Athletic philistines? Edmond Warre and his Etonian sporting masters

ABSTRACT

Although athleticism arguably rescued English public schools from chaos in the early nineteenth-century, concerns were soon raised that too much attention was paid to sport at the expense of learning. Subsequently, the sporting philistine became thought of as a self-perpetuating type within public schools, with masters who cared for nothing but sport producing boys who thought likewise. Edmond Warre, who taught at Eton from 1860 to 1905, and was headmaster from 1884, is often cited as the leading example of this type, building up a group of sporting masters who made Eton a dominant force in sport, but achieving little else. However, this paper argues this view does Warre and his colleagues a disservice, and that his educational achievements were downplayed because of Eton’s internal power struggles. While Eton, and other public schools, produced philistines aplenty, the best sportsmen were less likely to be among their ranks because they were increasingly motivated to study hard in order to qualify for university, and take advantage of the sporting opportunities offered there. Sporting and academic excellence were thus increasingly found in the same pupils, and sporting masters had a vested interest in providing their charges with the classical education required for Oxbridge entrance.

KEYWORDS:

• School sports
• sports history
• Victorian Britain
• rowing
• education history

Introduction

Edmond Warre was arguably one of the most well-connected and influential schoolmasters of the late nineteenth-century. His detractors regarded him as the ultimate example of the athletic schoolmaster, and there were many who greeted his appointment to the headmastership of Eton College in 1884 with dismay, seeing it as a victory for sport over scholarship.¹ Before becoming headmaster, he had already spent nearly a quarter of a century as a housemaster at Eton, transforming it into an unbeatable force in school rowing and the main supplier of ready-trained oarsmen to Oxford and Cambridge universities.² At the same time, Eton was renowned for the quality of its athletics, underwent a renaissance in cricket which produced numerous first-class cricketers, including several, like Lords Harris and Hawke, who later played for England, and was also indirectly a dominant force in early association football via the success of former pupils playing for Old Etonians and Wanderers.³ While many of those connected with Eton took immense pride and pleasure from this sporting success, there were those who felt that it came at too great a cost to the academic and cultural life of the college. Warre’s opponents argued that too much time and attention was spent on sport, and his other great passion, the Rifle Corps, both to the detriment of the school’s other clubs and societies and teaching itself. Their fear was that, if Warre had been able to athleticise Eton so thoroughly as a mere housemaster, as headmaster his power would be untrammelled, heralding a further eclipse of culture in favour of sport. In reality, this did not happen. Sport continued to be important under Warre’s headmastership, but academic standards did not fall and, if anything, Etonian sportsmen were slightly less successful after his elevation.⁴ This can be explained by a combination of Warre’s duties keeping him from being so heavily involved in coaching and, more importantly, the rapid and enthusiastic expansion of team games at rival public schools.⁵

Eton during Warre’s headmastership did not turn into the cultural wasteland predicted by those who sought to block his appointment, but the debate about his suitability for the role created widely held perceptions, both about Warre himself and the kind of boys produced by his regime, later prompting American historian Edward Mack to describe Warre as ‘eminently fitted to create a model school for turning out athletic philistines’.⁶ The habit of aesthetes referring to their more athletically inclined fellow pupils in these terms was an old one, dating back at least to 1872, when an editor of The Harrovian wrote of ‘the Philistine part of our population’ and the ‘glorification of muscle’.⁷ Mack’s comment suggests boys were philistines while Warre’s role was creating them, but the idea of the athletic philistine schoolmaster has also been a recurring theme in the study of Victorian public schools.⁸ This paper argues that, while evidence suggests that the majority of boys who came out of public schools between 1850 and 1914 had both a very narrow outlook and a poor level of educational attainment, there is also a case to be made that the successful school sportsman was no more of a philistine than less athletic, and was arguably more likely to apply himself to his schoolwork. Equally, while there were sporting masters who also fitted the philistine mould, many can be shown to have above average academic records, none more so than Warre himself.

Athleticism in the public school

Early nineteenth-century public schools had a less than wholesome reputation. Relationships between some schools and the communities that hosted them were often strained by theft, brawls, vandalism and poaching carried out by boys in their free time, and within the confines of the schools themselves, drunkenness, bullying, sexual abuse, and rebellions against masters were all common occurrences.⁹ The antics of Flashman in Tom Brown’s Schooldays brought the short-comings of the system into the public eye and shocked many middle-class sensibilities, but Thomas Hughes’ version of Rugby was heavily bowdlerised and the reality was far worse; within a few short years Eton had witnessed a serious stabbing by a pupil, and a notorious case in which a boy was actually beaten to death.¹⁰ The introduction of organised sport in the mid-nineteenth-century was seen as an important step in restoring school discipline, having the dual benefit of keeping boys occupied for long periods and making them too tired to get up to mischief afterwards.

By the 1860s, every public school played cricket and a form of football, and other sports such as fives, rowing, and athletics were also common. Schools developed complex sporting calendars involving inter-house competitions and external matches, and the average public schoolboy found himself committed to several hours of sport every week, with more if he were selected for representative teams.¹¹

Accounts of school life in this period are packed with references to the ever-expanding place of sport in the daily routine of pupils and its increasing importance in forging the identity of, and loyalty to, house and school. By the 1890s, sport was so integral to the impression of a school’s success that parents were as likely to pick a school based on its sporting record as its academic one, and the exploits of leading public school sportsmen were eagerly reported in the national press, particularly in cricket.¹² Such was the perceived importance of public school sport that the Pall Mall Gazette, which had pioneered the idea of publishing academic school league tables in 1886, based on exam and scholarship success, abandoned these in early 1894 in favour of tables based on schools’ relative athletic prowess.¹³

Etonians who neither rowed nor played cricket were referred to as ‘slack bobs’ or ‘saps’ implying they were lazy, although in some cases they were missing sport in order to spend more time studying, or indulging in other intellectual pursuits. However, such aestheticism was increasingly viewed with suspicion by athletically minded masters such as R.A.H. Mitchell and Warre, who tended to regard it as both unmanly and likely to lead to vice.¹⁴ The pure aesthete was also likely to be shunned by his more athletically minded classmates. Lord Hawke recalled his father’s surprise when his Housemaster, F.W. Cornish, enquired of him whether he was to be made to work or not. When his father insisted that he should, the young Hawke decided to steer a middle course, aware that he needed to make enough progress to ensure his passage to Cambridge, and the cricketing opportunities it afforded, but anxious to avoid ‘the stigma of being called a sap’.¹⁵

Mangan’s perceptive remark that ‘the disparagement of brains reflected nothing short of a virulent anti-intellectualism on the part of most boys and some masters’ reveals the likely truth.¹⁶ If athleticism created a generation of philistines in the public schools, it was largely at the behest of pupils backed by enthusiastic young sporting masters who were often old boys of the same, or similar schools. In this environment, intellectually minded masters could struggle to capture the imagination of their charges, and while some parents were dismayed by an over-emphasis on athleticism, others, especially those who were sporting old boys themselves, were more interested in sporting prowess than educational achievement, and Honey talks of parents who would rather that their son scored a century at Lord’s than win a scholarship to Balliol.¹⁷ However, this was sometimes too much even for the athletically minded. J.E.C. Welldon, the headmaster of Harrow, felt that pupils under parental pressure to do well at sports were hardly likely to concentrate on Latin, quoting the case of a boy who was promised a guinea for every run he made and £5 for every wicket he took, earning £50 in a week, well in excess of any professional cricketer’s weekly wage.¹⁸ That a Harrovian parent was able to indulge a child to this extent reveals both the economic gulf between them and the public at large, and the reality that many of the pupils at the great public schools did not need to worry about passing examinations or qualifying for a profession because they were financially secure for life in any case.

The cult of the athletic hero

In some schools sporting success bestowed immense power on the leading athletes.¹⁹ They were exempt from ordinary school rules, almost untouchable by masters and regarded as demigods by younger boys.²⁰ By the time athleticism reached its peak in the closing decades of the nineteenth-century, contests between the top public schools, and even more so, Oxford and Cambridge universities, had become major sporting events, reported in the national press, and often attracting huge crowds, not all of whom were directly associated with the institutions taking part. Successful players were feted by their schools and colleges, and for those who considered them primarily places of learning, this was a bitter pill to swallow;

The prominence, too, which the public press gives to them, and their arrangements and details, is quite out of proportion to their real importance. It is the cricketer who gets leave to London to play public school matches; it is to the boats that immunities are given to enable them to obtain that proficiency which is looked upon as a point of vital interest to the school.²¹

While faultless Latin and Greek may have been what every public school boy should aspire to, it was the esprit de corps created by playing in house matches that were seen by many as one of the most valuable things he would take away with him.²² As one boy wrote in The Marlburian, a passion for games created;

Hero-worship: that worship which has lain at the root of half the greatness that ever existed in this world’s history, which overcame the frivolity and scepticism of Alcibiades, which stirred the highborn gentlemen of England to pour out their blood like water on the fields of Naseby and Marston Moor.²³

This issue of hero-worship is an interesting one. E. Norman Gardiner condemned the public adoration of professional footballers, portraying hero-worship as one of the evils of modern sport, comparing it with gladiatorial and equestrian sporting celebrity in Rome.²⁴ Yet within schools hero-worship of successful sportsmen was encouraged to the point of cult status. The successful school sportsman was adorned with caps, colours, special ties, blazers and privileges. In some schools they were referred to as ‘hearties’ or ‘bloods’.

Autobiographies of former pupils such as Alec Waugh’s Loom of Youth and T.C. Worsley’s Flannelled Fool reveal a culture where boys, and often masters too, were obsessed with house sports results. As the cult of athleticism took off and schools began to select masters for their sporting, as opposed to their academic, abilities many found that they had indifferent classics masters teaching indifferent pupils, as Worsley confessed.

It was purely on my athletic record that, after leaving Cambridge, I became an assistant master at a well-known Public School. At my own school, Marlborough, I had been in the Cricket Eleven for three years and the Rugger Fifteen my last year. At Cambridge I had done pretty well all round at games and had kept well within the Old Boy network. This was the important thing for job-getting in those days. It more than counteracted a poor II 2 in Classics and an even poorer Third in English.²⁵

Such masters may have been popular with the boys, at least those boys who excelled in sports, but were not universally popular with parents, as one anonymous contributor to The Contemporary Review revealed;

As for the masters, we must say that many of them treat the school sports as if they were of far more importance than the school studies. We know an instance of a father going down to one of the great schools to see the master in whose house his son boarded. He wanted to know how his boy was going on. He stayed three quarters of an hour, trying in vain to draw the conversation to the subject of his visit. Nothing could he get from the master but idle talk of the prospects of the school in the next match at something or other.²⁶

There was a widely quoted story that a ‘Varsity blue received telegrams with job offers from no less than five public school headmasters on completing his century at Lord’s.²⁷ The tale was probably apocryphal but reflected a reality in which the athletic schoolmaster often found it easier to secure employment than his academic counterpart. Another contributor to The Contemporary Review, H.J. Spenser, described this type of master as being typically ‘healthy, selfish, philistine and generally slack’.²⁸ However, not all athletically minded masters conformed to this stereotype. Some, like the Marlborough housemaster T.C.G Sandford, played a major part in shaping the schools they served in. In Sandford’s case this included resisting the efforts of the headmaster, Frank Fletcher, to bring athletic excesses under control.²⁹ Sandford operated a Spartan regime in which new boys were forced to prove their prowess on hanging rings suspended from the dormitory ceiling and caned if they could not meet the required standard.³⁰ It might be expected that such a master might be regarded with dread by the boys, but sport obsessed pupils remembered him with affection. Worsley, who was a member of his house, described ‘Sandy’ as the very embodiment of the Greek ideal, ‘a triple blue who even in middle-age was an accomplished player of cricket, hockey and rugby and who had both a Spartan and Athenian side’.³¹

By the 1890s, boys were spending the greater part of most weekday afternoons in compulsory team games.³² At Marlborough, where the First XI generally played two-day cricket matches twice weekly, they were excused school from 11 o’clock on, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.³³ A measure of the importance of games to the school day was that at Loretto, in East Lothian, where days were short in winter, Hely Hutchinson Almond introduced his own time zone for the school, fifteen minutes ahead of GMT, in order to be able to fit in the two-and-a-half hours allocated to sport into every afternoon’s time table.³⁴

However, not all headmasters were enthusiastic about the headlong rush towards athleticism. Games may have helped curb some of the antisocial behaviour observed in many early nineteenth-century boarding schools, but doubts about the excesses of sporting culture in schools followed close behind. George Cotton was urging caution as early as 1858.

Undoubtedly there is a danger lest at this particular season the due proportion of work and relaxation should be inverted, lest your interest should be so absorbed in this particular excitement that you forget the main business for which you have been sent to this place.³⁵

Cotton’s fears were echoed by others, and as the new tide of athleticism swept through the public schools in the 1860s, a growing chorus of voices was raised against it. In 1861, the government tasked the Clarendon Commission with looking at ways to reform the leading public schools. Primarily set up to investigate financial mismanagement, root out corrupt practices, and highlight the need to move away from an almost entirely classical curriculum, it also considered the place of games. At Eton, they found masters like Warre keen to explain the benefits to health and morality of physical education, and others like the Rev C. Wolley, who insisted that the time spent on cricket had a damaging effect on intellectual ability, although he accepted that the less time-consuming sports of football and boating did not.³⁶

About the same time, Old Etonians, such as the former Oxford academic William Jelf, had begun to publicly express concerns about the ‘undue preponderance of amusement’ at Eton writing;

None can believe more emphatically than we do that ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy;’ but we believe no less firmly that there is one thing which makes a duller Jack still, and that is ‘all play and no work;’ and this is simply the case at Eton at present, at least with nine-tenths of the school.³⁷

Jelf came from a group of classicists worried that the rise of games culture within public schools in general, and Eton in particular, would inevitably lead to a cataclysmic decline in academic and cultural standards. They included William Ewart Gladstone, who besides his political career, was a lifelong scholar and authority on Homer, and who remembered his own schooldays at Eton in the 1820s, when sportsmen were treated as an eccentric minority.³⁸ Worries over the impact of athleticism were to be a perennial problem for some Etonian masters, and as late as 1914, A.C. Benson warned that athleticism had gone too far, producing boys who;

Hate knowledge and think books dreary, who are perfectly self-satisfied and entirely ignorant, and, what is more, not ignorant in a wholesome and humble manner, but arrogantly and contemptuously ignorant – not only satisfied to be so, but thinking it almost unmanly that a young man should be anything else.³⁹

Malcolm Tozer gives a scathing assessment of the kind of boys typically produced by the public schools during this period.

Most public school boys were narrow in knowledge, outlook, social conscience and responsibility. They were well-bodied, well-mannered and well-meaning, keen at their games and devoted to their schools, but they were ignorant of life about them and contemptuous of all outside their own caste.⁴⁰

These were the boys characterised as being ‘philistines’ and it came to be widely assumed that the masters who produced them came from a similar mould. There was an element of truth in this, as attested by Worsley’s experiences as a pupil and teacher at Marlborough and, as the numbers of minor public schools rapidly expanded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they necessarily drew on a limited pool of masters educated at older and more established schools, many of whom were better sportsmen than teachers.⁴¹ In the early days of athleticism, the idea of masters who specialised in teaching physical education was yet to be invented, so all masters were nominally hired to teach an academic subject. This, in itself, suggests that the problem of philistine sports masters may have been overstated since masters would require a good understanding of at least their own subject, usually in those days, classics, to be able to teach it. However, in many public schools the systems of semi-tolerated cribbing and cheating, combined with an established culture of poor teaching, sometimes meant that expectations were already low. As the nineteenth-century drew to a close and schools taught a wider range of subjects via specialists, Games Masters and Physical Training Instructors emerged as distinct roles, and it was then that the phenomenon of the philistine sports master became more widespread, not least because they were no longer expected to be interested in anything else. This phenomenon eventually spread beyond the public schools, permeating all levels of secondary education.⁴²

Controversy over Warre’s appointment

Despite its growing reputation for sport, Eton in the late-nineteenth-century continued to maintain a position of dominance in terms of academic and social success. The Clarendon Commission found that Eton provided the largest number of undergraduates to Oxford University by a considerable margin and only narrowly avoided being the largest contingent at Cambridge.⁴³ Partially this dominance was assured by Eton’s sheer size compared to other public schools, and Rugby and Harrow performed better than Eton in the Commission’s figures on a pro rata basis, but Etonian traditionalists nevertheless took pride in the large numbers of university men produced by their school and could also point to a similar dominance in winning direct commissions to the Army (Table 1).⁴⁴

Table 1. Numbers of pupils at leading public schools in 1861 and 1893^a.

School	1861	1893
Eton	806	1000
Harrow	481	600
Rugby	463	500
Westminster	136	230
Winchester	200	420

^a Howard Staunton, The Great Schools of England (London: Strahan & Co, 1869), 18; Pall Mall Gazette, December 20, 1893, 1–2.

Eton was originally founded in tandem with King’s College, Cambridge and it was only possible to enter the latter as an undergraduate on a closed-scholarship from Eton. As a result, there was a long and unbroken tradition of Eton headmasters being graduates of King’s College which only ended when James Hornby succeeded Edward Balston in 1867.⁴⁵ This was further exacerbated by the preponderance of intermarriage among the families of Eton masters with the result that the headmastership had been something of a ‘closed shop’.⁴⁶ Hornby, although an Old Etonian, was a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford.⁴⁷ Critics of Hornby felt that he had ultimately allowed athleticism to flourish at the expense of more cultural interests during his tenure, something for which they ultimately laid the blame on Warre’s increasing influence. They were aghast at the prospect of Warre becoming headmaster and launched a campaign against it. Their views were forcefully expressed by a correspondent calling himself Academicus who wrote to The Times in forthright terms.

Mr Warre is forty-seven years of age and has been for twenty-four years a master at Eton. In his youth he gained a Balliol scholarship, a First Class in the Final Schools, and a fellowship at All Souls, but for the last quarter of a century he has made no mark as a scholar, a preacher or a man of letters. His name is associated with no questions of educational reform; on the other hand, he is well known as the best rowing coach in England and as an able field-officer of volunteers. He is an oppidan of the oppidans.⁴⁸

In highlighting that Warre was an oppidan, Academicus is referring to the peculiar way in which Eton developed as a school. It was originally founded by Henry VI for 70 deserving boys who were known as King’s Scholars or collegers. These boys were elected by competitive examination and educated for free, and it was from their ranks that the majority of Eton’s most academically successful pupils came. Technically, only these scholars were members of Eton College. The remaining boys at Eton, of whom there were over 900 in 1884, were referred to as oppidans, a word derived from the Latin oppidum, meaning town. This was because fee-paying Etonians lived in the many private boarding houses in Eton rather than in the college itself, as the King’s Scholars did. Oppidans were generally less academically able than collegers, although there were always exceptions. More importantly, oppidans were almost always from very wealthy, and often aristocratic backgrounds. Collegers could theoretically be from poor families although, by the nineteenth-century, most in practice came from clerical or teaching families, many with long associations to Eton.

Academicus’ letter was written in support of Warre’s main rival for the headmastership, J.E.C. Welldon, another former Etonian, seventeen years Warre’s junior and, at that time, headmaster of Dulwich College. Welldon, who would go on to a successful career as headmaster of Harrow, and a rather less successful term as Bishop of Calcutta, was favourably compared by Academicus to revered figures in pedagogical history such as Thomas Arnold and Samuel Butler of Shrewsbury, but in Academicus’ eyes his main advantage was that he was a former King’s Scholar. The battle between Warre and Welldon for the headship was a contest between oppidans and Scholars or traditionalists and reformers.⁴⁹ However, the issue of who was the more educationally progressive was less clear cut. Supporters of both men accused the other of the same shortcomings. In reality, they had many similarities. Both were talented classicists with a gift and passion for modern languages.⁵⁰ Both were ordained Anglican clergymen, although Welldon was certainly more fervent in his belief, or at least the outward demonstration of it. Theologically, both would have characterised themselves as Broad Church Anglicans, but their approaches were very different. Welldon was an avowed Evangelical with strongly anti-Catholic leanings.⁵¹ Warre’s approach to Christianity was less overtly theologically driven with much of the content of his sermons taking inspiration from Greek philosophy. Warre’s Hellenised approach to Christianity had undoubtedly been influenced by his close association with Benjamin Jowett at Balliol, but his biographer, C.R.L. Fletcher felt that it was also a reaction to his mother’s overzealous adoption of High Church Puseyism during his childhood.⁵² This early association with the High Church, combined with his distaste for full blown Anglo-Catholicism, probably stood Warre in good stead with the Etonian establishment which was traditionally ‘high and dry’, rejecting the evangelical revival as too enthusiastic and the Oxford Movement as too flamboyant.⁵³ The theatre and ritual which Tractarianism sought to reintroduce to Anglicanism found a ready and enthusiastic audience among Eton’s more aesthetically minded masters, and offered a very different view of the relationship between God and man favoured by muscular Christians like Warre and Welldon.

Politically, they were opposed, Warre was a lukewarm Conservative while Welldon was a Liberal, but both men had links via family and friendship to leading figures in both parties.⁵⁴ However, as Welldon himself confessed;

I feel no shame in confessing that in my view of College at Eton I am an unbending Tory. Perhaps there is a certain element of Conservatism, as of Radicalism, in everybody, and if it does not take one form, it takes another. So I have noticed that some of the strongest political Radicals are apt in domestic or social or academical or civic affairs to be the most determined enemies of change.⁵⁵

Furthermore, while Academicus and others sought to portray Warre as primarily an athletic schoolmaster, Welldon too had an impressive sporting record, having distinguished himself at Eton as a player of both the Wall and Field games and representing the Old Etonians in the 1876 F.A. Cup Final.⁵⁶

Despite his own sporting achievements, Welldon did not consider himself an athletic schoolmaster. In his novel Gerald Eversley’s Friendship, the eponymous hero’s housemaster, Mr. Brandiston, is a composite character. Brandiston believes his house to be the best in the school, leading the boys in his house to have somewhat combative and disrespectful attitude towards those from other houses.⁵⁷ Certainly, Welldon’s description of Brandiston’s main characteristics seem to be a thinly veiled portrait of Warre or Mitchell.

He had no idea of any athletes who were not cricketers or football players. He had no idea of any scholars who were not good at Latin and Greek, or at mathematics; he was sometimes suspected of not setting much store even by mathematics. It would have been as disagreeable to him that any of his pupils should achieve distinction in Chemistry or German as that they should achieve it at hoops or marbles. He was a worshipper of the mens sana in corpore sano. The thing which he disliked most cordially was ‘loafing;’ but under ‘loafing’ he included not only idling about the street or lolling in confectioners’ shops, but the irregular studious habits of boys who sat reading books in their rooms or in the library, instead of taking part in the games.⁵⁸

That Brandiston is, at least partially, intended to represent Warre seems evident from the latter’s own well-known views on loafing.

A very large number of boys, perhaps the majority, would, if left to themselves, do nothing but ‘loaf’ as it is called, being unwilling to submit to the discipline and fatigue of games in common. It is owing to this that cricket and football fagging are in force at some of the public schools, which ensure that the younger boys shall at least be present at the games so many times a week.⁵⁹

Warre could not abide idleness. He was constantly working himself and could neither understand or tolerate those who did not have the same ethic. For others, this aspect of his personality could be intimidating and his attitude to loafing seen as an attack on physical inactivity even when applied to those involved in intellectual pursuits. However, Warre’s personal devotion to study, particularly the study of Greek and Latin, suggests otherwise. Warre’s objections to boys shirking games to meet in small groups, whether in their studies or aboard punts, was less about a distaste for study or intellectual discussion than about a fear that such activities were a cover for homosexual liaisons. Such a liaison ultimately caused the downfall of Oscar Browning, the leader of the aesthetic masters at Eton, and unspoken fears about ‘vice’ underlay much of the suppression of behaviour that was seen as too aesthetic.

Warre the scholar

Warre became a teacher almost by accident when he was invited back to Eton by his former tutor, Wharton Booth Marriott, to cover for him while he was ill. He evidently enjoyed his first taste of teaching, writing to his mother ‘Education, I feel, is my line in life, and the one in which I shall show God’s work to this generation’. Eton College was sufficiently impressed with his performance to offer him a permanent position in the summer of 1860. Fletcher, in his biography of Warre, notes that he took the post to assert his financial independence. He was also £300 in debt from the expense of starting the Oxford University Rifle Volunteer Corps, and did not want to be a burden on his father. Paradoxically, his father built him a new boarding house, which would not have been a trivial expense, but it made Warre a more attractive prospect for Eton, while at the same time considerably increasing his earning potential as a housemaster.⁶⁰

Warre was widely expected to succeed Edward Balston as Headmaster of Eton at the end of 1867, but the position instead went to Hornby, the Second Master of Winchester College, who had previously spent a number of years lecturing at Durham University and Brasenose College, Oxford.⁶¹ Hornby was well known to Warre, both were Eton and Balliol men, and both had been members of the Oxford University eight, Hornby from 1849 to 1851, and Warre from 1857 to 1859.⁶² Hornby was appointed with the expectation that he would attempt to reform Eton, but soon abandoned his efforts to modernise the school in the face of opposition from boys and masters alike. Essentially a university academic, he was not really suited to school teaching. Henry Salt, one of the masters who served under him, described him as ‘conspicuously lacking in industry and will-power’, and the new Headmaster’s habit of retreating to his study led to him being dubbed ‘Hornby the Hermit’.⁶³

Academicus may have sought to discredit Warre by portraying him as a time-server who had wasted the last twenty-five years, but his efforts backfired. A spate of correspondents, including George Marindin and St Clair Donaldson, wrote in Warre’s support. Marindin, a teacher himself, argued that Warre not having written a book should not be counted against him, as no master who undertook his duties seriously would have time for such an endeavour. Donaldson, a former oppidan and close associate of Warre’s via his considerable prowess as an oarsman, said that oppidan educational standards had markedly improved in recent years and the academic gulf with King’s Scholars had narrowed. Donaldson proved his point by gaining first-class degrees from Cambridge in classics and theology in 1885 and 1887 respectively.⁶⁴

Furthermore, Academicus himself highlighted Warre’s early achievements. He had won the Newcastle Scholarship, Eton’s top prize for classics, in 1854.⁶⁵ This achievement was all the more remarkable because Warre was an oppidan not a King’s Scholar.⁶⁶ At Balliol he continued to excel, taking a first in Moderations at the end of his first year and graduating with first-class honours in 1859.⁶⁷ His academic reputation also gained him a fellowship at All Souls College later that year.⁶⁸ Later in life, his interest in classics was not merely confined to teaching. He maintained a lively correspondence with Gladstone for example, discussing Homer’s anachronistic use of adjectives.⁶⁹ Although Warre and Gladstone enjoyed a cordial enough relationship, they were strongly in disagreement about both Homer and politics, and Warre exchanged a number of Latin and Greek epigrams with his friend, the Reverend Anderson of Winsford, lampooning Gladstone.⁷⁰ Anderson and Warre continued to correspond via the medium of classical poetry for many years, and Warre’s biographer, C.R.L. Fletcher, quotes extensive letters in these languages with a variety of other correspondents.⁷¹

It is difficult to judge the extent to which the epigrams exchanged between Warre and his acquaintances were rooted in a genuine love of composing in ancient languages or prompted by a desire to ostentatiously demonstrate learning. His friend and colleague, Hugh MacNaghten, wrote of Warre that ‘He believed in the Classics as almost essential to salvation.’⁷² Certainly, they were a way for this circle to reinforce their membership of the elite, and they also provided a forum in which strong views, which they did not necessarily wish to share with the wider public, could be shared among themselves. The fact that Warre wrote much of his diary in Latin suggests that he enjoyed the language for its own sake, but it also allowed him to grumble about his servants without their realising, and Fletcher reports his complaints about his cook, his housemaid, and his gardener.⁷³

Warre really developed as a classical scholar at Balliol, where his tutors included Benjamin Jowett.⁷⁴ Jowett was young, dynamic, well-connected and widely recognised as an exceptionally gifted scholar and hard-working teacher. However, his advocacy for university reform, position as a liberal Christian, and penchant for modern German philosophy, meant that he was viewed with alarm by traditionalists. Balliol was a college of warring factions, reactionary High Church versus progressive Broad Church, with Jowett leading the latter faction.⁷⁵ Jowett’s devotion to Platonism was remarkable and his style of teaching was often likened to that of Socrates.⁷⁶ He had already upset conservatives with his work on St Paul, and his treatment of Plato, which many regarded as bestowing greater moral authority on aspects of Greek philosophy than the Gospels, was controversial.⁷⁷ That Warre was heavily influenced by Jowett undoubtedly made him less attractive to those who preferred the ostentatious piety of Welldon.

Warre and Jowett remained friends for forty years, frequently visiting each other at Balliol and Eton. Jowett, one of the great Hellenists of the times, was almost certainly the major influence on Warre’s view of ancient Greece. Warre was also influenced by Jowett’s beliefs and methods of educational reform; ‘Be a reformer but don’t be found out’ he advised Warre.⁷⁸ Jowett’s confidence in Warre was shown when he unequivocally backed him for the Headmastership of Eton in 1884, and by his inclusion of Warre on a list of possible successors as Master of Balliol.⁷⁹ In turn, Warre influenced Jowett, convincing him of the social, moral and physical value of rowing as an element of college life.⁸⁰

As a classicist, Warre’s reputation was as a rather boring teacher who only really came alive when discussing subjects close to his heart, such as Odysseus’ experiences at sea or the construction of Athenian galleys.⁸¹ Such was his enthusiasm that he constructed a life-size cross-section of a trireme, so that his pupils could experience what the positions on a galley were like.⁸² In 1881, he contributed to Percy Gardner’s study of Greek boat racing and, three years later, wrote a chapter on ancient athletics in his own book on physical exercise.⁸³ Warre adopted an orthodox line on Greek athletics, claiming that it was in continual decline after Pindar’s time as ‘professional’ athletes, driven by the desire for prizes, became ever more venal, lazy, coarse, brutal and stupid. His conclusion was that this was a result of Greek sport lacking a collective element, and that, without the stimulus of team games, Greek athletes could not help but become selfish.⁸⁴ The exception to this was rowing and Warre highlighted his own sport as ‘the only athletic contest in which the effort was not that of one individual against another’.⁸⁵

However, Warre differed to other historians of his day in his view of Roman sport. Whereas they focussed on the great public games, dismissing gladiatorial contests and boxing as entertainment provided by slaves rather than genuine sport, Warre instead looked at the sports and exercises of Roman citizens. The picture he paints here seems entirely recognisable to the late-Victorian public schoolboy.

To the Romans the whole question was one of health. It seemed to him a necessary part of a regular and healthy mode of life, to take strong exercise causing perspiration, before the daily bath which preceded his afternoon meal.⁸⁶

Warre went on to claim that Cicero’s character flaws were the result of his disdain for physical exercise.⁸⁷ Warre’s dislike of Cicero was based on the same criteria as his dislike of Browning, their intellectual prowess could not make up for their physical sloth.

Eton’s athletic masters

Hornby’s lack of decisive leadership created a power-vacuum at Eton. Consequently, the masters below him coalesced into two factions, centred on Warre and Browning, reflecting the tensions within the school between athletes and intellectuals.⁸⁸ Although Hornby was initially sympathetic to Browning, Warre was able over time to use his shared experience as a rower and Balliol man to win Hornby’s trust.

Hornby was undoubtedly drawn towards athleticism. As well as his rowing credentials, he had played for Eton at Lord’s as a cricketer, and was reputedly one of Britain’s best alpine mountaineers and skaters.⁸⁹ In Warre, he already had an outstanding rowing coach on the staff, and R.A.H. Mitchell, another Eton and Balliol man, returned to the school as a master in 1866, having played cricket for Oxford University for four years, captaining it for three, and establishing a reputation as England’s leading batsman.⁹⁰ Warre and Mitchell formed the nucleus of a closely knit group of athletic schoolmasters who were to be extremely influential in Eton’s development in the second-half of the century. Under their leadership, Etonians were undoubtedly a dominant force in school rowing, cricket, athletics, and football for much of the next half-century, and their former pupils took this dominance with them into university sport.⁹¹ They were also highly influential in the emerging administrative bodies which governed these sports.⁹²

James Brindley-Richards, an Eton pupil from 1857–64, paints a vivid picture of the rise of athleticism in this period, describing 1860 as the ‘annus mirabilis’, when Warre arrived and sport was put on a more serious footing.⁹³ In reality, efforts to increase the school’s athletic standing had quietly started a little earlier. Even before Warre’s arrival Eton had strengthened its cricket coaching, after a disastrous decade in which they had lost every encounter with the much smaller Harrow School between 1851 and 1859.⁹⁴ In 1858 the Old Etonian and Cambridge blue, George Richard Dupuis, son of Eton’s vice-provost George John Dupuis, was recruited as an Assistant Master with cricket coaching forming part of his duties.⁹⁵ Joining the staff at the same time was Herbert Snow, who combined all-round sporting ability with a talent for the Classics.⁹⁶

He was a fine muscular master, with broad shoulders and a rather mastiff-like expression of countenance. He had pulled stroke of the Cambridge University boat in 1857, and was also a first-rate player at fives and football. He was a splendid example of the fact that physical and intellectual culture may be carried on together, for he was placed in the First Class of the Classical Tripos in 1857. He was Porson Scholar and Camden Medallist, and won the prize for Latin Ode. He was quite a schoolboy’s hero.⁹⁷

Brinsley-Richards’ enthusiastic description of Snow reflects how athletic masters were viewed by their younger charges and highlights that Snow was intellectually as well as physically sound. Snow knew Warre well; they had known each other as boys, and they rowed on opposing sides in the 1857 university boat race.⁹⁸ From 1860 until Snow’s departure to become Principal of Cheltenham College in 1873, Snow supported Warre’s transformation of Etonian rowing.

Two other Old Etonians, who returned as Assistant Masters immediately after taking their degrees at King’s College, Cambridge, were George Marindin in 1865 and Walter Durnford in 1870.⁹⁹ Both were heavily involved in sport at Eton, with Marindin also finding time to become an authority on ancient ball games.¹⁰⁰ Durnford’s arrival marked a time when the athletic group within the Eton masters reached its strongest, with most remaining in post for many years. The influence of these young sporting masters was profound, and between 1865 and 1875 Etonian sport arguably reached its zenith.¹⁰¹

Mangan characterised philathletic schoolmasters as belonging to two types.

The games-master of laurelled brawn and little brain and the games-playing master often in possession of a sound measure of both cerebral and muscular ability. The former were sometimes casuists who through self-interested excess eventually succeeded in making a vice out of an alleged virtue; the latter were frequently idealists who attempted through altruistic exhortation to make a virtue out of what eventually became a vice.¹⁰²

On the whole, sporting masters at Eton tended to fall into the latter category and if, like Warre and Mitchell, they were sometimes overly obsessive about their own sport, the obsession was usually limited to a single term per year.¹⁰³

The ‘suspicion of brilliance’

Henry Salt, in his time both a pupil and master at Eton, thought the College’s insistence on teaching boys to compose Latin poetry before they could even understand poetry in English was folly, and actually contributed to the air of anti-intellectualism, because he estimated around 90% of boys were incapable of mastering this work.¹⁰⁴

The seventy Collegers and a handful of industrious oppidans may keep up appearances by gaining university scholarships and the like, but the rank and file of the school are hopelessly and irretrievably anti-intellectual. They know little; they hate books; they regard scholars with good-humoured indifference or neglect; they worship athletes with an ever-increasing veneration: to mention the Newcastle scholar of the current year would be to the majority a painful effort of memory; the Captain of the Boats, or the Captain of the Eleven, is a deity ever present before their minds. I protest that in my experience of Eton I have known nothing so sad as to watch the gradual process of deterioration in the industry of a new boy. For the first fortnight or so all is perfection; the boy is punctual, diligent, eager to do his work conscientiously; then comes a period when he begins to look about him, and note with a mild surprise the indifference of other boys to their lessons, and the inability of masters to enforce through diligence; finally he yields to the temptation that everywhere surrounds him, eats of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (or rather Ignorance), and gradually sinks into a state of mental inactivity.¹⁰⁵

Salt was writing shortly after his departure as an Eton master on Warre’s accession to the Headmastership at the end of 1884. Salt, a former classmate of Welldon, had leaned towards Browning’s aesthetic group of masters and had feared the worst when Warre became Headmaster, imagining a new regime where games, and an outmoded adherence to the Classics at the expense of more modern subjects, would run riot.¹⁰⁶ A committed Socialist, Salt would have preferred Welldon in charge, not only because he was a friend, but because of his politics.¹⁰⁷ In the circumstances, Salt felt it was best to leave, but his subsequent criticism of Eton was based on Hornby’s regime, and how he assumed it would carry on under Warre. In fact, Warre was quick to introduce some reforms, including his long-held ideas about replacing Greek with modern languages for some boys. Warre’s long-time colleague and fellow sporting schoolmaster, George Marindin, soon replied to Salt’s accusations, laying out Warre’s efforts to modernise the school, while at the same time stating his own belief in the importance of Greek.¹⁰⁸

F.W. Cornish, who had been Salt’s Housemaster and was still teaching at Eton, also replied in the school’s defence. Cornish’s position was that Newcastle Scholars rarely went on to be great men, and that it was teamwork and camaraderie that made Etonians fit to lead the country.

What then is the Eton criterion? It is formed by the Boats, the Eleven, the society of ‘Pop’ – the leaders of Eton society belong to that class who will lead as men, men of action, not of ideas. That is what John Bull cares for in the main. He believes in manhood and the power of leading.¹⁰⁹

This reflected a ‘deep-rooted Anglo-Saxon suspicion of brilliance’ in which even such a leading pedagogue as Thring of Uppingham was apt to warn his boys against the ‘vanity of intellectualism’.¹¹⁰ This suspicion of expertise also lay at the root of the gentleman amateur’s objections to specialisation and training in sport, which, while often expressed via doubtful references to classical antecedents, was in reality firmly rooted in English culture. However, while Cornish may have been writing of how he felt Etonians saw themselves, Salt claimed that Cornish privately agreed with him.¹¹¹ Certainly, Cornish went on to sound a note of caution.

An Englishman does not admire professors as a German does. Rule of thumb has done very well for him and he does not appreciate the value of accuracy … He does not respect knowledge in itself. He has not flexibility enough to understand that all knowledge is power, not only that which falls in his narrow experience.¹¹²

Cornish was tactfully admitting that German elite education was academically superior. He wanted reform without sweeping away positive aspects of Etonian culture and gave Warre credit for starting to overhaul and modernise the curriculum, particularly by increasing the time and importance given to French and mathematics.¹¹³ In Cornish’s view, Latin was essential for a gentleman’s education, but Greek was difficult, and should be dropped for all but those intending to go on to university.¹¹⁴ Ironically, given that the successful school sportsman often wanted to continue and crown his career by winning a ‘varsity blue, this meant that the more athletically-minded a boy was, the more he needed to immerse himself in Greek culture.

Fortunately, Warre’s circle of athletic school masters were all classicists and so were well placed to help those athletically minded boys who were prepared to put in the work to meet the minimum requirements for Oxbridge entry. Certainly, at times, they gave undue attention to games over schoolwork. Warre’s rowers put in extremely long hours in the weeks leading up to Henley leaving little time or energy for anything else.¹¹⁵ Similarly, Mitchell was engaged more or less full-time in the business of cricket during the summer term and was not easily distracted from it.¹¹⁶ However, most took their teaching duties seriously, even if many of their pupils were reluctant learners. Warre was disciplined, and undoubtedly worked harder than most, His daily schedule as a Housemaster was gruelling, especially in the summer, when longer daylight hours increased the time available for sport. He would rise at 6.30 and start teaching before breakfast. After breakfast there was chapel, then more teaching until midday when there would be a two-hour break for lunch and rest. He taught again between two and four, and then drilled the Rifle Corps for an hour until five. He then went to the river for three hours of coaching, returning to his house for dinner at eight. He would do the rounds of the boys in his house, aiming to finish by ten, at which point he would snatch an hour’s sleep in an armchair before rising again at eleven and working on, marking and preparing the following day’s lessons until about 2.30 when he would finally go to bed.¹¹⁷

Crack houses and educational achievement

When Jelf pondered whether athleticism at Eton had gone too far and was actively damaging academic standards, he was not alone.¹¹⁸ The Clarendon Commission too, clearly worried about the implications of an excessive games culture and their interviews with masters frequently solicit their opinions of the correct balance between sport and study. The replies they received reveal a profession deeply divided, as exemplified in the comments of Warre and Browning.¹¹⁹ The memoires of former pupils show that opinions among boys were equally divided. Although a noted and successful athlete himself, Edward Lyttelton was one of those who felt too much time was devoted to sport. When he finally became Headmaster of Eton, he was in a position to act, but he noted that his first attempts to do something were in 1874, when, as Captain of the Eleven, he made a ‘feeble attempt’ to lessen the amount of compulsory cricket. Quite how much cricket that was is made plain in a reply from George Dupuis to one of Lyttelton’s tutors on the subject. ‘You say that if the boys play cricket for seven hours a day it interferes with their work. Prove it.’ Lyttelton claimed that the opponents of athleticism were hampered by the fact that one of their number, and he may well be referring to Browning, was notorious for shirking their work, while Dupuis and Mitchell both had a reputation for being ‘unflinchingly conscientious’, if not the most inspiring, teachers.¹²⁰ Elsewhere, he notes that many of the older masters often arrived twenty minutes late for a forty-five minute lesson and that the amount of teaching that oppidans received was often minimal.¹²¹ To some extent, sport was blamed for poor academic standards, but the implication is that standards were poor regardless of sport, rather than because of it. In a school such as Eton, where the curriculum was overwhelmingly dominated by classics, this was an almost inevitable outcome of the way in which the subject was taught, or more accurately, was not taught. Defenders of the place of classics in the curriculum often cited the ability of some boys to learn thousands of lines of Greek or Latin verse as an excellent training for the mind, and felt that the ‘grind’ involved in acquiring such skills was an excellent preparation for work in later life.¹²² However, the downside of this system was that it was stupefyingly dull for pupil and teacher alike. Consequently, many of the former never properly grasped the subject, and many of the latter became increasingly less effective the longer they were in post.

In 1862, oppidans accounted for 91.7% of pupils spread across 25 boarding houses.¹²³ These varied considerably in both size and character, and were very much influenced by the Tutor or Dame who ran them.¹²⁴ Houses which excelled at sports were known as ‘crack houses’ and competed fiercely for a wide range of trophies.¹²⁵ Housemasters who were keen on sports obviously encouraged their charges to play sport more seriously, so it is unsurprising to find that Warre, Durnford, Marindin, Mitchell and Dupuis feature prominently in the lists of winners. James Brinsley-Richards was of the opinion that ‘crack houses’ also produced the best scholars among the oppidans while some houses rarely produced anyone of note.¹²⁶ Although King's Scholars dominated Etonian academic prizes, those oppidans who were academically outstanding, were, like Warre and the Lyttelton brothers, often extremely gifted sportsmen. Successive generations of public schoolboys, from Edward Dowdeswell Lockwood’s accounts of Marlborough College in the 1850s, via Brinsley-Richards’ and Lyttelton’s accounts of Eton later in the century, right through to Worsley’s experiences at Marlborough in the twentieth-century, report regimes where sport was king and teaching often varied between indifferent and non-existent.¹²⁷ They described a world in which the majority of boys were compelled to play sport with varying degrees of enthusiasm, as a result of which a minority became literally world-class at a precocious age, with public school Eights and Elevens taking on, and often beating, leading club and university opposition. However, the majority of boys did not reach these standards and merely became enthusiastic and partisan spectators. These boys did not flourish academically either, leaving with no qualifications beyond the social kudos and contacts they had gained at school.

Academic success in the leading public schools was largely down to self-motivation and one-to-one access to a good tutor. Hence, for example, Lockwood was able, despite several years during which he claims to have learned nothing, to cram intensely over his final months at Marlborough in order to pass the East India Company entrance requirements.¹²⁸ The effectiveness of one-to-one tuition also explains why some houses were much more successful than others. Welldon and Edward Lyttelton both recognised that it was important to nurture all boys, but some masters could be partisan. Certainly, accusations were made that Warre favoured athletes over aesthetes, although he would have argued that he preferred balanced all-rounders to bookish boys. George Dupuis, and, even more so, Mike Mitchell, were seen as the archetypal philistine Housemasters, and allegedly had no interest in boys who were not sportsmen, but even they were acknowledged to be hard-working teachers compared to some of the older generation of Etonian masters. In fact, ex-varsity blues like Dupuis, Mitchell, Warre and Snow were keen to keep up the tradition of Etonian dominance in university rowing, cricket and football. Ensuring that their proteges had enough Greek and Latin to get to university was in their interests.

The serious work involved in qualification for Oxbridge scholarships went on in Sixth Form, a part of school which only a minority of boys ever reached. At most public schools, including Eton, it was only in Sixth Form that boys had regular contact with the headmaster, and only in Sixth Form that they could expect much help with Greek. Edward Lyttelton felt that this approach only worked for 2% of pupils and left the rest feeling helpless.¹²⁹ As ‘Paterfamilias’ wrote to the Cornhill Magazine in July 1864.

The great majority of Eton boys are stated to lead easy pleasant lives spending their time chiefly in the playing-field and on the river, and not a little of it in the public-houses and taps of the neighbourhood – and, if they are so minded, but not otherwise, acquire a faint smattering of the classics in the intervals of play.¹³⁰

At Eton, a small minority of highly motivated students, including Cuthbert Ottaway and Alfred Lyttelton, performed very well. Some were natural academics who found studying both easy and enjoyable, others had to work hard to win scholarships or pass entrance examinations. In many families, particularly clerical ones, a long tradition of winning scholarships and fellowships, acted as a pressure. However, as the culture of athleticism took hold in the universities, a new motivation was added. The successful school sportsman now had an incentive to work, at least hard enough to qualify for university, even if he did little but play sport once he got there.¹³¹ As with schoolwork, there were a few pupils who were natural athletes, but the majority of successful school sportsmen got there through long hours of practice, dedication and coaching. The upshot of this was that there was considerable overlap between successful school athletes and successful scholars. Those who played hard, often worked hard too; time in formal lessons at Eton only accounted for about four hours a day, and a determined pupil could achieve a great deal with his remaining time.¹³² This appears to be confirmed by the testimony of some Etonian masters. The Rev. C.C. James told the Clarendon Commission that ‘a boy of considerable mental powers will probably distinguish himself also in games unless he is of inferior physique’. He went on to mention that several members of the cricket eleven had been members of the Newcastle Select, although he felt rowers less academically gifted.¹³³ The Rev. S.T. Hawtrey added that ‘It is very rare that boys of high intellectual superiority do not take interest in the games and sports of the school’ adding that Eton’s sporting culture had saved these boys from being turned into ‘mere bookworms or crotchety pedants’.¹³⁴

The composer, Hubert Parry, was at Eton from September 1861 to December 1866 and kept a detailed diary.¹³⁵ Parry’s father was doubtful that music could be a career and sent him to study history and law at Oxford. His diary records the time he was busy working towards his Oxford entrance examinations. Remarkably, while still at Eton, he was already working towards an Oxford music degree, which he completed in his final term. His diary gives a vivid account of how he balanced music, classics, and sport, while at the same time indulging in a colourful social life involving drinking, smoking, and behaving boorishly to non-Etonians. The sense one gets from the diary is that Parry thought his music was important and serious, and that he regarded much of his work with Greek and Latin as a chore. However, he wrote about his involvement in sport with a real sense of excitement and pride as he was successively selected for house and school teams in football and cricket. His diary also chronicles several football injuries to his legs, as a result of vigorous shin kicking, some of which resulted in confinement to bed for several days.¹³⁶

The idea that sportsmen were sometimes better than their peers academically is borne out by data from Oxford. W.L. Newman, a Balliol College tutor, told a parliamentary select committee in 1867 that the idea ‘the devotees of athleticism are the most idle men of the place is contradicted by the facts’.¹³⁷ Two years later R.F. Clarke, a fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, published a paper showing that 45.4% of college rowers took honours degrees, a favourable figure compared to undergraduates as a whole, of whom only 30% were honours students. Clarke also found that 60% of Oxford fellows qualifying from open competitive examinations after 1860 were either rowers or cricketers.¹³⁸ In their survey of Oxford athleticism between 1850 and 1914, Curthoys and Jones point out that it was often the most successful sporting colleges, including Balliol, that were among the first to refuse to admit men who were not intending to read for honours degrees, whereas it was those colleges with a reputation for traditional aristocratic forms of leisure, such as Christ Church and Trinity, that lagged behind in academic achievement.¹³⁹

A good test of whether school sportsmen excelled academically is to look at the lists of boys included in the Newcastle Select, the elite group of Etonian classical scholars. It is in this group that we find many of those boys who went on to becoming sporting masters, including Hornby, Warre, G.E. Marindin, Walter Durnford, Selwyn, and Welldon. Other prominent Etonian sportsmen such as Lord Harris, Edward and Alfred Lyttelton, and Robert Carr Bosanquet, found an intellectual outlet as editors of the Eton College Chronicle, and some, like Cuthbert Ottaway and John Goldie, were King’s Scholars.¹⁴⁰ The by-product of a system which encouraged hard-working and sporty boys to go on to university, was not only that Sixth Forms and university colleges became more athleticised, but that sportsmen became more Hellenised. It was in the Sixth Form that Greek tended to eclipse Latin as the main focus of school classics, and it was by studying at this level that boys would become more attuned to ancient philosophy and history.

Conclusion

Mack’s damning indictment of Warre as the architect of a system deliberately designed to produce physically fit, but culturally ignorant, young men was unduly harsh.¹⁴¹ Drawing on the opinions expressed by Academicus and masters like Browning who had been alarmed by the rise, and subsequent power of athleticism at Eton, Mack seems to imply a degree of deliberate intent in the creation of a ‘philistine’ culture. In reality, such a culture already existed within a certain subset of oppidans, and was not particularly a by-product of athleticism at all.

Accusations of philistinism against Warre at the time of his appointment as Headmaster were partially coloured by Welldon’s campaign for the position. Welldon's reputation as intellectually superior to Warre was based to a large degree on his prodigious publication record. Welldon had published widely on theological issues and, at the time he applied for the Headship of Eton, had just published the first of the three translations of Aristotle’s works which would cement his reputation as a first-rate classical scholar.¹⁴² Welldon was the more deeply committed Christian of the two. Unlike Warre, he actively enjoyed preaching, and he was driven to write copiously by his evangelical zeal. He was also far more ambitious than Warre and a shameless self-publicist.

Yet Warre was far from being a philistine. His private correspondence reveals a passion for classical languages which indicate that he was as comfortable in Greek or Latin as he was in English.¹⁴³ If he did not produce as much published material as Welldon, it was less from a lack of ability as from personal choice. He worked hard as a teacher, coach, and administrator and spent what time was left on convivial meetings and correspondence with his extremely wide circle of acquaintances. As a teacher, Warre influenced not just the boys he taught, but, as a result of his elevated position as Headmaster of Eton, educational and sporting practice in other schools. As an authority on rowing, he was the most influential figure in the sport for much of the late-nineteenth-century, and his opinions were sought, not just for advice on rowing technique and coaching, but on boat construction, the history of rowing and the vexed question of amateurism. Such was his dominance that George Treherne referred to him as ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν, a description Homer used of Agamemnon literally meaning ‘lord of men’ but closer in modern meaning to ‘general-in-chief’.¹⁴⁴

From Eton, Warre’s tentacles spread across the sporting world, allowing his influence and ideas to permeate leading exponents and administrators, not only in England, but across the Empire and beyond, to Ivy League colleges in America and the nascent Olympic movement in Europe.¹⁴⁵ One of the earliest people on whom he had a direct influence was R.A.H. Mitchell, whom he inherited as a pupil when he took over Marriott’s house. Warre was instrumental in getting Mitchell, not the most academically gifted of boys, into Balliol and Mitchell, on his return to Eton, was steadfastly loyal to Warre for the rest of their careers. It is ironic considering Warre’s rowing credentials, that the two most successful sportsmen to pass through his own house were cricketers, Mitchell and Lord Harris. However, Warre took as much pride in Harris’s subsequent political career as his sporting achievements, as Harris acknowledged when he wrote to Warre in October 1896 to remind him that three former members of Warre’s house, Elgin, Harris, and Wenlock, were simultaneously Viceroy of India and Governors of Bombay and Madras.¹⁴⁶

Eton in the closing decades of the nineteenth century undoubtedly put enormous resources into sport and, as the pages of the Eton College Chronicle attest, it was an important part of school life. However, other activities were not eclipsed, and Etonians continued to enjoy access to a range of other diversions. The Literary and Scientific Society founded by Welldon continued to flourish, as did amateur dramatics, music and the Eton Society. Eton also continued to send large numbers of boys to university, maintaining its academic reputation and influence with Oxford and Cambridge colleges. However, it is also important to remember that Eton’s sheer size in comparison to other public schools often resulted in a misleading impression of academic success. Eton won a lot of university scholarships because it entered a lot of candidates, but even on this simple measure they were not the most successful school, with St. Paul’s winning 270 open scholarships to Eton’s 142 in the period 1886–1900.¹⁴⁷ The wide range of conditions that existed across late-Victorian public and grammar schools make it impossible to compare them on a like-for-like basis, but the statistics produced by the Pall Mall Gazette and Westminster Gazette over a number of years suggests that Eton was not academically preeminent, but nevertheless produced large numbers of university entrants, some of whom were individually outstanding.¹⁴⁸

The genuinely philistine housemaster was probably more common at lesser public schools, and at Eton only Mitchell, and possibly G.R. Dupuis, really fall into this mould. However, the enthusiasm for games and a laissez-faire attitude to learning meant that the vast majority of public schoolboys, at Eton and elsewhere, left school with philistine attitudes and a penchant for ball games. Paradoxically however, it was often the more talented sportsmen among them who were more naturally motivated and disciplined. For these boys, the prospect of university, and another three to four years of high-quality sport, was an attractive one, and often provided the necessary incentive to engage fully with schoolwork. This had the effect of producing a generation of sportsmen who were classically educated and who thought about themselves, their sports, and their place in society through a classical lens. Their superior educations and privileged backgrounds also ensured that many would go on to influential political positions or would have the time and inclination to go into sports administration. In this way, British sport came to be dominated by men with backgrounds as classicists just at the time that games culture was spreading, both socially and geographically.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andy Carter

Andy Carter is currently a PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University where his area of study looks at the use and abuse of ancient history in Victorian and Edwardian sport. He previously studied Public History at Royal Holloway, University of London and History and Archaeology at the University College of North Wales, Bangor.

Notes

1 Malcolm Tozer, The Ideal of Manliness: The Legacy of Thring’s Uppingham (Truro: Sunnyrest Books, 2015), 259.

2 George Gilbert Treherne Treherne, Record of the University Boat Race, 1829–1883 (London: Bickers & Son, 1884), 228.

3 Robert Titchener-Barrett, Eton & Harrow at Lord’s (London: Quiller Press, 1996), 243.

4 Although Etonian teams continued to perform very well against other public schools after 1884, Eton no longer produced the steady stream of sportsmen who became household names in adult sport that it had in the 1860s and 1870s. There is also a suggestion that, as rowing techniques changed and sliding seats were introduced, weight and strength increased in importance at the expense of technique meaning that Eton crews became less able to compete equally with university crews. Lord Desborough, Fifty Years of Sport: Eton, Harrow and Winchester (London: Walter Southwood, 1922), 21–30.

5 J.A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 73–96.

6 E.C. Mack, Public Schools and British Opinion Since 1860 (New York, 1941), 129.

7 Harrovian, IV, no. 47, 27 July 1872, 169.

8 John Chandos, Boys Together: English Public Schools 1800–1864 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 338; Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School, 111; Tozer, The Ideal of Manliness, 261.

9 Chandos, Boys Together, 133–54.

10 In 1821 Eton pupil, Tom Hoseason stabbed Edward Trower during an argument in the school chapel. Chandos, Boys Together, 137; In February 1825, thirteen-year-old Francis Ashley died after a fight with another boy lasting two and a half hours. Chandos, Boys Together, 142; In 1730 there had been another murder at Eton when a pupil named Edward Cochran had been stabbed to death by a classmate, Thomas Dalton, Chandos, Boys Together, 137.

11 Martin Stephen, The English Public School (London: Metro, 2018), 99.

12 Tozer, The Ideal of Manliness, 245.

13 Pall Mall Gazette, April 2, 1886, 1; Pall Mall Gazette, December 20, 1893, 1–3; Pall Mall Gazette, February 14, 1894, 1–2.

14 Chandos, Boys Together, 332.

15 Lord Hawke, Recollections and Reminiscences (London: Williams & Norgate, 1924), 23.

16 Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School, 107.

17 Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe, 132.

18 Public School Magazine, II (July–December 1898), 284.

19 At Marlborough for example the First XI were referred to as ‘the Gods’, T.C. Worsley, Flannelled Fool (London: Alan Ross, 1966), 81.

20 For an extensive description of the powers, privileges and process of gaining house and school colours see Alec Waugh, The Loom of Youth (first published 1917). This in a thinly disguised autobiography describing a boy’s ascent through the sporting and praefectorial hierarchy at the fictional Fernhurst School, actually based on Waugh’s time at Sherborne.

21 W.E. Jelf, ‘Eton Reform’, The Contemporary Review 3 (September-December 1866): 563.

22 J.A. Mangan, ‘Athleticism: A Case Study of the Evolution of an Educational Ideology’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 27, no. 1–2 (2010): 66.

23 Marlburian, II, no.17 (October 1867), 202.

24 E. Norman Gardiner, Greek Athletic Sports and Festivals (London: Macmillan & Co, 1910), 5.

25 Worsley, Flannelled Fool, 11.

26 Athletics, The Contemporary Review, III (September–December 1866): 390.

27 Tozer, The Ideal of Manliness, 248.

28 H.J. Spenser, ‘The Athletic Master in Public Schools’, The Contemporary Review LXXVIII (July 1900): 113–7.

29 Mangan, ‘Athleticism: A Case Study’, 72.

30 Marlburian, XCIX (Lent Term 1964), 30.

31 Worsley, Flannelled Fool, 77.

32 N.J. Humble, ‘Leaving London: A Study of Two Public Schools and Athleticism 1870–1914’, History of Education 17, no. 2 (1988): 151.

33 Worsley, Flannelled Fool, 82.

34 Tozer, The Ideal of Manliness, 230.

35 G.E.L. Cotton, Sermons and Addresses Delivered in the Chapel of Marlborough College (Cambridge, 1858), 220–1.

36 Report of Her Majesty’s Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Revenues and Management of Certain Colleges and Schools, and the Studies Pursued and Instruction Given Therein, I (London, 1864), 97; Ibid., II, 131.

37 Jelf, ‘Eton Reform’, 560–1.

38 Gladstonian Gleanings, Etoniana, no. 122, 7 June 1969, 341.

39 A.C. Benson, The Schoolmaster (London, 1914), 65.

40 Tozer, The Ideal of Manliness, 366.

41 Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe, 111.

42 Brian Glover’s portrayal of Mr Sugden, the ridiculous and brutish games master at a Yorkshire Secondary Modern in Ken Loach’s 1969 film, Kes attests to the longevity and pervasiveness of the stereotype.

43 Report of Her Majesty’s Commission, II (London, 1864), 31.

44 Ibid., 38.

45 Stephen, The English Public School, 195.

46 Alicia C. Percival, Very Superior Men: Some Early Public School Headmasters and Their Achievements (London: Charles Knight, 1973), 141.

47 The Eton Register, Part I, 1841–50 (Eton: Spottiswoode & Co, 1903), 23.

48 Academicus, ‘The Head-Mastership of Eton’, The Times, July 26, 1884, 10; Academicus was almost certainly a King’s Scholar and is using oppidan, not just to indicate that Warre had been a fee-paying pupil, but to suggest that he was oafish and boorish.

49 Ibid., 10; W. David Smith, Stretching Their Bodies: The History of Physical Education (Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 1974), 24.

50 C.R.L. Fletcher, Edmond Warre (London: John Murray, 1922), 22; J.E.C. Welldon, Recollections and Reflections (London: Cassell & Co, 1915), 57.

51 Hugh Pattenden, ‘The Manchester Cathedral Ritualism Controversy, c.1873–c.1906’, Northern History 58, no. 1 (2021): 89; J. E. C. Welldon, Spectator, October 8, 1898, 488.

52 Fletcher, Edmond Warre, 251.

53 Clive Dewey, ‘“Socratic Teachers”: Part I – The Opposition to the Cult of Athletics at Eton, 1870–1914’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 12, no. 1 (April 1995): 63.

54 Welldon, Recollections and Reflections, 20; Fletcher, Edmond Warre, 178.

55 Welldon, Recollections and Reflections, 27–8.

56 The Eton Register, Part IV, 1871–80 (Eton: Spottiswoode & Co, 1907), 2; Keith Warsop, The Early F.A. Cup Finals and the Southern Amateurs (Beeston: Soccer Data, 2004), 47 and 134.

57 J.E.C. Welldon, Gerald Eversley’s Friendship: A Study in Real Life (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1895), 79; Miss Evans once told Hugh MacNaghten that she thought poorly of any master who did not believe his own house the best in the school. Fierce house-loyalty was instilled into Etonians. Hugh MacNaghten, Fifty Years at Eton (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1924), 159.

58 Welldon, Gerald Eversley’s Friendship, 83.

59 Edmond Warre, Athletics; Or Physical Exercise and Recreation, Part I (London: Clowes & Son, 1884), 50.

60 Fletcher, Edmond Warre, 44–6.

61 The Eton Register, Part I, 23.

62 Treherne, Record of the University Boat Race, 177 and 191.

63 Henry S. Salt, Memories of Bygone Eton (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1928), 18.

64 ‘Letters to the Editor’, Pall Mall Gazette, July 28, 1884, 12.

65 The Eton Register, Part II, 1853–59 (Eton: Spottiswoode & Co, 1905), 4.

66 It was extremely rare for an Oppidan to win because the most able boys either entered Eton as King’s Scholars or achieved KS status at some point during their time at school. The novelty of an Oppidan success is commented on in the school magazine when it occurs again in the following decade. The Eton College Chronicle, no. 9, October 1, 1863, 34.

67 Fletcher, Edmond Warre, 26–7.

68 Ibid., 32.

69 Ibid., 176.

70 Ibid., 178.

71 Ibid., 179–204, 232–40.

72 MacNaghten, Fifty Years at Eton, 62.

73 Fletcher, Edmond Warre, 222.

74 Ibid., 24.

75 John Jones, Balliol College: A History, 1263–1939 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988), 207.

76 Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 248–50.

77 Jones, Balliol College, 205–6.

78 Fletcher, Edmond Warre, 129.

79 Ibid., 106, 196–7.

80 Ibid., 37.

81 Tozer, The Ideal of Manliness, 259.

82 Lord Desborough, The Story of the Oar (Edinburgh: Philosophical Institute, 1910), 14.

83 Percy Gardner, ‘Boat-Racing among the Greeks’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 2 (1881): 92; Edmond Warre, Athletics, 8–13. The exhibition incidentally, nodded further towards classical antiquity by choosing as its motto a quote from Juvenal’s Satire X, ‘Mens sano in corpore sano’ with its implication that mental and physical well-being are inextricably entwined.

84 Ibid., 9.

85 Ibid., 12.

86 Ibid., 10–11.

87 Ibid., 11.

88 Salt, Memories of Bygone Eton, 25.

89 Titchener-Barrett, Eton & Harrow at Lord’s, 254; ‘Obituary: James John Hornby’, The Times, November 3, 1909, 13.

90 Tozer, The Ideal of Manliness, 258; Titchener-Barrett, Eton & Harrow at Lord’s, 19.

91 Treherne’s survey of Oxford University VIII’s between 1829 and 1883 reveals that 88 Etonians rowed for Oxford out of a total of 214. The next largest contributor was Westminster with just 14. Eton did not dominate Cambridge rowing to quite the same extent, but were still the biggest group with 47 rowers to Rugby’s 19, out of a total of 193. Overall, Eton provided a third of Boat Race crews. Over the same period Eton produced more Oxford and Cambridge cricket blues than any other school.

92 Examples include, Francis Marindin, Arthur Kinnaird and Alfred Lyttelton in the early years of the Football Association for example, Harris and Hawke at the MCC, and John Astley, Lord Ampthill and Robert Carr Bosanquet in the revival of the Olympics.

93 James Brinsley-Richards, Seven Years at Eton, 1857–1864 (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1883), 214.

94 Ibid., 218.

95 ‘Obituary, The Rev G.R. Dupuis’, The Times, February 2, 1912, 9.

96 The Eton Register, Part I, 83.

97 Brinsley-Richards, Seven Years at Eton, 183.

98 W.B. Woodgate, Boating (London: Longmans, Greene & Co, 1889), 271.

99 The Eton Register, Part III, 1862–68 (Eton: Spottiswoode & Co, 1906), vi–vii.

100 G.E. Marindin, ‘The Game of “Harpastum” or “Pheninda”’, The Classical Review 4, no. 4 (April 1890): 145–9.

101 Eton enjoyed a successful run at the Henley Regatta and pupils in this period included two of England’s greatest all-round sportsmen, Cuthbert Ottaway and Alfred Lyttellton, future England cricketers such as C.T. Studd and Lords Harris and Hawke, leading footballers, including Welldon and Arthur Dunn, and the rower J.H.D. Goldie.

102 J.A. Mangan, ‘Philathlete Extraordinary: A Portrait of the Victorian Moralist Edward Bowen’, Journal of Sport History 9, no. 3 (Winter 1982): 23.

103 Football predominantly took place in the autumn, and boating and cricket in the summer.

104 Salt, Memories of Bygone Eton, 90.

105 Henry S. Salt, ‘Confessions of an Eton Master’, The Nineteenth Century XVII (January–June 1885): 179.

106 Salt, Memories of Bygone Eton, 106.

107 Welldon, Recollections and Reflections, 20.

108 G.E. Marindin, ‘Eton in Eighty-Five’, The Fortnightly Review XXVII (January–June 1885): 753–65.

109 F.W. Cornish, ‘Eton Reform’, The Nineteenth Century XVIII (July–December 1885): 578.

110 Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School, 110; Edward Thring, Sermons Delivered at Uppingham School (Cambridge, 1858), 113.

111 Salt, Memories of Bygone Eton, 229.

112 Cornish, ‘Eton Reform’, 578.

113 Ibid., 581.

114 Ibid., 586.

115 R. Harvey Mason, ‘Rowing at Eton College’, in W.B. Woodgate, Boating, 209.

116 R.H. Lyttelton, ‘Eton Cricket’, National Review (May 1894): 432.

117 Fletcher, Edmond Warre, 71–2.

118 Jelf, ‘Eton Reform’, 563.

119 For Warre’s evidence see ‘The Public Schools Commission, 1861–4’, Etoniana, no. 76 (11 November 1939): 414–5; For Browning’s see ‘The Public Schools Commission, 1861–4’, Etoniana, no. 75 (1 August 1939): 399–400.

120 Edward Lyttelton, Memories and Hopes (London: John Murray, 1925), 22.

121 Ibid., 33–4.

122 Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe, 129.

123 Howard Staunton, The Great Schools of England (London: Strahan & Co, 1869), 18; Brinsley-Richards, Seven Years at Eton, 49.

124 Originally, all boarding houses were run on a boarding only footage, and pupils would go elsewhere for tutoring during the day. As many boarding houses were run by women, they were referred to as Dames. This title stuck, even when boarding houses were run by men. However, by the late nineteenth-century it was increasingly common for masters to own boarding houses and run tuition in-house.

125 Brinsley-Richards, Seven Years at Eton, 50.

126 Ibid., 31–2.

127 Edward Dowdeswell Lockwood, The Early Days of Marlborough College (London, 1893); Brinsley-Richards, Seven Years at Eton, 1857–1864; Lyttelton, Memories and Hopes; Worsley, Flannelled Fool.

128 Lockwood, The Early Days of Marlborough College, 127.

129 Lyttelton, Memories and Hopes, 33.

130 ‘The Public School Commission, 1861–64’, Etoniana, no. 68 (11 April 1938): 284.

131 Deslandes extensively describes the enormous social capital to gained from involvement in Oxbridge rowing and how it could help a man’s career and marriage prospects. For those who preferred cricket, playing for Oxford or Cambridge generally required a higher standard than appearing as a gentleman amateur for most counties, and was often a stepping stone to a successful First-Class career. Thus, Lord Hawke, having failed to reach the Cambridge entrance standard while at Eton, was still prepared to put himself through a crammer to get there. Contrastingly, Alfred Lyttelton, who excelled both academically and at sport at Eton, entered Cambridge direct from school with comparative ease, but although an outstanding university sportsman found that both his mental health and academic performance suffered as a result of trying to balance his sporting commitments with academia. Paul R. Deslandes, Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 154–83; James Philip, Lord Hawke: A Cricketing Biography (Amazon, 2017), 54; Edith Lyttelton, Alfred Lyttelton, An Account of His Life (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1917), 54–79.

132 Report of Her Majesty’s Commission, II, 456–8.

133 Ibid., 140–1.

134 Ibid., 161.

135 The Eton Register, Part III, 43.

136 ‘An Eton Boy’s Diary, 1864–1866’, Etoniana, no. 103 (22 June 1946): 33–40; Etoniana, no. 104 (1 December 1947): 49–57; Etoniana, no. 105 (1 April 1948): 65–70.

137 PP 1867 xiii Qs 273, 342.

138 R.F. Clarke, The Influence of Pass Examinations (Oxford. 1869), 4.

139 M.C. Curthoys and H.S. Jones, ‘Oxford Athleticism, 1850–1914: A Reappraisal’, History of Education 24, no. 4 (1995): 312–3; These colleges were well known for their hunting and dining traditions, but nevertheless also embraced the newer sporting culture. Trinity and Christ Church were consistently in the top half of Oxford rowing crews and Christ Church, although admittedly a very large college, provided by far the largest contingent to Oxford University Football Club on its foundation in 1871; W.E. Sherwood, Oxford Rowing (Oxford, 1900).

140 The Eton Register, Parts II–V. Alfred Lyttelton and Cuthbert Ottaway shared the distinction of representing their university at 5 different sports. Ottaway represented Oxford at football, cricket, racquets, athletics and real tennis in the early 1870s while Lyttelton represented Cambridge in the same 5 sports in the late 1870s. Additionally, both men played football and cricket for England, although Ottaway did not play Test cricket as his appearances were against the USA and Canada.

141 Mack, Public Schools and British Opinion, 129.

142 J.E.C. Welldon, The Politics of Aristotle (London: Macmillan, 1883).

143 Fletcher, Edmond Warre, 296–303.

144 Treherne, Record of the University Boat Race, 82; Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), 52.

145 Warre’s influence was able to spread via three distinct, but often over-lapping channels; those he had directly taught at Eton, his considerable reputation as a rowing coach, including his extensive connections via the Henley Regatta, and his links as a classical scholar. He also had a direct relationship with Pierre de Coubertin who had visited him at Eton and Henley.

146 Fletcher, Edmond Warre, 196.

147 The Daily News, July 24, 1900, 6.

148 See for example Pall Mall Gazette, April 2, 1886, 2; Pall Mall Gazette, October 17, 1888, 2; Westminster Gazette, July 24, 1895, 1.