Big Brother, Fat Owls, and tennis for languid young ladies

Everyone's heard of George Orwell, author of the grim Animal Farm, and the even grimmer 1984. In fact the book 1984 was so awful and unbearable that I've only read it once, in my teens. I found it awful and unbearable because it seemed so plausible - the grey, repressive, hyper-controlled Britain that Orwell described had many echoes in actual regimes around the word during the 1960s and 1970s. It could so easily be imagined that, given a particular destabilising set of circumstances, this country could fall into the hands of whatever ruthless cadre pulled the strings in that future dystopia. (It was never made quite clear whether 'Big Brother' really existed as a person - a kind of all-knowing, all-powerful dictator - or was just a fake front for an anonymous ruling elite)

I was so relieved when the real year 1984 came and went, and Orwell's baleful story did not come to life. But I remain to this day wary of any tendency by any political party - whether left wing or right wing - to adopt extreme and absolutist policies.

'The Party' in 1984 was apparently a paranoid but ruthless Communist Party. Its surveillance of the country's citizens was minute and detailed. Arrest, squalid detention and horrifying torture were its tools. Essentially it was attempting a complete brainwash of the population by breaking all connections with how things used to be, renaming the country, altering the language, and using dehumanising brutality to enforce compliance with its political requirements. The subversion of children by turning them into informers on their parents and teachers, two-way TV screens in every home, compulsory indoctrinations and sessions to vent ritual hatred against the state's 'enemies', the strict rationing of food and education, and nothing but fake news - all these things were intended to wear down every individual, and turn him or her into an obedient, sexless, right-thinking robot.

As I grew older, I saw the fatal flaw in Orwell's dystopia: he had underestimated the stubborn contrariness of human nature, and the role that martyrs with a cause can play in defeating any oppressor. But even if long resilient, the world of 1984 would have eventually fallen apart from the centre. And even if all former things had by then been destroyed - the old language included - new things, and new ways of expression, would have been devised.

I dipped into some other books of his. For instance, one about the Spanish Civil War that was so crawling with body-lice and other discomforts that I was rather glad to leave it accidentally on a train. Another was about a Paris hospital ward for consumptives, so graphic that you could smell the sputum.

I wondered whether all of Orwell's writings were so depressing. So I was intrigued to discover, many years ago now, that he had written some essays. I bought a book containing a collection of them. These dealt with a variety of subjects, from watching a man hang, to the best way to write good prose. One essay stayed in my memory especially, although it was most definitely a political essay: Boys' Weeklies.

Orwell was in this essay reviewing the content of all the best-known boys' comics, published weekly since 1900. Even in 1940, when Orwell was writing, the Billy Bunter type of 'public school story' was still being featured in current comics of the traditional sort. His point was that the mental atmosphere, easy assumptions, snobbery, and delusions of Empire in these stories hadn't altered since 1910; and that the social developments and realities of actual British life since that year were ignored completely. He also looked at more modern publications that boys might read, largely based on American models: full of blood-and-guts adventure and muscular heroes, but nevertheless also divorced from real life. He sensed a cynical political purpose in filling boys' minds up with gung-ho trash. I dare say he was right.

I'm afraid girls' weeklies were dismissed in a footnote. This no doubt reflected the common male view of the time, that women had to play second fiddle in all things except motherhood and home management. So an analysis of their comics, for a male readership, would be of no great interest. Huh.

If  you want to read Boys' Weeklies - and it is very readable - then Wikipedia has this link: https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/boys/english/e_boys.

I think I have introduced the topic of this post well enough. Returning again to the advertisements in my 1917 Ward Lock Red Guide for holidaymakers, I am going to look at the schools. Schools in a holiday guide? Well, this was all well before the 1944 Education Act, and in 1917 decent secondary education was mostly for the better-off. So schools - mostly seaside boarding schools in this case - wanted to entice parents with the means to go on holidays into placing their children in their care.

Let's see what their ads were like. Three girls' schools; one for boys.

All three girls' schools place great emphasis on the comforts provided, and the leisure amenities. They sound like places where a girl, if ungifted or unambitious, could live a languid life, playing a lot of tennis. Preparation for exams was possible, but only with parental approval. Meaning, I suppose, that some of the duller or lazier girls could opt out altogether. 

The ad for the boys' grammar school, however, says little about the school itself, beyond the sports available, placing the stress on exam work for 'commercial and professional life'. Clearly a place for serious study; and no tennis. 

Two of them stress that full care is given to girls whose fathers and mothers are abroad, mentioning the Colonial Service in one of the ads. A period of service abroad was not uncommon for Civil Servants. Even in the 1960s, men in the Inland Revenue (now HMRC) could apply to go out to places like Uganda, Ghana, Kenya and other newly-independent nations that had formerly been colonies, to help set up, expand or improve their income tax systems. Dad nearly went to Kenya, I believe (or was it Rhodesia?), but Mum didn't want to go. Therefore I never learned my letters at Nairobi High (or perhaps Salisbury High). But I often came across colleagues during the 1980s and later, who had, when young, gone out to Africa with their parents, and therefore had a different, broader outlook than others who knew only England. 

One thing that clearly comes across from these 1917 ads is that they are for the middles classes, not for the nobility, nor the rich. They are not old and fashionable establishments like the fictional Greyfriars, which was Billy Bunter's school. 

Nor, come to that, anything like Harry Potter's school, Hogwarts.