PROFILE MR ANTHONY CROSLAND AND BRITAIN’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30961, 18 January 1966, Page 10

PROFILE MR ANTHONY CROSLAND AND BRITAIN’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS

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SIMON KAVANAUGH)

For a century and a half the great public schools of England have produced the nation’s ruling class. Incidentally they have created the stereotype of the upper class Englishman, his manner, attitudes, standards and even accent. These, not old school ties, are the caste marks of the public school man. Lone before vocational training was introduced into schools lower nn the social scale, the public schools devoted themselves to it. None of their bovs went out into the world equipped to operate a capstan lathe, but they were armed with a deep unshakable sense of their ability to govern and their right to do so.

This was absorbed not by conscious instruction but by ’exclusive association with the class that always had governed the moneyed, landed, aristocratic. It has always been easy to attack the public schools and difficult to defend them against charges of classexclusiveness and anachronism in an increasingly egalitarian world.

It has even been said that academically they are no better than the more plebian grammar schools. Indeed it is doubtful if anyone would dispute the assertion that Manchester Grammar School, the most famous of its kind, is academicaly ahead of Eton, the best known public school.

The Model

For all that, the public school man has unshakably remained the model for all ambitious Englishmen. His is the stiff upper lip. He was the Englishman who took England everywhere with him, dressing for dinner in the jungle, so to speak. It is hardly surprising that to traditionally-minded Socialists the great public schools were nests of vipers—ironically, two successive Socialist leaders, Attlee and Gaitskell were public school men —and it has long been a tenet of Socialist faith that the public schools, at least as presently constituted, should be got rid of. With only a tiny percentage of the electorate ever likely to attend public schools or send their sons to them, you might reasonably expect that the de-classing of them would not arouse much public feeling. Curiously enough, that is not the case. Class-conscious-ness exist at all levels in England, and the fact that the course of English social history has been one of evolution rather than revolution is in no small way due to the absorption by each class of the most vital and ambitious members of the class immediately below it. Since mere money *s not » distinguishing caste mark in England, the public schools have stood as the one near infallible way to assure oneself of acceptance by the upper class. To destroy their exclusivity, therefore, would be to

shatter the goal of many thousands of ambitions. But the Socialist government of Harold Wilson has decided that the days of the public schools as mandarin-factories must be numbered. And it is characteristic of Harold Wilson’s acumen that he has given the job of revolutioms-i ing the public schools to Charles Anthony Raven Crosland. M.P.

Suitable For The Job Few Socialists have argued longer and louder against the exclusiveness of the public schools than this handsome, 47-year-old Minister of Fdu-

cation, and the fact that he is himself a public school product makes him doubly suitable for the job. If the job had been given to a stateeducated politician of work-ing-class background Charges of inverted snobbery and class-vindictiveness would have been unavoidable. Anthony Crosland, on the other hand, is very much the public school product—superficially anyway.

He has the deep self-assur-ance that just stops short of arrogance, the social poise and polish that makes him not only acceptable but welcome in the drawing rooms of the upper-crust. He possesses, too, the sort of casual goodlooks and elegance that is .somehow associated with the public school product. One might well disagree with his views on the role and the fate of the public schools—and. many do—but no-one could accuse him of class-envy or vindictiveness, although some hard-boiled Tories see him as a traitor to his class.

If there is anything in Anthony Crosland’s background that sets him apart from the bulk of his public school educated contemporaries it is most probably the strong vein of religious nonconformism in his family. The average public school man is an Anglican, a member of the established Church of England by birth if not by conviction and practice. It has been said with pardonable cynicism that the Church of England is the Tory Party at its prayers. By the same token non-conform-ism in England may be described as the religion of radicalism.

Non-conformist Family Anthony Crosland’s family though very comfortably-off were members of the Ply-

| mouth Brethren. It is likely [that Crosland’s own relaxed ’social attitudes —he smokes, drinks moderately, enjoys [the social round —represents Jess a revolt against the reli|gious background of his | childhood than an extension of his father's ability to I temper the asceticism of his religion with tolerance and moderate enjoyment o’ the material world. Crosland pere was a senior civil servant who refused a knighthood, not because he had anything against the award of honours, but because he felt it might set him apart from his religious brethren. He gladly accepted a lesser honour.

Against this background Anthony Crosland was brought up and educated. He went to Highgate public school then to Oxford. It was the pre-war Oxford of leftwing enthusiasms and inevitably Crosland threw himself wholeheartedly into the fray. When the Russian attack on Finland brought disillusionment with communism to many left-wing undergrade ates, Crosland headed a breakaway group, loyal to the Labour Party and antiCommunist. The dash and enthusiasm of Crosland's war service—he was one of the paratroop officers who spearheaded the allied invasion of Southern France—was typical of the public school boy rather than of the left-wing undergraduate.

He returned to Oxford to take his degree, became President of the Union and decided to further arm himself for the political career he knew lay ahead by arranging to do three years as a don at Trinity.

Admirer Of Gaitskell

When he did enter Parliament he tended towards his own kind, the Left-wing university products rather than the cloth cap traditionalists. Hugh Gaitskell was the man he admired and the man whose close friend he became. He was—and is—the embodiment of the sort of Socialism Hugh Gaitskell represented, a modern-minded, adaptable breakaway from the evangelical, cloth-cap, Red Flag brand.

After a spell in the Department of Economic Affairs. Crosland was given one of the Cabinet hot seats. Education. It has been said of this post, as it has of Transport, that the occupant can not please any of the people any of the time. Faced with a chronic shortage of teachers, schools and university places there are many who think Crosland has his plate overloaded without setting himself to revolutionise a national institution like the public schools. But Anthony Crosland is dedicated to the ideal of a classless society, and it is his recorded belief that the system of entry into the public schools should be democratised and that the nation must eventually accept the idea of over-all comprehensive schools. He will not be satisfied with a token acceptance by the public schools of a handful of guinea-pig boys from working class homes. He wants to see the great public schools, no matter how venerable or how exalted, incorporated in the nation's comprehensive system.