PREFACE

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)

2 Foreword

as of the tougher, less scholarly Jack Smyth. And Skipper’s willingness to publish Smyth’ s poem – in his school magazine – shows how honest he was prepared to be with himself and with eight-year-old boys about the bleak and random horror that lay beneath the haunting nursery rhyme:

Modern Warfare (Or how to get knocked out without seeing a German). Ten British Officers sitting in a line: One stopped a ‘pip-squeak’ , and then there were nine. Nine British Officers – What’s to be their fate? One dropped a live bomb, and then there were eight. Eight British Officers looking up to Heaven: Down came a German bomb and then there were seven. Seven British Officers leaning on their sticks: A sniper drew a bead on one, and then there were six.

The story of these hundreds of lives and deaths connected by five years in a north Oxford prep school is almost an encyclopaedia of the war.The Dragons evacuate from the beaches of Gallipoli, are killed at the third Battle of Ypres, meet Lawrence of Arabia and Marie Curie, grapple with the German High Seas Fleet in the Battle of Jutland, save the wounded at the Easter Rising and are shot out of the sky by Baron von Richthofen. Desmond Devitt catches their very varied responses to these theatres without judgement or preference. He reveals the strong character of Roderick Haigh – oarsman, marksman and holder of scholarships to Winchester and Oxford – and carefully records both his view that ‘We are all inspired with the justice of our cause, and by the fact that we are fighting for the cause of honour and liberty throughout the world’ and his belief that ‘it is the highest honour to which a man can attain – to die

for one ’s country’. But he gives equal space to the Old Dragon who wrote bleakly of Gallipoli that ‘it is sickening to think that we have been under fire for six months and that the total result of our fighting is that we have got to go and leave our material and everything, especially some 100,000 dead, in the hands of the Turks’. He describes the intellectual who revelled in killing, alongside the decorated hero who killed himself in depression after the war. The men are portrayed not as victims but as original human beings whose charms and character persist as they struggle – in their own, individual way – with exhaustion, absurdity, mud, cacophony, gas and death.

So many lives lost: yet this book is equally a portrait of how those who survived mourned the dead. Ronald Poulton was shot by a German sniper while standing still on a trench parapet at night – like a British officer in Jack Smyth’ s nursery rhyme of modern war. But it is the full and beautiful heroism of his life and rugby that was commemorated by his peers:

Ronald is dead; and we shall watch no more His swerving swallow-flight adown the field Amid eluded enemies, who yield Room for this easy passage, to the roar

Chapter 1 Summer Term 1917

Prizegiving Day

One day in late July 1917 the chairs were all set out in the Victorian-style school hall and on the balcony overlooking it, in serried ranks facing the stage. On them were seated the assembled company of parents, staff and 153 children of the Oxford Preparatory School (O.P.S.).There were many guests too – notably a number of wounded officers recovering in Oxford from injuries sustained in the First World War. They had been regular visitors to the school during that term.

The hall itself, built in 1895, was typical of many schools of that era. Six classrooms led into it, and the space would be classified as ‘ multi-purpose ’ today. Ropes hung from the beams to allow for P.E., while a stage could easily be erected at one end for school plays and concerts. Most importantly for the children, it was play space.The hall was the centre of life at the school, but it was also used for more formal occasions such as on that summer day: Prizegiving Day.

On to the stage came those invited to give away the prizes and make speeches. Presiding over the occasion was the headmaster, Charles Lynam, known to all as the ‘Skipper’. Not noted for his sartorial elegance, he had clearly made an effort; he looked almost smart in his dark suit when he stood up to address his audience.

Among them were the ten-year-old John Betjeman and his parents.This was the end of John’s first term at the school. It had been a term in which war shortages were biting.The effects of the German decision to undertake unrestricted submarine warfare, sinking any shipping approaching the British coastline, were becoming serious. The country relied on imported food; at one point it was estimated that there was only six weeks’ supply of corn in the country. Feeding nearly 80 hungry boarders was a major concern for the school. Mindful of this, Skipper reassured attentive parents that their children were being well fed:

We have had potatoes regularly, no meatless days and plenty of bread – the only rationing has been in sugar and each boy has had first his eight and latterly his six ounces per week besides cooking sugar, also golden syrup and always jam.

Despite the exigencies of war, John Betjeman’s first term had not been one of dull routine but stimulating variety: picnics, bike expeditions, collecting eggs and

Left: The Oxford Preparatory School Hall (built 1895)