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Chapter Five

But we’ll do more, Sempronius

In September 1941, my father drove me for my first term at Charterhouse in his green 1932 open Lagonda, using some saved petrol coupons; I remember our happy feeling of companionship. The setting of the school is beautiful, and even then I appreciated it; the old school buildings, the best Gothic of 1870, look out over the green, where later I was to watch Peter May as a thirteen-year-old batsman; he became one of the finest English batsmen there ever was. The green itself is at the summit of the steep hill which runs up from Godalming; the view stretches out to Haslemere. Around the school there were walks in its extensive grounds, and beyond that the Surrey countryside, though Surrey seemed brown and scrawny compared to the green meadows of Somerset.

In summer the setting was delightful, but in autumn, winter and spring, it was cold, almost as bone-chillingly cold as the Charles River in mid-winter, if one walks back across the bridge from Harvard to Boston. My father had been cold at Charterhouse; I was cold. Nevertheless, I was quite happy in my first year. I was a fag in Verites, which was my house; ‘fag’ was then an innocent word, which meant that I had to perform minor domestic tasks and run errands for the monitors. My own house monitor soon discovered that he would do better to polish his own shoes than have me polish them.

I was in the scholars’ form, and found myself sitting next to Simon Raven, on the alphabetical principle. He was as good a classical scholar as I was a bad one, and was soon moved up a year into the fifth form. The quiet and elderly form master of the Remove, Mr Lake, had taught my father when he was a young man, and shared my enthusiasm for the novels of Anthony Trollope.

My great-grandfather had been to Charterhouse, in the time of Thackeray; my grandfather had been to Charterhouse, less than ten years before the school moved out of London and down to Godalming in Surrey; my father had been to Charterhouse in the years before the First World War. None of them had been happy; all had received a sound classical education and retained a loyalty to their old school. For much of the time I was not happy, or in good physical health, but I too retain an affectionate loyalty for Charterhouse.

Institutions are like people; one has a temperamental affinity with them, or a temperamental unease. I doubt if I have an ‘anima naturaliter Catholica’, a naturally Catholic soul. Left to its own devices, my soul is rather inclined to Protestant liberalism. I do, however, have a naturally Catholic temperament; I enjoy the personality of the Church of Rome, as well as being thankful for its graces. I love the ancient institutions of Somerset. I love the institutions of the United States. In another life I would have liked to have been born in Boston, preferably in the 1860s, studied at Harvard and – if my career flourished – become a Senator for Massachusetts during the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. I related reasonably well to Clifton College, saw the appeal of an Eton I did not go to, am loyal to Charterhouse, rather disliked Balliol – which returned the compliment – but enjoyed Oxford, and particularly the Oxford Union, had a liberal education at the Financial Times, worked well with the Sunday Times, have had by far my greatest professional loyalty to The Times, seriously disliked the institutional BBC, was happy and useful at the Arts Council and enjoy a peaceful old age in the House of Lords. Balliol and the BBC, out of all those institutions, I did not take to. They were not my cup of tea, and most decidedly I was never theirs.

One story illustrates how Charterhouse sees the world. My daughter Charlotte, who was a sweet rebel as a teenager, had left Cheltenham Ladies College in disfavour; it was, in my view, the College’s fault rather than hers. I remember writing to the Chairman of the Board of Governors a letter which contained the sentence: ‘You make the girls unhappy and then punish them for being so’. We decided that Charlotte should, if possible, take her A levels at Charterhouse. They received a letter from Cheltenham, which, apparently, warned them against Charlotte in strident terms. Their reaction was to decide at once that they ought to take her. I was an Old Carthusian, which constituted a bond; Charlotte’s education was in difficulty; they obviously ought to help. That is how sympathetic grown-ups think. It is not how all schools would have reacted. So Charlotte became the fifth generation of Rees-Moggs to go to the school of Addison, Steele, Blackstone, Wesley, Thackeray, Max Beerbohm and Robert Graves.

At the start of the autumn term of 1941, the war was shuddering towards its tipping point. Germany had invaded Russia, and at first had been having every success. The Russian winter was holding the German army before Moscow. Towards the end of my first term at Charterhouse, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered the war. After that, there was never any doubt who was going to win. Of course, Pearl Harbor came as a great relief to the British; the Japanese had given us an invincible ally. Despite the loss of Malaya and then of Singapore, the turn happened in the last months of 1941, and every schoolboy knew it.

At Christmas the scholars were promoted to the Special Remove, which was then taught by a charismatic man, Bob Arrowsmith. He would have regarded the word ‘charismatic’ as new-fangled, possibly blasphemous and certainly vulgar. He had three great enthusiasms: Charterhouse, cricket and eighteenth-century literature. He found that I shared all three; having discovered in the nets that I was a hopeless duffer at cricket, he particularly encouraged my interest in the eighteenth century. He received antiquarian booksellers’ catalogues, and left them for me on his desk; he got me to read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall; he let me explore the minor eighteenth-century poets, such as William Shenstone; he introduced me to the great classical scholar Richard Bentley, and to the eighteenth-century letter writers. In those days, when his arthritis only showed in a slight limp, he was a great walker and we went on country walks together and discussed what Gray had written to Mason, or John Wilkes’s reply to Lord Sandwich. ‘You will either die of the pox or by hanging.’ ‘That depends, my Lord, on whether I embrace your Lordship’s mistress or your principles.’

For some boys, probably the majority, Bob Arrowsmith was a great teacher. We used to imitate his drawling vowel sounds. ‘My dear Sir’, he would say, and it was easy to imitate that. With those he did not like, he could be more alarming. Max Hastings, who has edited both the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard, was later to have him as a housemaster. I believe that Bob tried to be kind to him at an unhappy period of his life, but I do not think Max has ever forgiven him for his inability to reach a common ground of sympathy.

In February 1942, I asked Bob whether, in addition to my ordinary school work, in which I was rather idle, I could write a weekly essay for him. It never occurred to me, nor, I think, to him, that I was putting him to any trouble. For the next couple of terms, I wrote these essays. I remember one of his comments. I had been reading Bacon’s Essays and was writing in similarly short, staccato sentences. Bob said that my essays reminded him of the Book of Proverbs. None of those essays survives, and I imagine they expressed antiquated prejudices in antiquated language; indeed, Bob would have liked that. But those weekly essays, with their echoes of Bacon, or Addison – I was reading Addison’s Spectator – Johnson or Gibbon, helped to teach me how to write. I tried to imitate Addison’s conversational style, but could not resist a rhetorical antithesis. One should get a big style as a teenager, so that one can tone it down later on.

My first year at Charterhouse was a good one, particularly the summer, when I spent my spare time divided between the cricket field, at least as a keen scorer, and the excellent school library, with its huge patent Victorian stove in the middle.

It was after I had returned to Somerset for my first summer holiday that I fell ill, and for the next couple of years that illness changed my school life, even leading to a suggestion by J. C. Holmes, my housemaster, that I should go on indefinite leave to try to recover my health. I remember the first illness being diagnosed by Dr Brew, the jovial and very old-fashioned Somerset doctor from Chew Magna. He was a farmers’ doctor, and was full of farming stories, such as that of the old farmer who had not been to the end of the garden for six weeks, and commented, ‘you’d better send a ferret up’n’. He listened to my symptoms, felt the area of my liver, and diagnosed the infectious jaundice which had become epidemic in the unsanitary mass feeding of wartime. It would now be diagnosed as Hepatitis A.

I have never felt so horrible; I had less than no energy; my urine was the colour of mahogany; I was struck by the depression which is a symptom of the disease. The illness and convalescence lasted from late July into October, when I did manage to go back to Charterhouse, but I do not think my energy or my spirits fully recovered so long as I was still at school.

I do remember one happy moment when I was at home, but had started to recover from the acute stage. My mother wanted to cheer me up. I had set my heart on a set of the Pickering ‘wreath’ edition of Christopher Marlowe, which I had seen earlier in the summer in George’s Bookshop, at the top of Park Street in Bristol. It was priced at £2 5s. That would now be the equivalent of about £75; if I saw the same set in a bookseller’s catalogue, I would now expect it to be priced at about £350.

I have the books in front of me as I write. They are bound in a Victorian half-green morocco, an excellent, clean copy. I put a regrettable rubber stamp of ‘W. R-M.’ in the end fly leaves, and stuck my great-grandfather’s armorial book plate, which is far more appropriate, in each volume. I also put a red ribbon as a book mark to each volume; two of the three still survive. The title pages read: ‘The Works of Christopher Marlowe. Volume the First (Second, Third) [wreath ornament] ‘Marlowe renown’d for his rare art and wit Could ne’er attain beyond the name of Kit.’ London: William Pickering, Chancery Lane; Talboys and Wheeler, Oxford; J. Combe and Son, Leicester. MDCCCXXVI.’

This birthday present introduced me to Christopher Marlowe, and for a year or more I was drunk on his plays. I read the plays in quite a careful way. In Act II, Scene II, of Tamburlaine the Great, there is a line which Pickering’s edition reads as ‘His arms and fingers long, and snowy-white’. My pencil note, slipped in, reads: ‘Sinewy is now the generally accepted emendation to snowy-white’. It would indeed be surprising if Marlowe had praised Tamburlaine for his lady-like hands.

I found my imagination stirred by all of Marlowe’s plays. I delighted in the bravura poetry of Tamburlaine the Great. I wrote to John Gielgud, asking him to put on a performance of The Jew of Malta, not realizing how anti-Semitic it was, but taken with the beauty of the verse.

I realized, of course, that The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr Faustus was Marlowe’s masterpiece. The closing scene, in which Faustus faces his death and damnation, is of Shakespearian quality.

O lente, lente currite noctis equi!²

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,

The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d.

Oh I’ll leap up to heav’n!

– who pulls me down? See where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament:

One drop of blood will save me; oh, my Christ!

My imagination was so gorged with Marlowe that, when I went back to Charterhouse, I wrote two full-length tragedies in my version of Elizabethan blank verse. The plots were full of murders, and were placed in sixteenth-century Italy, about which I knew next to nothing. I remember that one of the more sinister characters was called Bagnio. These plays are lost, which I cannot regret.

Unfortunately, jaundice is a disease which produces clinical depression, and I suffered for the next two years from an adolescent depression which, though intermittent, was at times acute. I remember a degree of exhaustion which made it hard to rise from a chair, even when I was sitting in a draught. In such a depression, as many will know only too well, all pleasure, interest and zest disappear from life. At the time I had never seen television, but the effect of depression is to grey the world, as though one was turning the colour control from vivid to black and white.

The school authorities were naturally disturbed, but fortunately they were flexible. I sometimes went to class, and sometimes not. I often stayed in bed until lunchtime, and occasionally did not get up at all. Admittedly I read a lot in bed, so the time was not wholly wasted. Somehow I stumbled through School Certificate with respectable but not scholarly marks. The two matrons at Verites, Mrs Lewis and Mrs Peel-Yates, fluctuated between wondering whether I was malingering or was so seriously ill that they should no longer take responsibility for me. They were, however, very kind.

The school doctor, a healthy-minded man, was convinced that I was a malingerer who ought to be restored to ordinary school discipline. My physical symptoms, which were not extreme, centred on my sinuses. He sent me to a Harley Street ear, nose and throat specialist, Mr Gill Carey, who had the background of an international rugby player, from New Zealand, or perhaps from Australia. He was, in my life, the good physician who may have saved my sanity. He examined the X-rays and shone a torch into the back of my mouth. He saw that my sinuses were in no great disorder. I left the room; he then told my mother that I was reasonably healthy in my sinuses but tired and run down; that I was not a malingerer, but should not have any pressure put on me; that I should be permanently excused from games and the Officers’ Training Corps, but might, if I wished, play an occasional game of cricket in the summer, as I seemed to enjoy that. He wrote a letter to the school doctor to that effect.

That solved the school and the games problem, and thereafter the depression gradually abated, though it was only at Oxford, six or seven years later, that I had the last attack of it which I can remember. During the more acute phase of the depression I had suicidal ideas. I talked about suicide to my friends, including Gerald Priestland, who later became the much-admired religious correspondent of the BBC. Suicide ends the career of Somerset Lloyd Jones in Simon Raven’s Arms for Oblivion novels, a character which is loosely based on the less agreeable aspects of my schoolboy personality.

I argued with Bob Arrowsmith that both Socrates and Jesus Christ had committed suicide, because they could both have avoided their deaths; it was not his sort of argument, and it embarrassed him, though he tried to frame a reply. I never actually made any attempt at suicide, but I can remember looking at my father’s wartime pistol, and wondering how it worked. I can also remember a moment in Charterhouse chapel when I simply wished that I could be removed from an earth which I found so pointless and returned to what seemed to me a lost state of happiness. I could not understand what I was doing in this strange and ugly century, when the eighteenth century had been so much better.

Literature continued to be a great consolation. I read Edgar Allan Poe, a sinister though romantic author I cannot now stand. I also read Shakespeare, and when, in 1943, I saw Gielgud’s Hamlet, the Shakespearian melancholy – ‘Oh that this too solid flesh would melt’ – summed up my mood precisely. So did Gray’s Elegy, which I read in a state of acute depression. Gray’s elegiac depression offers a benign and calming alternative; one is still depressed, but in a nostalgic style.

Undoubtedly depression affected, and even dominated, my period at school. Nowadays it would probably have been diagnosed and I would have been put on some mood-altering pill, which might or might not have improved it. I am, however, glad to have experienced it, and even gladder that it has not so far recurred, as I rather expected it to, in later life. It gave me an understanding of the shadowy side of my own nature, and a better sympathy with the tragic condition of human life. I think it gave me somewhat more insight than I might have had into the gusty emotional weather of adolescence in others. Depression – if it is survived – is an exploration as well as a disaster.

In my worst year, from the autumn of 1942 to the summer of 1943, I was taught by a most sympathetic master, V. S. H. Russell, nicknamed ‘Sniffy’. He was not a very good teacher in his class, but he was a brilliant teacher outside the classroom. He was a man of wide learning, and sympathetic to anyone who was going through a bad time. He was the housemaster of Hodgsonites, and I used to drop round to his house after school to talk over school gossip, in which he delighted, and about literature and the progress of the war, where, of course, many of his recent pupils were fighting.

Arrowsmith and Russell were both classicists. They believed that the study of the languages of Latin and Greek provided the only sound basis of education; this belief had dominated public school and grammar school education in England since the time of Erasmus and Linacre. Up to my fifteenth birthday, I received, without the floggings which used to accompany it, the same classical education as John Locke would have had at Westminster under the great Busby, Horace Walpole would have had at Eton, or as my father had under Thomas Ethelbert Page at Charterhouse. It was more limited in scope than modern systems of education, more vigorous in its mental discipline and more intense. I am glad that I belonged to the last generation educated in the culture of ancient Greece and Rome.

The grammar and public school classical teaching retained its imperial purpose when I was at school. Clifton and Charterhouse were a practical training for, among other things, governing nations and fighting wars. This faded away within a few years of the independence of India, which brought the British Empire to an end. Britain no longer needed to train boys to become colonial officials; deference to authority slipped away from the national culture and education.

By the end of my second term in the Classical Under Sixth it became clear to me that I was never going to make a classical scholar, even of the humblest kind. Nevertheless, there had to be a battle if I was to change my specialization. The classical side of Brooke Hall, which is the masters’ common room at Charterhouse, would not easily give up. Arrowsmith advised strongly against a change; Russell, as was his nature, was less dogmatic; Irvine opposed it though with decreasing confidence. My housemaster, Jasper Holmes, was a scientist, but was well aware of the strength of the classical side in Brooke Hall, from which he had sometimes suffered his own reverses in Charterhouse politics.

I wanted to switch to the History Under Sixth, which would lead naturally to Robert Birley’s History Sixth. That in its turn would lead to reading history at Oxford. I was increasingly strongly convinced that that was what I ought to do. However bad I was at the classics, I was good at writing essays, and had always read history.

During the period of this minor, but, to me, crucial, struggle, an incident occurred which nearly led to my changing my house as well as my form. There was a Jewish boy in Verites whose family background was unhappy, and whose conduct was erratic. He was so unhappy that at one time he tried to set fire to the school pillar box. He was nonetheless intelligent, and he was a friend of mine. I remember once going to a meal with his mother. Perhaps she had pressed him to bring a friend home. I knew therefore that his home was not happy, and that he resented about equally the authority of Charterhouse and that of his non-Jewish stepfather who, even to me, lacked charm.

In Verites he was unpopular. No doubt there was anti-Semitism in it. He was accused of being dirty, of not having taken a bath for a long time. This was not all that unusual; hot water was rationed and we only got one bath a week, so we must all have been pretty grubby. A group of sixteen-year-olds dragged him to the bathroom, stripped him and put him in the bath.

I was present, protesting and horrified at what was happening. I was not able to prevent it, though my protests may have helped to shorten the ordeal. I went to Holmes, as the house-master, who took less action against the bullies than I thought appropriate. I wrote to my mother, saying that I could not tolerate staying in a house where this sort of thing could happen. In this there was no doubt some desire to take advantage of the situation for my own ends, as well as a genuine horror and shock at the Jewish boy’s humiliation. I suggested that I should be transferred to Birley’s house, Saunderites.

Strangely, it did not occur to any of us that there was a parallel between the ritual humiliation of my friend, who had come to hate Charterhouse, and Nazi anti-Semitism. The event happened, after all, in 1943. I did raise the issue of bullying and the issue of anti-Semitism. I did not myself raise the parallel of Nazi anti-Semitism. Neither Holmes, Birley, nor, indeed, the bullies saw it in that way. The bullies themselves were not particularly thuggish boys, as I remember. They seemed to be acting out some very primitive role, like chimpanzees setting on a weakened companion in the rainforest.

I am not sure how closely my bid to move house, which failed, and my bid to move from Classics to History, which succeeded, were linked. I do not regret having stayed in Verites; it was not my spiritual home, and Holmes was not a particularly sympathetic housemaster, but we had a mutual respect, and I was certainly more trouble to him than he was to me. Later, when Birley made me Head of the School, Holmes refused to make me Head of Verites, a disjunction of office which had last happened when William Beveridge, later the author of the Beveridge Report, was Head of the School. That, too, suited me perfectly well. I liked the prestige of being Head of the School, but was happy to forgo the chore of running Verites.

The move to studying history was a joy and a turning point, one of the crucial decisions of my life, all the better for having been achieved after a struggle. Robert Birley, later to become the head of education in the British Zone of Germany and Headmaster of Eton, was an inspired teacher of history for a sixth-form student. Even then, I took a Tory view of the world, more so than I do now, and was always willing to argue the Tory case. Disraeli was right; Gladstone was wrong, even about Ireland. Birley found that amusing; he was himself a man of liberal views, later to distinguish himself in the struggle against apartheid in South African education. Some of his liberalism was bound to rub off on me, as it did on James Prior, who was in the same History Sixth, and as it had on Edward Boyle, an earlier Eton pupil of Birley’s, who, as a rising Conservative Minister, resigned over Suez.

The summer of 1944, when I had my sixteenth birthday, was a happier one. The depression was still lurking, but was seldom too unpleasant when the sun was shining and there was good cricket to be watched on the Green. My closest friend at Charterhouse, one of the closest friends I have ever had, was Clive Wigram. Clive was the son of a distinguished Jewish doctor, who had cared for Asquith in his last illness. Because he was Jewish, Clive had been sent to the United States early in the war, but his father fell ill and he came back in 1942, earlier than most of the refugee children. He was more mature than the rest of us, and was a year older than I was; he found it difficult to take schoolboy life seriously, and even Robert Birley misread his character as a result. Birley mistook Clive’s maturity for cynicism.

Clive and I would go for gentle walks in the Charterhouse grounds. On one such walk we were discussing the fact that we had not been invited to join the Literary and Political Society, an ancient Charterhouse society. The reason for our exclusion was that the Lit and Pol was run by Harry Iredale, a senior French master with snowy white hair, who disliked us; he had never been made a housemaster because of his progressive views, which were largely derived from George Bernard Shaw. He saw Clive and myself as sinister and reactionary; we saw him as pretentious and superficial. The poor man had suffered a tragedy, some time in the later 1920s, when he had taken a boy out punting on the River Way. The boy had fallen overboard and been drowned.

As we walked beside Under Green, the idea came to us of setting up our own literary society. I am not sure who had the idea first; it came into our heads together. We thought it should cover much the same subjects as the Lit and Pol, but from a more conservative point of view. We decided that it should be set up so as to capture the high ground of Carthusian prestige. We would match Iredale by two patrons from Brooke Hall; one was to be Russell, always a willing co-conspirator in school politics, the other Mr Thomson, the senior science master. He introduced me to Sung Dynasty Chinese pottery, of which he had a fine collection.

Clive and I discussed an appropriate name, and decided to call it the Thackeray Society. William Makepeace Thackeray, the Victorian novelist, was one of the most eminent of the Carthusian authors; there is a long-standing Thackeray Prize for an English essay, which I was later to win, narrowly beating Simon Raven into second place. We thought that the school would soon accept the Thackeray Society as an established institution.

I remember some of the early meetings the society had, usually in Russell’s drawing room at Hodgsonites. Clive and I had selected the best of the next year’s group of boys, most of them scholars. One of them was Dick Taverne, the brightest of the scholars of the year below mine. We took entrants a year younger than the Lit and Pol, during their summer in the fifth form, so that we could catch the best candidates before the Lit and Pol could get hold of them.

My own contributions were marked by my interest in a classical and even stoical human culture. I persuaded the society to have a play-reading session in which we read Addison’s Cato, on the grounds that Addison had been an Old Carthusian. Cato is a play which justifies suicide in a noble cause, and that may have influenced my choice; I think it was more the stoicism which attracted me.

’Tis not in mortals to command success,

But we’ll do more, Sempronius; we’ll deserve it.

I still feel an attachment to the play, which has many connections for me. It is a link to the Thackeray Society, to Russell and Clive Wigram. It is a link to my youth, and what it was like to be sixteen. It is a link to George Berkeley, my favourite Christian philosopher, and to Alexander Pope. Both Berkeley and Pope were present on the first night the play was performed in April 1713.

On that first night, the part of Marcia, Cato’s daughter, was played by Anne Oldfield, the leading actress of the period from 1710 to 1730. I think Pope fell in love with her and was rebuffed, since he attacked her more than once in barbed verse. She had an illegitimate son, Charles Churchill, who married Maria Walpole, Robert Walpole’s daughter by Mary Skerritt, also born out of wedlock. My son-in-law, David Craigie, is a descendant of that romantic match between an illegitimate Churchill and an illegitimate Walpole. For me, Addison’s Cato is ringed about with the happy coincidences of life. Four of our grandchildren are descendants of Anne Oldfield.

In the early autumn of 1944, I discussed with Robert Birley the prospect of going to university. I knew that I wanted to go to Oxford. I was drawn by its romantic and political character and slightly repelled by the intellectual puritanism of Cambridge. I had no strong family connection with any particular Oxford college; my father had gone to University College, but his uncles had gone to various other colleges, and my ancestor John Rees had gone to Jesus. Birley recommended that I should try for a scholarship at Balliol, his own old college; he had himself won the Brackenbury Scholarship, which had been held by various other well-known figures, such as Cyril Connolly and Hilaire Belloc. In terms of prestige, the Brackenbury was then the best known history scholarship at Oxford.

I was only just over sixteen and had been a history specialist for no more than a term and a half. Birley warned me that I was too young and did not really know enough history to get a scholarship, but suggested I should enter for Balliol, to see what the examination was like. I was delighted with the challenge.

The examination was taken over a couple of days, and the candidates stayed in college. I remember how cold it was, with an early December snow covering the paving stones outside the Sheldonian. I took with me a copy of Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Politie, a first edition which I had bought from George McLeish of Little Russell Street. I imagine that I found an opportunity to work in some quotation from Hooker, intended to show the breadth of my reading. The set essay was a quotation from Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII, in which Cardinal Wolsey says to Cromwell: ‘Fling away ambition, by that sin fell the angels’. At the age of sixteen, I was not at all willing to fling away ambition, which was my ruling passion at the time. I wrote an essay defending ambition; how I got over the problem of the fall of Lucifer I do not now remember.

There was an oral interview, in which my confident assertions were gently probed. Two young Balliol dons, still serving in the army, took part in it: Richard Southern, a serious-minded medieval historian, who later became the President of St John’s, and Christopher Hill, the Marxist historian of the seventeenth century, who later became Master of Balliol. Southern was too ascetic, too serious, too medieval for me, and I was too frivolous, too partisan, too eighteenth-century for him. I was never to find it easy to learn from him, which was my fault; he never found much pleasure in trying to teach me, which was also my fault, since he was both a good historian and a good man.

Christopher Hill was much more my type of historian. As a good Marxist he looked for broad explanations of historic events. He saw, and taught, history as a series of challenges and responses, which could be explained by identifying underlying social and economic forces. He had an ebullient Celtic temperament. Although we were on different sides of the ideological fence, and disapproved of each other quite strongly, we were also quite fond of each other in an adversarial way. I have always been grateful for his Marxist teaching; Marxism is only one of the ways of looking at history, and is only partly true, but it is a form of analysis all historians need to have experienced at some point.

The history dons sat round the fire in the Dean’s room, and made me feel welcome; I knew I had done quite well. I was back in Somerset on my Christmas holiday with my parents when the telegram arrived, telling me that I had won the Brackenbury. I had won it, as I now think, because I had the basic qualities not of a good historian, but of a good journalist. I had trenchant opinions; I wrote with vigour at short notice on any subject; I was manifestly clever, without being particularly consistent, accurate or profound. I showed promise. Indeed, my whole educational career was based on showing promise.

When I received the telegram I was filled with delight; I felt like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. ‘Is it not passing brave to be a King, And ride in triumph through Persepolis?’ Was it not passing brave to have won the Brackenbury Scholarship at the age of sixteen? I have never felt such an uprush of pleasure at any subsequent success, at becoming President of the Oxford Union or Editor of The Times, agreeable though success always is. It is the moment of success which gives the greatest satisfaction; the life of a Prime Minister must be anxious and exhausting, but the hour of appointment, or of winning a General Election, must feel very good. The hour I got that telegram from Balliol was good in that way. Of course, if one is going to have a success, sixteen is an enjoyable time to have it.

I paid for it, in a way I have not had to pay for any subsequent success. I went back to Charterhouse in the January, having achieved a Balliol scholarship and having at least a couple of terms of relaxation ahead of me. The old depression came back, more severely than it was ever to come again. I sat in my study at Verites, unable to concentrate, unable to take pleasure in anything, wholly lacking in energy, let alone zest. I had not expected to react so badly to something which had given me so much delight. The black mood passed as spring came, but for a couple of months I felt lower than I had felt high on receiving the telegram.

That year I edited The Carthusian, which was a senior position in the school. I spent a good deal of my leisure time with Clive Wigram, on whose judgement I greatly relied. I remember a walk with him when we discussed the relative evils of the Hitler and Stalin regimes. I said that Stalin’s was the more totalitarian of the two, and that a private individual had a better chance of preserving some normality in Germany rather than Russia. Clive agreed, but pointed out that such an option would not be open to him, because he was a Jew, and Hitler would kill him. At that time, early in 1945, we still had no real knowledge of the Holocaust, but Jews knew that Hitler was a Jew killer. It was only when British troops liberated Belsen in May of 1945, and the first photographs of the starving or the dead appeared, that we began in Britain to realize that the evil that had happened was even worse than the war itself.

In the summer, the war in Europe came to an end. Rather to my surprise, Birley asked me to stay on for an extra term and be Head of School. I had not been considered a likely candidate for the job, and, in any case, everyone assumed I was leaving. I was conspicuously unathletic. I was a thorn in the side of my house-master, who was opposed to the whole idea. I was seen in the school as a weedy intellectual, and there were doubts as to whether I could maintain discipline. Few headmasters other than Birley would have considered it. I think that part of his motivation was the desire to show that an intellectual could be Head of School.

I do not think that I made a particularly good one. I compensated for my apparent lack of authority by being too decisive in some cases. The benefit of my being Head of School was not to Charterhouse but to me. I would previously have thought of myself as the sort of person who edits the school magazine but does not become the Head of School. My self-image came to include the idea of exercising authority. I have never subsequently found it worrying to handle the political relationships in such positions of authority as I have held. As Editor of The Times or as Chairman of the Arts Council, I have found the simple leadership skills which I first learned at Charterhouse were useful, and if I made some of the mistakes of the learning process while I was still at school, that is as it should be.