LITMIR.BIZ

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were necessarily entirely benign. Michael’s schooling was delayed by his severe asthma in 1919, which led him to go to London at the age of six to obtain medical advice. Indeed, his awareness of ill-health and fear of being thought unattractive were important threads in his early years: a robust life into his nineties was not what the doctors might have predicted. His first school in 1919 was a local preparatory school, Plymouth College for Girls, perhaps not a total success for a six-year-old boy. In Recitation, his school report commented, ‘His expression is very good; he should speak out more’ – seldom an injunction needed in later life. Another subject was Needlework – ‘Good, but he works too slowly.’²¹ In 1921 he went on to Plymouth College and Mannamead School. Going there was not without its hazards, especially being harassed by local bullies as he made his way across Freedom Fields. In 1923, at the age of ten, he went away to a private boarding school, Forres, in Swanage on the Dorset coast. His brother John was already a pupil there. Michael’s progress was often interrupted by bronchial complaints; nor did the school’s occasional penchant for caning its pupils (including Michael himself for one alleged misdemeanour) appeal to him. But he seems to have developed well, and his headmaster, R. M. Chadwick, wrote enthusiastically when he left Forres in 1927 of the immense contribution he had made, and how his name should be inscribed on the school Honours Board. He was first in his form in every subject from Latin to Scripture, while he had also done well in sport as captain of games – ‘a very good example of all-round keenness’. An earlier report at Christmas 1926 had commended his football skills – ‘Fast and a very good shot at goal. Much more determined than he was last season.’ The headmaster added in his final remarks, ‘We have all grown very fond of him during his time with us and he will leave a big gap. We look forward to making Christopher’s acquaintance next term.’²²

      The fourteen-year-old Michael’s next destination was another private school, Leighton Park, the Quaker boarding school near Reading which his older brother Hugh had already attended (as a scholar, unlike Michael). Founded in 1890, Leighton Park was an elitist school in its way, and was sometimes referred to as ‘the Quaker Eton’. Years later A. J. P. Taylor told Lord Beaverbrook, ‘Michael had been educated at Leighton Park, the snob Quaker school, and I at Bootham [York], the non-snob one.’ Beaverbrook gleefully responded (ignoring Taylor’s extremely wealthy cotton-merchant father), ‘You and I are sons of the people. Michael is an aristocrat.’²³ But Leighton Park had much cachet amongst nonconformists in both England and Wales. Its liberal Quaker ethos meant that there was no fagging, no corporal punishment and certainly no cadet corps. Its historian, Kenneth Wright, wrote that it was ‘an unconventional school producing unconventional people who did not fit into predetermined moulds’. It attracted droves of liberal Cadburys from Bourneville and liberal Rowntrees from York, putative pacifists one and all. Michael seems to have found both the teaching and the atmosphere of the school generally congenial. Later on in life he was fiercely to denounce the public schools in the Daily Herald for their atmosphere of snobbery, but clearly Leighton Park escaped this particular contagion. Its school magazine, The Leightonian, gives at that time a cheerful sense of irreverent informality.

      At first Michael’s schooling was much interrupted by ill-health. His return for his second term in 1928 was delayed by impetigo and bronchial problems, while his weight was relatively slight. But he soon got into his school subjects with gusto – or at least into those parts of the work which interested him. These clearly did not include a great deal of science. By the spring term of 1928 his science teacher lamented that ‘he has not much aptitude for this subject’ (chemistry). Physics was adjudged to be no better. A year later, science of any kind has disappeared from his schooling, a not untypical instance of the secondary education of the time. By contrast, his mathematics was highly praised for arithmetic, algebra and geometry, with marks in the high eighties in each. But by the end of 1929 that also has vanished from his ken. Michael Foot was never a particularly numerate politician. By contrast, the humanities were going well, especially all kinds of literature, and history, for which he had a fine Welsh teacher. His parents were also pleased to see that he scored 92 per cent in scripture in the summer term of 1928. In the spring term of 1930 his report praised the ‘mastery’ he demonstrated in a paper on the Italian Risorgimento (surely a particularly congenial theme for a romantic young radical), while in European history generally he was thought to be working with ‘considerable intelligence and interest’. The one weakness in his work on humanities subjects appeared to be modern languages. Neither in French nor in German did he distinguish himself French lessons in the spring of 1930 showed that ‘his vocabulary is weak’, and he scored a mere 37 per cent.²⁴ Surprisingly for a man with such a quick and adaptable mind, this remained a weak point throughout his life. He was never a confident linguist; he gloried in the novels of Stendhal and the poems of Heine, but he read them in translation. But in that he was typical of the political generation of his time. He got his School Certificate with honours in 1930, and his Higher School Certificate a year later.

      Leighton Park in general seems to have been very good for the teenage Michael Foot academically, and he also flourished in other ways. He was an active member of School House, and in 1930 he became a school prefect. The Leightonian records several of his other activities. He played a role in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance as Sergeant of Police. An old boy of the school wrote that ‘Foot’s performance will go down in the school’s history’: the audience got him to sing one of his songs three times, and ‘in each encore he was even funnier than before’. Despite his asthma and eczema he took his full part in school games, and was commended on his performances as a wing forward in the first rugby XV (‘his dribbling is his best feature’, though his tackling was also sound) and especially at cricket – ‘a good forceful batsman, an excellent cover point fielder and a good bowler who keeps a steady line’. He took six wickets for twenty runs against Bedales, and topped the school bowling averages in 1931, with fifteen wickets at an average of 10.73 apiece.²⁵ Years later he was to demonstrate his cricketing skills when playing for Tribune against the New Statesman: the latter’s captain and political correspondent, Alan Watkins, came to realize that asking his fast bowlers to be charitable to an amiable old gent was a big mistake. Tennis and rugby fives were other games at which he represented the school. He also began to display talent in the school debating society, which he restarted, and took part as the Liberal candidate in the school mock election on 30 May 1929. He won with fifty-six votes, against thirty-eight for the Conservatives and eleven for Labour – a more substantial majority than he ever gained at Devonport, and one of relatively few Liberal victories that year.

      This was a time of much political energy in the Foot household. Their new home in Pencrebar became a significant salon for West Country Liberalism, with Lloyd George himself a visitor. The young Michael Foot was heard to deliver impromptu speeches to garden parties even at the tender age of twelve. Past divisions between Coalition and Asquithian Liberals set aside, the Foot household campaigned en bloc on behalf of Lloyd George’s last crusade in the 1929 election with its famous Orange Book to promote economic recovery, We Can Conquer Unemployment. The Liberals’ eventual tally of seats was a mere fifty-nine, and Ramsay MacDonald became Prime Minister for the second time, Labour ending up with 289 seats, the largest number in the House. But there was much joy with the return of Isaac again for Bodmin, though with a majority of less than a thousand over Gerald Joseph Harrison, the Conservative who had defeated him in 1924. Isaac took a prominent front-bench role in the new House, and was appointed as a Liberal member of the Round Table conference on India in 1930. Michael’s elder brother Dingle had also made his first attempt on Parliament, but was defeated by a Conservative in Tiverton, despite polling over 42 per cent of the vote. Hugh was now entering the diplomatic service, and would soon embark on a long connection with the Middle East by serving in Palestine. The schoolboy Michael, a vigorous campaigner for Lloyd Georgian Liberalism in 1929 with its multi-coloured cures for economic stagnation, the Green, Yellow and Orange Books, yielded to none of them in the passion of his political commitment. Lloyd George’s battle hymn, ‘God gave the Land to the People’, was a very popular song at

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