candidates – whose career ambitions can be manipulated by the whips to ensure that they toe a party line designed not to offend swing voters in marginal seats – has all but eliminated from parliament the more maverick members who could enliven debate and keep the parties in touch with the country. Very few of the MPs put up for ‘Question Time’ or ‘Any Questions’ seem able to articulate any ideas of their own – often they simply parrot the latest line from the spin doctors. The current Labour leadership election – brilliantly encapsulated in Steve Bell’s Guardian cartoon picturing the candidates as the members of ‘Diane and the Tokens’ – looks likely to leave us with three party leaders almost indistinguishable by age, race, background, education or even politics. At the same time a more sinister development has been the disappearance from debate of any real alternatives. Argument is largely conducted by assertion and ridicule because any idea which cannot be expressed in a single sentence is considered too difficult for public consumption, and too long for a sound-bite. Documentaries which might enlighten are squeezed into niche slots in the schedule on specialist channels. Information released by government is massaged and sexed up for media consumption – and the continuous need for new twists to a story mean that politicians are pressed for decisions before they have had time to find out the facts, let alone analyse and debate possible plans of action. The unseemly haste with which the new coalition was formed under intense media pressure was in marked contrast to the more measured approach in other countries whose proportional systems make coalition a commonplace. Politicians have grown so wary of the media that real debate and argument have become completely stifled. The recent election and its aftermath demonstrated just how impoverished our politics now is, and underlined again how unhelpful our media can be. We can only hope that electoral reform will enable more points of view to be credibly presented to the electorate next time – but it would be inadvisable (as they say) to hold our breath meanwhile.
standard by replacing it in some subjects with the new progressive Cambridge Pre-U – and soon the International Baccalaureate will be introduced. Consider also our uniform: had it not been altered from time to time, scholars would still be wearing gowns – and we would have to wear our school clothes for the whole day. Some changes have been a matter of deliberate policy; others have come about through natural wastage: the wearing of cravats and boaters in CQ, while still just about alive, is a rare thing today; when a Carthusian does happen to drink a little too much coffee and don this alternative uniform, he goes about for the rest of the day attracting more glances than the Headmaster. In 1874 it was decided that scholars would be selected on intellectual grounds rather than social status, and no longer isolated in Gownboys: an important reform. The late 19th century saw an increase in sport (football particularly) and other extra-curricular activities, such as drama and music. All this followed the move to Godalming and the rapid expansion of the school, with the addition of new boarding-houses; Charterhouse left London because the school needed more space, and a healthier environment; yet, ironically, the new houses were not especially spacious or sanitary – and when they were replaced in the 1970s by buildings in the old copse between Wildernesse and Northbrook the improvement in accommodation was felt to be remarkable. It is interesting to note that the school solved the problem of over-crowding in chapel almost fifty years earlier in 1927 with the opening of Frank Fletcher’s Memorial Chapel, which provided plenty of space for the now much larger school. The 1970s also saw the very important introduction of girls. Since then, we’ve seen fresh facilities rise up at an unprecedented rate: BTT, RVW & JDTC (1980s), QSC & Chetwynd (1990s), Beveridge Centre (2006), Modern Languages Building (2007), and Hunt Health Centre (2009); whilst Library was renovated in 2003. So the school evidently has not been afraid of changing and improving its rules, policies and surroundings; however,
Tomorrow was New Yesterday Continuity & Change British public schools have long been thought of as old-fashioned, rooted in the traditional, generally trapped in the past – and Charterhouse has not escaped this condemnation. When visitors to Charterhouse first see the old houses, they might think the school’s ways haven’t changed much, and are just as strange as they were in the 19th century; but, just as the interiors of those neo-gothic buildings have been renovated, so Charterhouse (while maintaining those fundamental traditions that are not inimical to modern educational philosophy) has evolved through numerous reforms – some more obvious than others. Recently the school reacted to the decline in the A level
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