Free Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges Page A

or anything. … It’s rather hard getting settled down. Do write soon. There was no work on Wednesday except for ‘Hall’ or prep. And then its a business finding my classrooms what books to get but I will be more or less settled after a week or so …
    But a week later Alan was not much better off:
     
I am getting more and more settled down. But I won’t be quite right until my things come. Fagging starts for us next Teusday. It is run on the same principle as the Gallic councils that tortured and killed the last man to arrive; here one fagmaster calls and all his fags run the last to arrive getting the job. You have to have cold showers in the morning here like cold baths at Marlborough. We have tea at 6.30 here on Mon., Wed., Frid. I manage to go without food from lunch to then. … The general strike had a part of it as a printer’s strike the result of that is that ‘Bennetts’ booksellers had none of the books ordered and I am without a lot of them. As in most public schools new boys have to sing some song. The time has not yet come. I am not sure what to sing anyhow it won’t be ‘buttercup’. … The amount of work we are given for Hall here is sometimes absurdly small e.g. Read Acts chapters 3 and 4 and that is for 3 /4hr.
    Yr loving son Alan
    There was indeed a song-singing and another ceremony in which he was kicked up and down the day room in a waste paper basket. However, if his mother read between the lines, she subordinated sympathy to her sense of duty. Her comment on this letter was that it displayed Alan’s ‘whimsical sense of humour’.
    He was now at last being taught science, and reported:
     
We do do Chemistry 2 hrs. a week. We have only got to about the stages of ‘Properties of Matter’, ‘Physical and chemical change’ etc. The master was quite amused by my Iodine making and I shewed him some samples. The headmaster is called ‘Chief’. I seem to be doing Greek and not Hellenics. …
    The master, Andrews, was no doubt ‘amused’ that Alan already knew so much. He had arrived ‘delightfully ingenuous and unspoilt’. And the head boy of Westcott House, Arthur Harris, had rewarded Alan’s cycling initiative by appointing him his ‘fag’, or servant. But neither scientific education nor initiative were exactly Sherborne priorities.
    The headmaster used to expound the meaning of school life in his sermons. 15 Sherborne was not, he explained, entirely devoted to ‘opening the mind’, although ‘historically … this was the primary meaning of school.’ Indeed, said the headmaster, there was ‘constantly a danger of forgetting the original object of school.’ For the English public school had been consciously developed into what he called ‘a nation in miniature’. With a savage realism, it dispensed with the lip service paid to such ideas as free speech, equal justice, and parliamentary democracy, and concentrated upon the fact of precedence and power. As the headmaster put it:
     
In form-room and hall and dormitory, on the field and on parade, in your relations with us masters and in the scale of seniority among yourselves, you have become familiar with the ideas of authority and obedience, of cooperation and loyalty, of putting the house and the school above your personal desires …
    The great theme of the ‘scale of seniority’ was the balance of privilege and duty, itself reflecting the more worthy sideof the British Empire. But this was a theme to which ‘opening the mind’ came as at best an irrelevance.
    The Victorian reforms had made their mark, and competitive examinations played a part in public school life. Those who came as scholars had an opportunity to take on the role of an intelligentsia in the ‘nation in miniature’, tolerated provided they interfered with nothing that mattered. But Alan, who did not belong to this group, was quick to note the ‘absurdly small’ amount expected of him. And in fact it was the organised team games of rugby