Foreword Rory Stewart
My father always returned from Malaysia or Hong Kong to join me at the Dragon on Remembrance Sunday. I remember how straight he stood to attention, how cold the wind was and how bleak his face. His only brother, George, had been wounded at Alamein and killed in Sicily. I remember the Celtic cross on the memorial. But I do not think I ever focused on the names below. Nor would I then have thought it possible to learn very much about the names recorded on the cross – almost a hundred years since their deaths. Desmond Devitt, however, by drawing upon a remarkable range of letters and obituaries, sermons and poems, has brought them to full and remarkable life. Some of those names were very well known and perhaps still should be today – William Leefe Robinson, for example, awarded the Victoria Cross for becoming the first pilot to shoot down a German airship over London. Ronald Poulton was the popular, record try-scoring captain of the English rugby team, who led them through the 1914 Grand Slam. Others were quieter boys who made less impact on their schools, colleges and regiments. Almost every type of boy is represented on that cross because almost 20 per cent of the Dragons who served were killed (almost 40 per cent were wounded). Few, however, were untouched by the character of their headmaster, ‘Skipper’ Lynam. All the early writing from the front is shaped by the Skipper’s Dragon School. One former pupil under an artillery barrage reflects that its ‘flashes were even more brilliant and alarming than Skipper’s lighting in Macbeth’; another consoles himself with a fragment of ancient Greek and then cheerfully asks for the accents to be corrected by ‘someone in VIa’. All the letters home mirror the Skipper’s insistence – rare in a Victorian schoolmaster – that children should be openly affectionate to their parents. Both Skipper’s love of adventure (displayed in his cruise through the uncharted waters of the far North) and his endearing scruffiness are reflected in his young protégé Jack Haldane – described by General Haig as ‘the dirtiest and bravest’ soldier in the army. Devitt tells us that Skipper once purchased a parrot on the advertiser’s promise that it could ‘speak three languages, recite Kipling, sing comic songs and make friends at once’ – and one senses that this was his ideal for boys as well as talking birds. Hence, in part, his deep affection for George Fletcher (killed in 1915), who combined literary flair (describing a German attack as a combination of ‘rustling in the turnips’ and ‘Sennacherib’), a love of pranks (he liked to creep across no man’s land to pin flags to the German trenches) and a deep and serious knowledge of German language and culture. The writing of these young men – irreverent, improbably learned, tough, decent and occasionally a little donnish – is Skipper’s Dragon School to the core. The boys were far from clones, however. Skipper insisted that the job of his school was to allow the full development of original characters. He was thus as deeply fond of the astonishing intelligence and learning of Hugh Sidgwick (in the habit of improving his civil service memoranda by translating them in and out of ancient Greek)
