LITMIR.BIZ

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       Winchester

       Winchester helped to open for me the doors of perception.

      KENNETH CLARK, Another Part of the Wood 1

      Winchester was a curious choice of public school for Clark’s parents, and is perhaps best understood in negative terms: it was not Eton or Harrow. Clark senior had a horror of the nobility, who – as he liked to point out – only ever wrote to ask him for something. He did not want his boy turning into a snob, and he and Alice would no doubt have felt uncomfortable at speech days – had they ever bothered to attend. The idea of sending Kenneth to Winchester almost certainly came from Wixenford. Even in an establishment so academically lax, it was recognised that the boy was exceptionally promising. His sponsor in the entry book at Winchester is given as P.H. Morton, Wixenford’s headmaster. Kenneth was the only boy in his year to go to Winchester.

      Winchester is one of the great schools of England, with a distinctive and cerebral reputation. Founded in 1382 by William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, as a school for poor scholars, it maintained a standard of academic excellence that was daunting to all but the cleverest boys. Clark painted a miserable picture of the school in his early years there, but pointed out that ‘All intellectuals complain about their schooldays. This is ridiculous.’2 He believed that they tended ‘to regard bullying and injustice as a personal attack on themselves, instead of the invariable condition of growing up in any society’.3 Ridiculous or not, Clark certainly took bullying personally. An additional privation was the effect of arriving at the school in the middle of World War I, which meant little heat and very poor food. Clark, who all his life was mildly epicurean, suffered accordingly. He also missed the soothing feminine influences of Lam.

      Like all English public schools, Winchester had its peculiar rites and customs, including a vernacular language called ‘notions’. It was an academic hothouse, with a dual emphasis on studying the Classics and sporting achievements. When Clark was later honoured by the school in the Ad Portas ceremony, its highest honour, he said, ‘Winchester was once famed for the uniformity of her sons: a uniform excellence, no doubt, but one obtained at the expense of individual fulfilment.’ This was to be one of several hindrances he felt at Winchester, since his trajectory was not to follow the conventional Classics route to scholarly recognition. He chose instead to walk an individual path through the study of art and its history. Arriving from Wixenford poor in Latin and without Greek, he was underrated during his early years at Winchester until Montague John Rendall, the school’s unconventional headmaster, recognised his singularity.

      The second problem Clark faced was his total unpreparedness for the tribal cruelties inflicted by older boys on younger ones. As a mollycoddled only child who had never experienced sibling rough-and-tumble, nor yet learned teenage cunning, the thirteen-year-old Clark was to experience probably the greatest trauma of his life in his first week at Winchester. He tells the story with some emotion in his autobiography. On the school train he addressed a handsome senior boy, who ignored him. The boy turned out to be the head prefect of his house, and on arrival at the school Clark was summoned to the library, where he was instructed to ‘Sport an arse’ – i.e. bend over – and received several painful strokes of a cane for his bumptious behaviour in speaking to an elder. The prefect’s children were later to become close friends of Clark’s children, but he never revealed the story to them.

      Tony Keswick,4 who became Clark’s closest friend at Winchester, recalled that first day at the school. The new boys for the 1917 spring term had arrived on an early train, been abandoned and got over their tears. He and Clark were beginning tentatively to make friends when the main school train arrived. There was a tremendous cacophony of voices, at which point ‘a river, an avalanche of boys poured in’. Clark turned to Keswick and said, ‘This is dreadful, isn’t it?’ Keswick agreed, and later said, ‘It’s the most vivid memory I have of him.’5 Clark’s torments were only just beginning. On the second evening Clark encountered a prefect who was an artist, and rashly offered an opinion on his work. ‘Bloody little new man. Think you know all about art. Sport an arse.’ In addition to these beatings, Clark found himself regularly cleaning fourteen pairs of prefects’ shoes. ‘In the twinkling of an eye,’ as he put it, ‘the jolly boy from Wixenford became a silent, solitary, inward-turning but still imperfect Wykehamist.’6 The traumas of his first week at Winchester gave him a bruise from which he never fully recovered, and a lifelong horror of upper-class tribalism.

      The school was divided into ten ‘houses’ of about thirty boys each, and Clark was placed in the house of Herbert Aris, known as ‘the Hake’, with whom he had no understanding or sympathy. Houses were remarkably individual, and took their character from the nature of the housemaster. Aris was Clark’s housemaster for three years, until 1920, when he retired on his wife’s money to a country estate and his place was taken by Horace Jackson, ‘the Jacker’. The house still stands as it did in Clark’s day; a line of small brick houses at 69 Kingsgate Street, pleasant cottage architecture with internal panelling. Aris – whose motto appears to have been ‘Go hard, go hard’ – wanted to make a man of Clark, who describes in his autobiography how Aris encouraged him to learn boxing, and exclaimed, ‘I want to see that big head knocked about.’7 After a few weeks he asked Clark how he was getting on. ‘I am enjoying it sir.’ Aris was furious: ‘I don’t want you to enjoy it, I want you to get hurt.’ Clark wrote a witty dialogue entitled ‘The Housemaster’ reproducing this scene. It is the earliest surviving manuscript in the Saltwood archive, and it suggests a more humorous gloss, with Clark responding ‘(penitently & repressing tears – or is it laughter! – with difficulty) So sorry sir.’

      Clark’s portrait of Aris in his autobiography was of a small-minded sadist, but he records Mrs Aris as charming. Their son, John Aris, later wrote to Clark remembering his mother lending him a book on Ruskin (which Clark acknowledged had a crucial influence on his life) and allowing him to play her piano. He added, ‘You might be right about my father as a schoolmaster, though your contemporaries would not all agree … He was not unkind but he was a man of rather simple austerity, and I believe he was then preoccupied with those who went from Winchester to France [i.e. to war]. I hope you have not misjudged him.’8

      Clark’s second housemaster, ‘the Jacker’, was something of a Winchester legend. A school manuscript describes him as ‘a ferocious little man who didn’t suffer fools – wounded in the war, he became an ardent militarist but he collected china and knew about woodcuts. He had many unlikeable qualities and was not by nature affectionate. It was said he was only interested in athletes.’9 Despite their obvious differences, Clark thought he treated him very fairly. Jackson hated conceit. When someone towards the end of Clark’s time at the school asked him what he was going to do afterwards, Clark answered, ‘Help Mr Berenson to produce a new edition of The Drawings of the Florentine Painters.’ Jackson, whom he had not observed, remarked ‘Bloody little prig.’10 He was not the last to voice this sentiment. Equally often quoted, though probably misinterpreted, was the Jacker’s remark when sitting between Clark and Keswick, whose father was a leading Hong Kong nabob, ‘Never, never again will I have the son of a businessman in my House.’11 In fact there were many such children in the house, and as Jackson’s obituary stated, ‘he could crack a joke, maybe with an edge to it’.

      Like most clever and sensitive boys at school, Clark found

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