LITMIR.BIZ

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and non-stop ragging in the dorm.’ After a term or two at Heatherlea, boys were confronted with a more forbidding and traditional dormitory of about a dozen boys in the main school. On arrival, new occupants were allowed to bring their own rug – to cover the Spartan wooden floorboards – and their own teddy.

      As he progressed Cameron’s school day was bookended by God. Before breakfast every day, senior boys would gather for ‘scripture’ in the school library. Here the headmaster, James Edwards, would ruminate on a text from the Bible (‘The Sadducees didn’t believe in Jesus, so they were sad, you see’ was one of his lines). After cereal and a cooked breakfast, boys would meet for a ten-minute chapel service before the curriculum classes began. The education was determinedly traditional. Even by the mid-1970s, Heatherdown saw little advantage in following what it would have seen as fashionable new methods. The teachers themselves were mostly products of English public schools and the war. The much respected Maths and Geography teacher, Monty Withers, had been at Harrow, the Science teacher, Frank Wilson, had been at Sedbergh, the headmaster was a Radleian and Christopher Bromley-Martin, the French master, an Old Etonian. These were the core staff around whom the school revolved, and to whom a succession of younger, short-staying visiting teachers (some very young and ill-qualified) deferred, to varying degrees. What had served that senior echelon well would do the trick for the new generation.

      The school’s head was a remote, forbidding figure who, with his wife Barbara (‘Bar’), a devoted gardener, ran a conservative regime. Edwards would insist – at an early stage – that boys learn to recite the Kings and Queens of England and their dates on the throne. The same went for the names of all the books of the Old and New Testament. R. V. Watson’s La Langue des français and Ritchie’s First Steps in Latin were considered unimprovable introductions to their subjects, and there was little truck with ‘the new Latin’ or ‘the new Maths’, which other comparable schools were beginning to investigate. After lunch (liver on Thursdays, fish on Fridays) boys were expected to rest on their bed with a book, a break rich with opportunities for insubordination and mischief, followed by games – cricket in the summer, soccer from September and rugby in the Lent term. Tea, as might be expected in so resoundingly comfortable an institution, was a meal of some importance. Boys would take it in turns to sit next to matron, who would wearily insist on faultless table manners.

      The academic day ended as it had begun with another ten-minute chapel service, except on Sundays when the service was rather longer. The last meal, a light supper, could be light indeed. On Thursdays it consisted of a single brick of Weetabix. At one point a looming revolt by parents was bought off by the introduction of chocolate and biscuits to fill the gap between the early supper and bedtime. Nevertheless, David Cameron, who admits that he was ‘rather tubby’ as a boy, says he ‘lost a stone every term because the helpings were so small’.

      He seems otherwise to have been happy, however. His easy affability, which has since helped smooth his path, was early in evidence. A contemporary remembers him as ‘bright, bushy-tailed and good fun. He had a good ability to get on with people.’ ‘My memory is of someone who was always smiling, very social and chatty,’ says Rhidian Llewellyn, who, as an eighteen-year-old doing his gap year, taught Cameron briefly (having been a boy at Heatherdown himself) and went on to teach at Arnold House, the Dragon and Papplewick. ‘Both he and Alex had a lot of charm, although David was the noisier of the two. He was quick-witted, full of jokes, a natural boarding school boy. They were terribly easy to get on with, and I imagine very easy for their parents to bring up. He was a bright boy, but at the time no brighter than many of his contemporaries. Among all those titled children, Cameron was one of the most normal. He was just a middle-class boy from a nice family.’

      ‘The parents all knew each other, of course,’ says Daniel Wiggin, a former pupil, and a good number of the boys saw one another during the school holidays for cricket games, for example. ‘It was quite smart,’ says Wiggin, ‘very much one of the grandest. The Kleinworts, the Hambros, the royals, the St Andrews. But they weren’t there to be smart. They were there because a lot of the fathers had been there themselves.’ When Prince Andrew was sent to Heatherdown, it was partly on the recommendation of Lord Porchester, the Queen’s racing manager, whose two sons had flourished there. Evidently satisfied, the Queen sent Edward there as well. David Cameron was two and a half years younger than Edward, but the prince and Alex Cameron were contemporaries and friends. The Queen could occasionally be seen driving a green station-wagon, dropping her sons off at the end of a weekend at home or at the beginning of term, sometimes stopping by for a cup of tea with the headmaster. More often, though, the royal presence was indicated by the series of low-key royal detectives.

      ‘I think it is fair to say that the headmaster used to choose according to the stable rather than the colt,’ says Llewellyn. ‘If you were of the right sort of background, it wouldn’t have been terribly difficult to get in. You didn’t have to be brilliantly clever. Certainly there was no formal exam. Its business was to get boys into Eton, which was via the Common Entrance exam.’ Among the eighty or so sets of parents of David’s contemporaries, there were eight honourables, four sirs, two captains, two doctors, two majors, two princesses, two marchionesses, one viscount, one brigadier, one commodore, one earl, one lord (unspecified) and one queen (the Queen). One former pupil, the son of a mere MP, said, with only some exaggeration, that the place was so full of titled people that he was one of the few boys there whose name didn’t change – as he inherited some title – during his time there. At the school’s annual sports day, two or three helicopters bearing smartly dressed parents would land on the playing fields. Instead of the customary signs for Ladies and Gents, Heatherdown had a third category: Ladies, Gentlemen and Chauffeurs. ‘It was deadly serious – the drivers were not supposed to mix with the other guests,’ says a former teacher.

      The school attached great importance to good manners. One Wednesday in the mid-1970s, the headmaster James Edwards decided that standards were slipping, so after games, instead of giving the boys their customary free time, he stood in the middle of the rugby pitch and made the boys walk around doffing their caps to the corner flags and saying ‘Good afternoon, Sir.’ The importance attached to courtesy sprang from deeper values that the school was trying to instil. ‘It was about the ability to get on with people of all backgrounds. The notion of noblesse oblige was very strong, both for the school and David Cameron at home, I think,’ says Rhidian Llewellyn. Alexander Bathurst, who later became a consultant on leadership, agrees: ‘It was very much small-“c” conservative, with good principles – honesty, enthusiasm, upholding the honour of school, family and friends.’ Dan Wiggin says the school sought to cultivate ‘a sense of duty, Christian moral responsibility and awareness of people around you and how to behave properly’. The relative lack of academic pressure allowed the inculcation of such values to be something of a priority.

      Nor was Edwards squeamish about the use of corporal punishment in fostering those values. Carrots, as well as sticks, were deployed. A boy who did a good deed or commendable work, or who behaved particularly nicely, would be given what was called an ‘Alpha’. If he won three Alphas, he was given a Plus and a reward. If, though, he misbehaved, he would get an ‘Omega’. Too many of those meant a certain beating – with a clothes brush on the trousers. This would be administered by Edwards, pipe clenched between his teeth. The punishment was followed by a manly handshake as if to wipe the slate clean. ‘It stung a bit,’ remembers Llewellyn, ‘but James Edwards wouldn’t have been unusual in that respect at the time.’ Some crimes carried a beating without question. One Cameron classmate, Rupert Stevenson, remembers that that was his punishment for talking in chapel.

      But to speak to the school’s old boys is to gain the impression that they thrived on defying authority. There was no stigma, physical or otherwise, to being beaten – rather the opposite. Alexander Bathurst says that he and his contemporaries used to ‘see how many petty rules we could break. We weren’t supposed to read comics after lights out, for example, so you could be quite sure that is exactly what we would try to do. But it is still fair to say that you did rather live in awe of the senior masters and matrons.’ One former boy remembers that there was a regular opportunity

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