the final estimate, it may well be found that Frank Richards,

who is the author of Greyfriars stories,

had more influence on the mind and outlook of young working class

England than any other single person.

OK, well, that's brilliant, Dominic.

I think that you've absolutely shown that there is a living link

between Tom Brown School days and Harry Potter.

And people can see how that thread would have been woven through

what, 150 years or more of British popular culture.

And so when we come back, we will look at how all the famous elements

in the Harry Potter stories are prefigured in the Victorian public school.

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Welcome to Hogwarts, said Professor McGonagall.

The start of term banquet will begin shortly.

But before you take your seats in the great hall, you'll be sorted into your hooses.

The sorting is a very important ceremony

because while you're here, your hoose will be something like your family

within Hogwarts.

You will have classes with the rest of your hoose sleeping in your hoose

dormitory and spend free time in your hoose common room.

The four hooses are called Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin.

Each hoose has its own noble history

and each has produced outstanding witches and wizards.

While you're at Hogwarts, your triumphs will earn you hoose points

while any rule-breaking will lose hoose points.

At the end of the year, the hoose with the most points is awarded the Hoose Cup.

A great honour.

I hope each of you will be a credit to which ever hoose becomes yours.

So that, Dominic, was obviously J.K. Rowling and Professor McGonagall again

from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

And that's Harry and his chums who've come from, what's it? Platform nine and three-quarters

Kings Cross to Hogwarts.

And this thing about houses, as we south of the border call them.

What is Professor McGonagall going on about?

Where she's got this idea from?

Does it perhaps go back to Victorian public schools?

It does, Tom.

So just before we get to the houses, one second.

Harry is with his family.

He gets his letter.

He gets his hour.

He gets all his gear.

He goes off to school.

In almost every element of the story,

he's doing something that people in public school stories have done before.

So crucially, he gets the train.

So you know the Hogwarts Express.

I mean, even people who haven't read Harry Potter will know about the Hogwarts Express.

It goes from Platform nine and three-quarters at Kings Cross Station.

That is a well-used device in school stories because, of course, so many people did go by

train to public schools.

And actually, the existence of the British public school network depends on the Victorian

railway system because often the point of these schools is that they are on isolated

moors or provincial towns a long way from the urban centres that presumably are producing

the wealth that enables parents to pay for these schools.

Exactly.

It's precisely that point in the 19th century when people are very anxious about the

consequences of the Industrial Revolution, the expansion of the city, the kind of fetid

air of the cities, all of industrial modernity, all of these things.

And they're looking for an escape.

This is a kind of course great criticism for public schools, isn't it?

Over the 20th century, this idea that it's industry that creates the money that then

gets spent on sending the children of these industrialists off to medieval,

faux medieval schools in the countryside.

Well, this isn't...

I mean, you're absolutely right, Tom, that the medievalism is the point.

So many of the great public schools of England, what are regarded as the sort of totemic public

schools of England are really 19th century fake medieval foundations.

You take my own school that I went to in Malvern, which was founded in 1865.

It's in a spa town that you get to even now.

It's at the end of the railway line from London, Paddington.

People would go there on the train.

The point is that you're going to the countryside and you're leaving industrial

modernity behind.

The buildings of the school like Hogwarts, which is a castle, the buildings are done in

the kind of medieval gothic.

So many schools are done in this style.

Theo, our producer, so Theo, as regular listeners will know, purports to be a Frenchman.

In fact, Theo was educated at Wellington College, which was set up in 1859 for the sons of soldiers.

Was that named after the Duke of Wellington?

After the Duke of Wellington.

Now, your own school, Tom, I'm sorry to say, is a much more recent, a Reveased Foundation,

isn't it?

Isn't it 1920s, Canford?

Well, that's because I'm of humble, lower middle class stock, Dominic.

Clearly, clearly.

But so many of these schools, if you look at their websites, you will see that they are kind

of mock medieval gothic buildings, which are sort of weighted.

Which, of course, King's Crosses as well.

I always assumed that Jacob Rowling chose King's Cross because that's the train that

goes to Edinburgh, where she wrote it from London.

But maybe also the fact that it's called medieval St. Pancras and all that is part of it as well.

You're in the shadow of St. Pancras with the kind of huge gothic spires of St. Pancras.

And you're going to a car, another kind of gothic-ish building.

But what about houses?

Well, houses, you mentioned houses.

Before the 19th century, most boys had kind of boarded in very ramshackle kind of surroundings.

They might have all stayed in one.

They might have slept in the schoolroom.

They might have stayed in the headmaster's house.

But the point of houses is that Dr. Arnold and his imitators want a much more disciplined,

regimented system, which will institutes-

Can you say regimented?

I mean, presumably literally like regiments.

Literally, exactly literally as Hogwarts is.

Hogwarts is divided into four competing houses.

So the spirit of competition is built into the school.

This was a 19th century idea that you will get the,

you will teach the boys team spirit, absolutely central to Arnold's vision,

to the entire ethos of the kind of Victorian ruling classes,

and of course, to the ethos of Harry Potter.

That the individual is never bigger than the team.

That the most important thing is the collective rather than, you know, your own personal gain.

And the house is the kind of embodiment of that.

The other thing about the house, the house is governed by an incredibly complicated series

of rules.

There's an outsider finds utterly impenetrable and impossible to understand.

And the impenetrability is the point.

The impenetrability is the point.

Now in Victorian schools, and this persisted well into the late 20th century,

you would learn the rules of the school and the special language of the school,

and you would be given a test after two weeks.

And if you didn't pass it, you would be beaten, you know,

or you would be punished in some way.

Now, Harry, when he arrives, you know, he's nervous as people are,

and he is told and he is made to learn the rules of the, the rules of the school.

His, his kind of peers in Gryffindor, his house and the senior children in Gryffindor

are sort of guiding the juniors and explaining to them the rules of the sports,

all of this kind of thing.

The other thing, the one thing they don't have in Hogwarts,

which is part of the kind of regimentation of the Victorian public school,

the, the regimentation of the Victorian public school in hand in hand with a kind of cult of,

of emotional reserve of, you know, not exposing your emotions of self.

I mean, the importance of that is,

of not crying because you're missing mummy.

Right. It's self-discipline, but, but it's not just a way of beating homesickness.

The point, I mean, the Victorians, Victorian teachers in the shadow of Arnold believed

that self-discipline was a positive good.

Well, this is a stiff upper lip.

Again, this is.

Exactly. It's a stiff upper lip.

It's the, you know, you're under fire in the Sudan with, with General Gordon

and you don't show a flicker of it.

I mean, it's really important for an imperial power to have this kind of.

But I mean, internationally, this becomes the image of the,

of the English gentleman, that he's cold, emotionless.

James Bond.

Ice in his veins.

James Bond is nothing.

I mean, as we talked about before in our James Bond episode,

he's nothing if not a public school hero, a classic public school hero,

the ice in his veins, as you, as you say, Tom.

And of course, one way that the regimentation, the competition,

and the spirit of self-discipline, one way that they are all

inculcated in the boys is through sport.

So, right.

This brings us to Quidditch.

So Quidditch, Tommy, you haven't read all the Harry Potter stories, have you?

Haven't read all of them.

But you know what Quidditch is, right?

They're flying around.

I've read some of them and I've watched the film.

So yeah, of course.

I mean, everybody does.

It's part of, you know, what everybody knows.

So the joke about Quidditch, to some degree,

is that Quidditch is a kind of made up, intricate, bizarre, absurd sport.

But of course, all sports, you know, cricket,

to many of our American listeners, it's no matter than cricket.

Or baseball.

Well, yes, American football is the ultimate ridiculous sport, of course.

But, or rugby.

So rugby devised that rugby school.

It's this kind of sublimated violence.

Because that's the thing, isn't it?

That all these sports are individual to various public schools, basically.

And it's this mania for codifying games

that in the long run will feed into the codification of games

like football and rugby and so on.

Yeah. Public school boys, instrumental, of course, in all of it.

But you still famously have the Eaton Wall game, which is quite quidditchy.

I didn't really know what it is, but I imagine it involves a wall

and it seems to involve people rolling in mud.

But the Eaton Wall game is one of many such games at the time.

The only reason it's notable is because it's survived.

Most schools had versions of the Eaton Wall game or something similar.

Some kind of weird game.

So I think at Charter House, they had a game, which was a bit like rugby,

except they used boys instead of balls.

And one boy died.

That toughened him up.

But Dominic, just against that, I mean, cricket is distinctive

because already by this point, it is a national sport.

And so in Tom Brown, you have, I think it's Gideast,

or one of those chaps, says of cricket

that it is the birthright of British boys, old and young,

as habeas corpus and trial by jury are of British men,

which is a splendid sentiment that you would do well to reflect upon.

But I think what happens in the 19th century with cricket

is that the public school embrace of cricket kind of elevates it

from a fun game that people played.

They imbue cricket, just like Scott East does it there,

with this kind of moral Arnoldian...

But again, famously more than a game, an institution, they say.

Exactly, it's this sort of grandiosity

of the public school moralism, the Corinthian spirit

that people apply to all these games.

Now, by the end of the 19th century,

the funny thing is actually, by the way,

Dr Arnold himself wasn't interested in sports at all.

It was his disciples who made this great attempt

to institutionalize sport.

People sometimes complain now that British private schools

are too concerned about sport.

But in the 1880s at Uppingham School, for example,

boys played vast quantities of football every single day,

the headmaster made them do it.

Schools like Eaton would have a huge variety of sports

that people would be doing, because sport was seen as the essence of...

It became seen, it became, dare I say,

sacrificed, Tom, as the absolute essence of manliness and moral character.

But was it not also enshrined, and we mentioned beastliness before,

as a way of stopping boys from obsessing about girls and other boys?

I think there's no suspense, or I can say,

I don't think there's any great concern

about boys obsessing about girls in this period.

I think the issue of boys obsessing with other boys is part of it.

We'll talk about the beastliness a bit later,

just one thing about sport.

So yes, some headmasters are obsessed

with the dangers of beastliness, and they believe that the best way to do this,

to fight it, is for the boys to do nothing at sport all day,

so they're too tired to think about anything else.

And cold showers.

Do they have cold showers?

They must do.

Yeah, of course they do.

However, some masters think that they notice that the boys,

obviously when they're playing sport,

their legs, for example, are exposed.

So there's a fantastic story that at Rugby,

the guy won master.

He made all the boys wear really long shorts,

and then the ends of the shorts were fastened with elastic bands,

so no hint of flesh could be seen by the other boys,

in case they became excited by one another

while they were playing football or rugby or whatever.

Cripes.

So yeah, you don't get that in the Billy Buns stories, Tom.

One thing that people who read Harry Potter will know

is that there was this kind of cult of the athlete,

so Victor Crum or Cedric Diggory.

Cedric Diggory is the character that I most resemble, Tom,

because I, like Cedric Diggory, am in Hufflepuff,

the house for very kind boys and modest boys.

He's the cock of the school, isn't he?

He's a tremendous fellow.

He's played, as I would be if there were a film

with the rest is history, by Robert Patterson.

So if you know Robert Patterson.

Yeah, the vampire guy.

Vampire guy.

He would play me.

You, of course, would be played by Tom Holland,

in a public school story.

So yeah, there's the cult of the athlete,

and of course that leads into the kind of cult of the sort of,

not just the sportsman schoolboy,

but later on the soldier.

Lots of J. R. R. Tolkien, his former rugby team,

virtually all of them kind of enlist in the Great War.

Lots of them are killed.

So there's a kind of link between the sporting team

and the sort of the teamwork of military service,

service for the empire.

Would you get in that famous Henry Newbolt poem?

And which, in due course,

again comes to be seen as a kind of index of British decadence,

ironically.

So Kipling has the famous lines about muddied oafs

and flanneled fools.

Mudded oafs, exactly.

We should talk a bit about magic, of course, Tom.

Yes.

So in his lessons, Harry is taught,

effectively, a bizarre and impenetrable code

that outsiders kind of possibly understand,

but which works to kind of bind the pupils at Hogwarts together

as a community separate from the outside world.

So that's magic.

It's spellarabas.

Or in real life, of course, it's classics.

Tremendous.

So the fetish of Latin and Greek at public schools.

This is a leftover from the medieval period, to some degree.

But...

And definitely the Renaissance, as we will discuss.

Yeah, of course.

I mean, people have taught classics all the way through.

I mean, classics have been there from the very beginning

of the public schools in the 14th century,

all the way through as we will discuss next time.

But there's a brilliant book called Gilded Youth

by an academic called James Brooks Smith.

He says the profound linguistic alienation of classical study

formed a complex network of rules and regulations

that subsumed the individual within the collective life

of the institution.

He says, why is it that so many public schools

were so defensive about the study of Latin and Greek,

which they've never used since?

It's because they bear the indelible stamp

of the public school initiation right.

Latin and Greek were tools for identity formation,

as much as they were bodies of knowledge.

For many, their appeal lay in a realm beyond

the rational and utilitarian concerns of education.

That's magic, Tom.

And so those who don't have Latin and Greek are muggles.

Exactly.

Equivalent, Tom.

Exactly.

So people who in the Harry Potter universe

aren't witches or wizards.

Yeah.

You think that's fair?

I think that's exactly it.

Latin and Greek is one of a series of secret languages

that you will get at a boarding school.

So the other secret language is the language

of the school itself with all the weird terms.

The slang and things.

For the slang and the tuck shop and so on.

But the idea of the secret language, I think,

is really important in what you might call

public school humor.

So so much British humor, elite humor,

is about institutions and secret languages and things.

So Lewis Carroll, the Molesworth stories in the 1950s,

the St Trinians, Monty Python.

You know?

Yeah.

The absurdism of Monty Python,

which is so often about sending up institutions

and mocking the language of institutions,

that's very public school humor, I would argue.

Private eye.

Exactly.

We haven't talked about the teachers

right from the start.

Harry Potter is frightened to one teacher,

in particular, Professor Snape.

Actually, most of the teachers at Hogwarts

are pretty benign.

This was maybe, I think it's fair to say,

not always the case at Victorian public schools.

So they're full of sort of terrifying Alan Rickman,

Professor Snape figures.

And of course, the thing that a boy would fear

more than anything else is punishment, is beating.

And we did a podcast recently about the Marquis de Sade.

He would have loved life in a British boarding school

in the 19th century, Tom.

Well, he loved regimentation and depersonalization

and all that kind of thing,

which is basically what Victorian public schools

are all about.

Yeah.

So there's a great Canadian sociologist

in the 20th century called Irving Goffman.

And he talked about total institutions.

And the Victorian public school

was the ultimate total institution.

But that is why they work so well as stories.

Because it's a self-contained world.

And actually, it's true of Star Trek.

It's true of the Aubrey and Maturin books

that I've been reading there, Patrick O'Brien.

Yeah.

That actually self-contained worlds

with their own hierarchies,

their own rules, their own language

are brilliant for stories.

Of course they are.

And kids adore them.

The critic, Catherine Hughes, many years ago

was writing about Harry Potter, the appeal of Harry Potter.

And she said,

children who are never going to go to a boarding school

often love boarding school stories

because they love the idea of all the rules

they have to learn, all the traditions of the school,

the codes of conduct.

I remember reading to Katie when she was young,

my elder daughter said she was going

to the local state school.

So absolutely no houses or trains

off to boarding schools or whatever.

But the book that she adored

were the Twins at St. Clairs by Enid Blyton,

which is kind of a light Mallory Towers as well,

which is about girls boarding schools.

And I remember when I read her,

the last of these novels,

that she burst into tears

because she would never hear them again for the first time.

Oh, my words.

Absolute kind of evidence for the incredible hold

that these stories can still have on children

in the 21st century who know nothing about this world.

Well, any parents who've read the Harry Potter books

or seen their children read the Harry Potter books

will know the power that the school story can have.

I was like that with Billy Bunter.

I discovered Billy Bunter when I was about 10.

It was baffling to me a lot of the stuff

about translating Virgil and the beatings and stuff.

But I was addicted.

So just on the beatings, Tom, I know you love a beating.

As part of the institutionalization

of Victorian public schools,

public ritual of flogging or beating

was absolutely central to this.

So at Charter House,

people would be beaten with a bunch of birch switches.

At Rugby, they had a thin wooden cane

and they had lead.

It was weighted with lead at the end.

And you were generally beaten on the buttocks.

They would have special flogging blocks at schools

like a kind of altar, like a wooden altar.

How long did this go on for?

Oh, I mean decades.

Canes with birches and lead on the...

Yeah, kind of up to when?

After the Second World War, it started to decline.

Yeah, people thought this was poor form.

Blimey, I had no idea.

I thought it was the slipper.

You would often be...

Other boys would assemble.

It would be a great public spectacle.

Oh, it's in if, isn't it?

It is in if.

At Eaton, you would go up the stairs to the Headmaster's study.

The stairs would be lined by boys.

Being taken to the guillotine.

You can imagine the atmosphere.

Some boys, their face is stricken with fellow feeling.

Other boys, their face is contorted with glee

as the victim was...

The historian Heather Ellis says that this had

a kind of political resonance.

That actually the more trouble the British Empire was in,

the more it seems that public schools were keen on flogging

because they're more anxious about forming character

and about discipline.

That the greater the sense of anxiety in society

as a whole about the state of the nation,

the more beatings, flogging, canings seem to have increased.

Well, I mean, do you think that this is...

Hence the obsession with fagging and being beaten

is that this is schooling you then to go out and...

I think so, absolutely.

...dominate people, have servants and beat them.

So I was reading a very good book by David Turner,

The Old Boys, The Decline and Rise of the Public School,

in preparation for this.

And he quotes a teacher at Harrow School in 1928

that to learn to obey as a fag is part of the routine

that is the essence of the English public school system.

Those who hope to rule must first learn to obey.

Yeah.

And that has an obvious relevance, I guess,

for a ruling class that is anxious about

the possible collapse of the Empire.

Yeah.

You're going to go on from a public school

into another institution.

It could be the Church of England.

It could be the Civil Service.

It could be the...

You're going to be a colonial official in India.

It could be the army or the navy.

So you're going to move into another hierarchy

where you will be, once again, at the bottom

and you'll have to work your way up to the top.

So that idea of obedience and giving orders,

it's really, really important.

One other consequence of the beatings, Tom.

One historian reckons that about half of all the erotic works

published in late 19th century Britain

had flagellation as the key theme.

Well, it's Levis anglais, isn't it?

The mistress of flagellation, the history of the rod,

the quintessence of birch discipline.

These are the titles.

Now, not only that.

These are books aimed at a public school audience

because they are too expensive for working class readers.

They are two or three guineas.

So in other words, you have to be rich to buy them.

They are aimed at that, particularly on tell.

There are also special flagellation brothels in London.

But not just in London, right?

I mean, in Paris as well and across the continent,

because this is seen again as a kind of very English specialization.

Right.

Right.

And there's no doubt that it comes from the schools.

So a pornographic publisher called George Cannon

who wrote about these brothels,

he said, why are they so popular?

Because hundreds of young men,

through having been educated at institutions

where the masters were fond of administering birch discipline

and recollecting certain sensations produced by it,

have imbibed a passion for it

and have longed to receive the same chastisement

from the hands of a fine woman.

So even at the time, people think,

there's something odd going on here.

And of course, you mentioned before,

anxieties about the boys interfering with each other.

They are definitely there.

So Theo, our producer, who was at Wellington College.

Where are we going with this?

He may well be able to shed some light

on whether they still have to install barbed wire entanglements

on the top of the dormitory cubicle stall.

Is that what they did?

To stop the boys breaking out at night

to interfere with each other after the master's crash.

Because as well.

So we've got Theo.

Let's ask Theo.

Is this what happened at your...

He's not replied.

Thanks for that, Dominic.

Yeah, I can confirm that.

That was no longer the case when I was there.

Okay, thank you, Theo.

Excellent contribution there from Theo as it happens.

It's great to have Theo on the show.

So just one more thing before we move on to

something we have not talked about at all.

This is classic rest of history.

We haven't talked about girls.

The boys are not just interfering with one another.

There's a very famous story by a girl called John Addington Simmons.

Now, John Addington Simmons was a harrow in the 1850s,

and his memoir of his time there was not published until 1984, Tom,

because it was so scandalous.

John Addington Simmons said,

At Harrow, when you arrived,

the better-looking boys were immediately given female names

by the older boys.

Well, that's in Tom Brown's school days.

Yeah, there's a hint of that in Tom Brown's school days.

Well, no, so they say that Arthur, the guy who prays and likes a rooster,

since obviously a weed, and it's referring to him and other kind of new boys like him,

that this new boy would most likely never get out of the close

and would be afraid of wet feet and always getting laughed at

and called Molly or Jenny or some derogatory feminine nickname.

Yes, but they're not being called Molly and Jenny in a derogatory way.

They're being called Molly and Jenny in an appraising way,

because John Addington Simmons said...

That's the same, surely.

Well, he said, what would happen is the better-looking boys,

you would be adopted by an older boy as, and I quote,

his bitch or his tart, and then you would perform various services.

Simmons said that at Harrow in the 1850s,

one could not avoid seeing acts of oneness and mutual masturbation,

the sports of naked boys in bed together.

Now, our executive producer, Tony Pastor, Tom, is obsessed by this kind of stuff.

When we went to America for the American tour,

he spent the entire flight on the way out,

endlessly quizzing me about what happened at boarding schools.

Was it true we'd done this, that, and the other?

So he would enjoy this.

At one point, Simmons' best friend, a guy called Alfred Preter,

comes to him and he says, I've got interesting news.

I've actually been having an affair with the headmaster.

Wow.

So the headmaster was one of Arnold's disciples,

a man called Charles Vaughan.

I shouldn't laugh.

He had become headmaster of Harrow at 28.

You know how Cricketer's a talk of as a future England captain, Tom?

Yes.

He was talked of as a future Archbishop of Canterbury,

but presumably this didn't help his cause.

It didn't help his cause because basically, Simmons told his father,

his father kind of blackmailed Charles Vaughan.

Charles Vaughan had to step down as head of Harrow

for having had an affair with this boy,

and he ended up becoming a parish priest in Doncaster, Tom.

Well, bit of a come down.

So that was the end of him.

Now, this doesn't happen in Harry Potter for one key reason.

Girls.

Hogwarts has girls, so Hermione Granger,

who is a very, very, I have to say, a very girl's school story stereotype,

isn't she?

She is just an annoying, girly swatch.

She is a blue stocking.

Yeah.

So Hogwarts has girls.

Of course, there weren't coeducational schools in the 19th century.

They didn't really come in until after the Second World War

when boys' schools started to admit.

There were always girls schools, Tom.

I know, because like Mallory Charles and St Clairs.

Exactly.

The prototype for a lot of girls schools

was the Cheltenham Laders College set up in 1853.

And Rodine, isn't it?

And Rodine, 1885, Wickham Abbey, 1896, Downhouse, 1907.

So often these are schools for people who are going to go overseas.

So their parents are going to go overseas.

They want their girls to stay in Britain to be educated.

Girls schools, I hope, girls school products listening to this will not be offended

when I say they were regarded generally as atrocious academically

by comparison with the boys' schools.

So Cheltenham Laders, they would spend a quarter of their time doing music.

They would, a lot of the time, they would do needlework.

They would do, they would learn modern languages.

So they would learn French rather than Latin.

They do a lot of sport, don't they?

They play hockey, so jolly hockey sticks and lacrosse.

They don't have the culture of beatings and the sort of physical,

all of that stuff.

They have a whole load of absolutely mad rules.

My favorite ones were from North London Collegiate,

where girls were banned from gathering in groups of more than three.

That was a very serious business.

I think it's seen as beastly.

I don't know.

And the other thing that I love is they were specifically very strictly forbidden

from getting wet on the way to school.

It was un-ladylike.

So, and the government did a report in them called the Taunton Commission,

in the 1860s.

And the Taunton Commission said there were two problems with girls school teaching.

One was that the teachers didn't know anything about teaching.

And the two was that the teachers didn't know anything about their subjects.

So, but apart from that, they're brilliant.

I guess one of the big changes, and this is obviously coincided with

J.K. Rowling starting the Harry Potter series, is that public schools now,

they're coeducational and they live or die by their exams.

Yeah.

I mean, that's why people spend all the money they do.

It's not really to learn character or manliness or womanliness or whatever it is they're teaching.

It's basically to get very, very good grades and go to university.

Exactly.

But one of the things that Harry Potter does is to kind of re-import that idea of, you know,

the Victorian idea that you become a better person.

Yeah.

And that is something that public schools are now kind of buying into again.

That's absolutely essential to the public school ethos, Tom.

You visit any public school website and they will tell you right from the outset that character,

you know, we are forming the citizens tomorrow, the change makers of the 21st century.

But is that actually true?

Or is it just kind of fashionable window dressing?

So again, I was reading up that St. Paul's Girl School has actually abolished the title

of head girl because it's too binary.

Right. Yeah, they're very woke.

Some public schools are very woke now.

Well, so Eaton is decolonizing its curriculum.

Yes.

So the funny thing about Hogwarts, therefore, Tom, is that Hogwarts, it's multicultural.

It has the kind of Patil sisters.

It has Lee Jordan who is black.

Rowling goes out of her way to make it diverse.

And the existence of girls means that although it looks like a Victorian public school,

in that sense, it's nothing like a Victorian public school because it's far more feminized

than a Victorian public school would be.

But at the same time, you still have this idea that they are an elite,

that they are separate from the muggles.

I mean, that remains hard baked into it.

And in that sense, public schools remain

absolutely separate from the vast mass of children who are going to state schools or whatever.

And I think that that opens up a whole question,

which we haven't really discussed in this first episode, which is,

where do public schools come from?

Yeah.

And that is something that in your book, The Great British Dream Factory, you talk about.

Tom, this is a lovely advert.

Thank you.

Well, one comment you make about J.K. Rowling is that

Pace and Brevity are not her strong points, though I may not necessarily be the best person

to make that observation, which I think is a very wise, self-aware comment to make.

Some of you know I didn't mean it.

You know, I don't think that of myself.

We absolutely need to finish this episode now.

But you do have a very interesting comment about how

Hogwarts supposedly is founded before the Norman conquest, and it's a castle

to which you attach the footnote.

It would probably be unbearably pedantic to observe that this makes Hogwarts very odd,

since there were no castles in Britain until the Normans arrived.

In fact, the first Scottish castles were not built until about 1200.

Horrible little boy.

You must have been a horrible, horrible little boy.

But Tom, I went to a good school and I was made into a fine,

upstanding Christian gentleman.

A prefect.

But I think that that opens up the question of, you know, we've been talking about the

Victorian public school and Hogwarts and all the public school stories and traditions

that lie in between Tom Brown's school days and J.K. Rowling.

But where did the whole concept come from?

How old is it?

Does it go back to before the Norman conquest?

If not, when does it go back to?

So I think that we should do a separate episode and look at the prehistory of Dr.

Arnold and Tom Brown and ask where the public schools come from.

Because actually, it's, I mean, it's an amazing story that involves riots,

the militia being called out and all kinds of extraordinary stories,

and takes us back to a world that is actually pretty unfamiliar.

Brilliant. Tom, you know I would love that.

So everybody, we will see you all next time.

But of course, if you are a member of the Restless History Club,

you can listen to Tom, I can imagine that you would like nothing more

than to listen to us talking even more about public school stories.

And we will be doing that on this week's bonus episode for Restless History Club members only.

And of course, if you are a member of the Restless History Club,

if you are a member of what I like to think of as the prefects,

then you can listen to the second episode of this series right now,

as is always the way with our chat community.

And on that bombshell, Tom, we say goodbye.

Goodbye.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.