LITMIR.BIZ

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leaving report that he had driven him to the end of his tether. Another teacher added that Randolph would have to make more of an effort and keep his wits about him, and still another concluded that Randolph was extremely backward for his years and would have to learn to grow up. Randolph might well have been young for his years – he was thirteen – but that Christmas, the schoolmasters’ counsel did not prevent Lord Galloway from pressing ahead with his own programme of development. He presented Randolph with a gun, and soon after Randolph began to go shooting with Mr Malcolm Scott, the gamekeeper. By the end of the holiday, he was accompanying Lord Galloway on organised shoots at Larg. Much to everybody’s surprise, he showed signs of becoming a rather good shot.

      Randolph’s enrolment at Chartridge Hill House marked an important change in his family’s approach to him. ‘Through psychological and psychiatric causes that term I had injections inflicted on me by Dr Johnson, the school’s Buckinghamshire doctor man,’ Randolph recorded.

      Given Randolph’s perceived instability, it is most likely that Lord and Lady Galloway had decided that it was appropriate for him to be sedated, in order to curb his wild bouts of behaviour. Paraldehyde was the most used sedative in the first half of the twentieth century and could be easily administered by injection. It calmed patients down without impairing their intellectual capacity. But despite being under sedation, Randolph was to receive no soft handling. Lord Galloway instructed Mr Stafford Webber, Randolph’s new headmaster, to forbid him from spending too much time with his southern relatives. Lord Galloway explained that Randolph had become ‘spoiled, pampered and petted’ and that he was still in need of toughening up.

      It had already been settled that Randolph would attend Harrow School, just as three generations of his family had done. His passage to the school that had produced Sir Winston Churchill, Lord Byron, and Lord Palmerston was predestined. The full weight of family history had been pointing him in that direction since birth. Virescit vulnere virtus was the family motto and he would simply have to rise to it. That he could not frustrated Randolph deeply, and it made him even more terrified of his father. As is so often the case when the weak are terrified of the strong, the very fear itself feeds the problem, causing paralysis in the former and even greater fury in the latter.

      In June 1942 the dowager countess died. She was buried in the graveyard of All Saints’, Challoch, with the other Stewarts. A month later Randolph returned home from school and further irked his father. ‘I gorged and guzzled at my food to grossest excesses, and ate far too much for the parents’ conveniance [sic] and expense,’ he wrote, ‘The father man was truly disgusted at me, I was rude, discourteous, uncivil and impolite, not to mention greed [sic]’. Randolph’s healthy appetite for buttered rolls, chocolate biscuits, and cakes had always infuriated the late dowager, who had called it ‘vulgar and ungentlemanly’. Lord Galloway did not want to see a display of it either.

      Three weeks after Randolph’s fourteenth birthday in October 1942, he sat the Common Entrance exam for Harrow. It was a formality since the school would never have turned him down (his results were predictably ‘abysmally low’, even though he was a little old compared to other candidates). Randolph’s inability to please his father was having a profound effect on his social development. ‘My personality was slowly going to pot,’ he wrote, ‘becoming ever entombed in guilt, with the ever encroaching festoons of gloom entwined about complexes and phobias which had me a spectre’s shadow before that term was up. The guilt was deep and intense, becoming ever more so. I gave up laughing, I dared not even smile, thinking both were wrong.’

      If Randolph’s propensity for overeating bothered his father, it was about to flip the other way and develop into a much greater problem, one that would threaten Randolph’s physical wellbeing. Randolph’s self-imposed starvation diet – a sign if ever there was one of just how deep-rooted his unhappiness had become – began towards the end of his time at prep school. The masters and subsequently Lady Galloway were once more at a loss as to what to do with him. And yet it was in the midst of the starving and the not smiling or laughing, the growing inferiority complex and the terror of the war, that the plans were finalised for Randolph to begin at Harrow School in the Easter term of 1943.

      The memory of the First World War hung over Harrow School like a spectre, but now the school buildings themselves were in danger. That Harrow, merged with Malvern School since the year before, had chosen to stay on the hill placed it at great risk, not of direct attack, but of German pilots losing their way or dropping excess loads after bombing London. Parents, sensing the immediate danger, had begun to withdraw their sons, so that between the summer of 1940 and January 1941 the numbers in the school fell by almost a quarter. During the Blitz in the autumn of 1940, for example, all the boys were transferred to overnight shelters, with separate daytime shelters, and on the night of 2 October, thirty-three school buildings were hit. The first incendiary bomb fell at the feet of the headmaster as he entered the ARP control station in the war memorial.

      In his definitive account, A History of Harrow School 1324–1991, Christopher Tyerman writes of how the school had been devastated and consequently shaped by the losses it had sustained during the First World War. Of the 2,917 Harrovians who served, 690 were wounded and 644, including Keith Stewart, were killed. In 1939 at least the school itself had been better prepared. The headmaster, Paul Vellacott DSO, had fought in the First World War and been gassed and taken prisoner. Air-raid precaution planning and classes on air-raid protection had started two years before the Second World War was declared, and detailed plans for dispersing the school during the anticipated aerial bombardment were in place by September 1938 when gas masks were issued.

      If Lord and Lady Galloway had any qualms about sending Randolph to a place of such high risk, they did not change course. When Randolph unpacked his bags in the Grove, the same boarding house in which the 10th Earl of Galloway had been placed in April 1848, his parents had effectively placed his safety in the hands of the Senior ARP warden, H. L. Harris. Harris, greatly skilled at his job, would prove deserving of Lord and Lady Galloway’s confidence, but there was no escaping the fact that bombing remained a serious threat to the school until the end of the war.

      Randolph’s housemaster was Mr Leonard Henry, a Scot and a first-rate historian who had been at the school for twenty-five years and housemaster of the Grove since 1935. During the First World War he had served in the Inns of Court Officer’s Training Corps, from which he was invalided out. He was a classically educated intellectual of whom a former pupil wrote in the Harrovian, ‘Joined to [his] power of breathing life into the facts of history was a genius for asking questions of them; this impelled one to think.’

      Would the spirit of Harrow and the influence of such a man inspire Randolph? Would he learn to think clearly? Discuss and debate ideas? Would he acquire high standards and methods of scholarship? He would not, but Lord Galloway was not prepared to give up hope. Before Randolph left Cumloden for Harrow, John Edgar, Lord Galloway’s head gardener, had taken him for a walk around the grounds and delivered a pep talk about how best to cope with boys tormenting and niggling him. It was a prophetic act of kindness. ‘On account of my phobias and complexes as to what I did or did not do,’ Randolph wrote, ‘I was conspicuous beyond all proportion, and therefore a bit of a drip.’

      It defies belief that Lord Galloway could ever have imagined that Harrow in wartime could have done Randolph anything but harm. Beginning life at the school unsettled and disorientated even the healthiest and most stable of boys. One such fellow wrote about it in the Harrovian, under the headline ‘Random Impressions Of A New-Comer’. ‘It was pretty alarming coming here in September, and the latter part of the summer holidays was somewhat clouded by the prospect. My first impression was that all the boys were very big and all the buildings very ugly … I shan’t be sorry when I cease to be a new boy.’

      Randolph was assigned a room with another boy, and they had had a view of the school chapel. The following day he joined the newcomers in the fourth form room where Mr Moore, the headmaster who replaced Paul Vellacott, lectured them on the school rules, including the tipping of hats to him or any females connected with the school. There were countless others, which amounted to making Randolph’s first week ‘utterly wretched’. The Harrow in which he found himself was a long way from its halcyon pre-war days. This was not a place of exaggerated

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