Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead

Evelyn was alert to the fallacy of sexual stereotyping: ‘Mr Crease … was effeminate in appearance and manner; J. F. was markedly virile, but it was he who was the homosexual.’ Waugh and his contemporaries believed that J. F. fell in love with individual boys, though without ‘physical release with any of his pupils’. One of those he loved was a ‘golden-haired Hyacinthus’. J. F. gave the boy a motorcycle. In no time the lad was thrown from it and facially disfigured. J. F. remained close to him until the boy’s premature death.

Evelyn was not a particular favourite, although J. F. invited him to tea before he ‘had any official position in the school’. In Charles Ryder’s Schooldays, A. A. Carmichael, the model for J. F., is ‘the splendid dandy, and wit … whom Charles worshipped from afar’. Evelyn got a bit closer than this: ‘I was always in awe of him, so that he was, in a sense, the courtier and I the courted as he sought to draw me into his confidence.’ The tea was a great honour: ‘I remember as the clock struck five he said ‘‘How delightful. We have nothing to do until chapel but eat éclairs and talk about poetry.’’’ Evelyn felt that he had not impressed, but as he went into chapel he was ‘giddy with the sense of having been in communion with the Most High’.

The tea with J. F. was another defining moment, a revelation as profound as that when Crease had opened Evelyn’s eyes to his father. On this very day, Crease happened to be at chapel in his ‘cape and soft cravat’. By comparison with J. F., Crease ‘seemed diminished. I did not exactly turn coat, but I knew that Mr Crease and J. F. were opposites and at about that time I transferred my allegiance to the more forceful and flamboyant person.’ Following a later afternoon tête-à-tête in which J. F. visited Evelyn and a friend, the friend expressed disappointment that the great man had failed to comment on the specially ordered tea. Evelyn had a more sophisticated reading of the lacuna: ‘You see how considerate he is. He never commented because he wanted us to believe that he knew perfectly well that we always drank it.’ That, to him, was style.

In later years, the now famous writer heard that J. F. ‘deplored my writing and what he heard of my conduct’. Yet he wrote Evelyn a letter, which was kept and treasured, in which he said that ‘if you use what the gods have given you, you will do as much as any single person I can think of to shape the course of your own generation’.

At Lancing Evelyn did not find the special friend he had longed for. Like many of his contemporaries, he was drawn to the memory of Rupert Brooke and the ideal of romantic friendship that he represented. Looking through a memoir of Brooke, he noted in his diary: ‘I felt very envious reading, particularly the parts about Rugby and friendship. I do honestly think that that is something that went out of the world in 1914, at least for one generation.’

This was a person for whom friendship would become an art, despite a lifelong tendency to infuriate and even to ostracise those who were closest to him. Yet, unlike most of his contemporaries, he made no really intimate friends at school. His intense and enduring friendships were formed at Oxford. Nor, as a schoolboy, was he prone to love affairs with pretty younger boys of the kind known at Lancing as ‘tweatles’ and at Eton as ‘bitches’. He granted that he ‘was susceptible to the prettiness of some fifteen-year-olds, but never fell victim to the grand passions which inflamed and tortured most of my friends (to whom I acted as astringent confidant)’.

On the whole, ‘indulgences were kept private’. Sexual activity was known as ‘filth’ and ‘was the subject of endless, tedious jokes, but not of boasting’. Evelyn assumed a rather aloof, amused stance to the agonies of his friends who ‘played a Restoration comedy of assignations, secret correspondence and complacent chaperones’. In his diary he confided: ‘I lead as pure a life as any Christian in the place, always excepting conversation of course.’ He advised his friends to show restraint, talking a close friend out of a night’s ‘whoring’ in the holidays.

He was drawn to charming, charismatic boys and was prone to hero-worship. But he despised boys who hero-worshipped him, such as a certain Dudley Carew, who appeared to have an insatiable taste for vulgarity, saying things like ‘there’s a delightful squalor about Shoreham’. Crease said of Evelyn: ‘You want a friend who is a thorn in the flesh, not an echo.’ Evelyn recognised the wisdom of the observation.

The closest he came to real friendship at Lancing was with Tom Driberg – later chairman of the Labour Party, and Hugh Molson – later talked about as a possible leader of the Conservative Party. Molson was nicknamed ‘Preters’ on account of the fact that when asked if he was interested in politics, he would reply ‘preternaturally so’. Flamboyant, highly intelligent and sophisticated, he dazzled with his ‘superb pomposity of manner and vocabulary’. Molson had, Evelyn noted in his diary, ‘the true aristocrat’s capacity of being perfectly at home in anyone’s company’. He was perhaps the first of the Sebastian type.

In the upper fifth, Evelyn and his friends formed a debating society called the Dilettanti, divided into three streams. Molson ran the Politics, a boy called Roger Fulford the Literary and Waugh the Arts. The society lasted a year, ‘during which time almost every leisure hour was spent in lecturing and heckling one another, in debates, in committee-meetings and in elections’.

As Evelyn’s confidence increased, he showed his sadistic side. One boy’s life was rendered particularly miserable by his cruel tauntings. Appeals for temperance were met with stony refusal. Evelyn noted in his journal that ‘in all these nasty manoeuvres there lay hidden the fear that I myself might at any moment fall from favour and become, as I had been in my first year, the object of contempt’.

Looking back, the mature Evelyn Waugh was appalled by what he read in his own early journals. In a moving letter to his son Auberon, who was unhappy at boarding school, Evelyn wrote that he had read through his own Lancing diaries in order to try to understand his son better. Instead, Evelyn was horrified by the priggish, selfish boy that he encountered amongst the journal’s pages. ‘Most adolescent diaries are naïve, trite and pretentious: mine lamentably so.’ But it was more than this. With his characteristic honesty and self-deprecation, he saw that he ‘was conceited, heartless and cautiously malevolent’:

The damning evidence is there, in sentence after sentence on page after page, of consistent caddishness. I feel no identity with the boy who wrote it. I believe I was a warm-hearted child. I know that as a man my affections, though narrow, are strong and constant. The adolescent who reveals himself in these pages seems not cold but quite lacking in sincerity.

The war had left its mark on Evelyn’s generation. Cynical and clever, he was determined to oppose the ‘imperialist trash about discipline and the capacity for leading’ that was the public school ethos. He was a rebellious boy, though his transgressions seem light by today’s standards (giving in homework written in blank verse to catch out his master, for example). Evelyn and his cronies were barred from senior school positions of authority. He gained a reputation as a subversive and was the leader of a group known as the ‘Bolshies’. They vented their spleen on those they felt were absurd or inferior. Science masters were treated with contempt and their laboratories were sabotaged by means of minor explosions generated by Bunsen burners.

The Bolshies’ contempt was greatest for the school’s Officer Training Corps (OTC), to which, like all the boys, they had to belong. Scornful of the school’s military ethos, they devised ‘rags’ – practical jokes – to make the OTC appear absurd. They would march in the platoon with one boot polished and the other muddy, or deliberately drop rifles or turn right instead of left. They were merely expressing what countless other schoolboys around the country felt: a strong reaction against militarism and what they considered to be the huge waste of the casualties of the war.

It was becoming fashionable not to be patriotic. Evelyn noted in his memoir that while the Bolshies made their protests felt through minor delinquencies, other schools expressed their objections to militarism differently: ‘At Eton there was a platoon which paraded in horn-rimmed spectacles and numbered off: ‘‘ten, Knave, Queen, King.’’ We did nothing as stylish as this, but we outraged local tradition.’ The Bolshies’ final act of defiance against the OTC was designed to show utter contempt for all that the corps held dear. Evelyn’s House (Heads) was well known for its incompetence in drill. His plan was to surprise the school by winning the Platoon Shield but then to have no part in the all-important ceremonial passing over of the shield. The scheme, however, failed as Heads was placed third.

Secretly, he longed for recognition. In Charles Ryder’s Schooldays, Charles is furious at being passed over for a position of authority in the Settle, just as Evelyn was at Lancing. His House tutor, Mr Woodard, cleverly brought him into conformity. He gave a choice: Evelyn could accept the House captaincy or he could leave. ‘I know that you often say and write a lot which you don’t really believe,’ said Woodard shrewdly. ‘Now what do you really think about it?’ Needless to say, Waugh chose the captaincy ‘and for the next two terms was segregated from my former cronies’. In looking back and assessing his motives, Evelyn concluded that it was not authority that he craved but ‘school offices I coveted, such as the editorship of the magazine and presidency of the debating society, which were held by House captains only’.

He knew that he was too much the individualist. But in his diary he showed self-disgust with the way that he had capitulated to authority: ‘My position is really impossible – a House-captain as a bribe to make me sober.’ It was ‘limited Bolshevism’ for him from now on. In reality, he felt lonely and dispirited. He was neither an insider nor outsider. Above all, he had not found the golden circle of friends that he craved.

Perhaps his diminutive height and his lack of conventional beauty contributed to his sexual insecurity. His brother Alec had had at least two passionate affairs at Sherborne, and had made his name through his illicit romances, but the most romantic of Evelyn’s encounters were late night solitary walks down to the sea with another prefect. The relationship was entirely innocent, but Arthur Waugh found out about it. Fearing a repetition of Alec’s disgrace, he wrote a furious letter, which Evelyn found rather bewildering, since he wasn’t in full possession of the facts about his brother. Still, at least there was uncharacteristic strength in his father’s outburst, with Evelyn commenting: ‘I am rather glad that he has taken a strong line against something at last.’

Evelyn’s final year at Lancing was more productive than those that had gone before, though not necessarily happier. He enjoyed the privileges of his seniority. He had his own ‘pitt’ or study, which he decorated in a tasteful blue – blue curtains, blue cushions on the window seat, blue upholstery for his desk. Arthur Waugh’s brass candlesticks stood on the desk and Medici prints hung on the walls. Evelyn worked hard for his scholarship to Oxford. ‘I must write prose or burst,’ he told his diary. He also started writing a novel: ‘the study of a man with two characters, by his brother’. He was becoming aware of ‘a detached, critical Hyde, who intruded his presence more and more often on the conventional, intolerant, subhuman, wholly respectable Dr Jekyll’. During his final months he edited and contributed to The Lancing Magazine, won the poetry prize and the Scarlyn Literature Prize, composed poetry and wrote a very successful three-act play, which was performed to the whole school. He was made president of the debating society, not to mention junior sacristan in chapel.

Outwardly he may have appeared to conform, but his play Conversion was aimed to show that he was still a ‘Bolshie’ at heart. It was a satire on public school values. Its hero, Townsend, clearly a self-portrait, is a rebel blackmailed into conformity. At this time Evelyn wrote in his diary with his usual perceptive candour: ‘I am beginning to think that there must be some malignant fate that makes me foul. I never think of the man behind at all. I spend all my attention on trying to get in front of the man in front.’

He half-jokingly toyed with the idea of suicide, drafting farewell notes to friends. Though he admired the beauty of Lancing’s enormous chapel (best appreciated, he decided, by lying outside on the grass staring up at the imposing stone and the sky), he felt a loss of faith, sparked by a dynamic divinity teacher called Mr Dawlinson: ‘This learned and devout man inadvertently made me an atheist. He explained to his divinity class that none of the books of the Bible were by their supposed authors; he invited us to speculate, in the manner of the fourth century, upon belief in God.’

Evelyn’s last term at school, a golden age for most of his friends, was a time of boredom and depression. Or so he remembered them. But there were happy moments. His last Ascension Day, so different from that first terrible day, was spent with Preters, who had borrowed a motor car. The boys drove to Chichester, got very drunk at luncheon and drove round and round the Market Cross shouting out to passers-by that they were looking for the nearest pub. He also enjoyed pleasant late afternoon sessions behind the chapel, smoking ‘sweet-smelling gold and silk-tipped Levantine cigarettes’.

The last term meant that he was exempt from all the rules. He was now free to walk on the lawns and wear a bow tie. But instead of revelling in his freedom, he founded the Corpse Club ‘for people who are bored stiff’. They wore black ties and black tassels in their buttonholes and wrote on mourning paper. Evelyn was the leader, or ‘Chief Undertaker’.

Evelyn’s anarchic sense of humour always sustained him, no matter how miserable he felt. His school friend Roger Fulford said that ‘without Evelyn’s forceful sense of the ridiculous, the spirit of our House would have been unworthy of recall’. Fulford remembers how they stole into a housemaster’s room to read his correspondence, only to find a hilarious letter concerning an impudent boy who had the temerity to eat pineapple chunks in class. This incident found its way into Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall. What Evelyn took particular delight in was the phrasing ‘he was pleased to belch rudely in my face’. He relished the choice of the words ‘pleased’ and ‘rudely’. This was the same delight as that he took in Roxburgh’s felicitous phrases and put-downs – and indeed in the language of the egregious Dudley Carew. He was honing the ear for dialogue that became so acute in his novels, where pompous people are forever saying serious things that are unintentionally wildly funny.

Even in his final months at Lancing he continued to be plagued by feelings of inadequacy, sensing that he was never first choice in anything, always a sloppy second. Alienated and depressed, generally unpopular, he considered running away: ‘I am burdened with failure this term, when I have been most successful really … Everything I have had has come to me shop-soiled and second hand.’

Evelyn had an almost pathological fear and loathing of the second-hand and the second-rate. For him, Lancing came into both categories. Even whilst writing about his sabotaging of the OTC, he was thinking wistfully of the stylishness of the Eton rebellion. In a sense, this was not Evelyn’s fault. He had already been indoctrinated at home into the view that Sherborne was a much better school than Lancing, and at school, the headmaster, Henry Bowlby, himself a former master at Eton, also impressed upon the boys the superiority of the place where he no longer taught: ‘We held him in some awe and he remained aloof from us, never dissembling the opinion, to which we all assented, that Lancing was a less important place than Eton.’

In his biography of Old Etonian theologian Ronald Knox, the adult Evelyn let slip the awe he felt for Eton. He describes Knox’s relationship with his school as ‘a life-long love’. Like many Old Etonians, Knox found Oxford a very poor second best. Eton, wrote Waugh, ‘was the scene of Ronald’s brilliant intellectual development and of his ardent and undying friendships’. Waugh went on to write that:

Most candid Englishmen recognise it as a school sui generis which marks the majority of its sons with a peculiar Englishry, genial, confident, humorous, and reticent; which gives to each as little or as much learning as his abilities and tastes demand; which, while correcting affectation, allows the genuine eccentric to go his own way unmolested; which nourishes its rare favourites … in a rich and humane traditional culture which admits no rival.

Lancing had not been like that. John Betjeman in his verse autobiography Summoned by Bells has one young man at Oxford saying to him ‘Spiritually, John, I was at Eton.’ The same might perhaps have been said of Evelyn Waugh. When Fulford came up to Oxford, Waugh recommended him not to talk so much about Lancing: ‘If you weren’t at Eton or Harrow or Winchester or Rugby, no-one minds much where you were.’

What Lancing schoolboys did have in common with their peers at major public schools such as Eton was the cynicism they felt with regard to the disasters of the Great War. They firmly blamed the ‘old men’, Arthur Waugh’s generation, who had betrayed the golden boys of Rupert Brooke’s generation. Evelyn used the phrase ‘old men’ for the first time in a speech he gave in his final year at Lancing. He would advert to it repeatedly throughout the next decade in his advocacy of the younger generation at odds with the old. This was his manifesto: ‘No generation has ever wreaked such disasters as the last. After numerous small indiscretions it had its fling of a war which has left the civilised world pauperised, ravaged, shaken to its foundations.’ Evelyn later described his last editorial for The Magazine, entitled ‘The Youngest Generation’, as ‘a preposterous manifesto of disillusionment’:

The men of Rupert Brooke’s generation are broken. Narcissus-like, they stood for an instant, amazedly aware of their own beauty; the war, which the old men made, has left them tired and embittered. What will the young men of 1922 be? … They will be, above all things, clear-sighted … very hard and analytical and unsympathetic … They will not be revolutionaries and they will not be poets and they will not be mystics … they will have … a very full sense of humour … They will watch themselves with … a cynical smile and often with a laugh … They will not be a happy generation.

He would become the voice of that unhappy generation.

Evelyn’s panegyric to Eton as a school sui generis was written at a time when his male friends were almost exclusively Old Etonians. Eton was then, and perhaps is still, considered to be the best public school in England. It had, and continues to have, an unsurpassed record of future prime ministers. Its aura of elegance and tradition was, and remains, the stuff of legend. Even George Orwell wrote of his old school that it had ‘one great virtue … a tolerant and civilised atmosphere which gives each boy a fair chance of developing his own individuality’.

When one of Evelyn’s friends, the writer Cyril Connolly (whom he nicknamed ‘Smarty Boots’), sat his entrance exam at the school, he was utterly entranced. Eton was ‘splendid and decadent … the huge stately elms, the boys in their many-coloured caps and blazers, the top hats, the strawberries and cream, the smell of wisteria’. When he overheard a boy with a top hat call out in a foppish drawl a remark to a passing sculler, it all seemed ‘the incarnation of elegance and maturity’. For Connolly it was a paradise built of ‘wine-dark brick’. He was mesmerised by a huge chestnut tree in Weston’s Yard. ‘I was long dominated by impressions of school,’ he wrote in his memoir Enemies of Promise; ‘The plopping of gas mantles in the classrooms, the refrain of psalm tunes, the smell of plaster on the stairs, the walk through the fields to the bathing places or to chapel across the cobbles of School Yard, evoked a vanished Eden of grace and security.’

Eton College was at the pinnacle of the English social system. It had received its royal charter in 1444. For many it embodied quintessential Englishness. ‘The Headmaster of Eton has more to do with the soul of England than the primate of Canterbury,’ quipped Winston Churchill’s Irish cousin, Shane Leslie. Running in and out of School Yard, dominated by Lupton’s Tower and the crumbling cloisters, the boys hurried past the statue of the school’s founder, Henry VI: ‘the past history was there … all this mellowness was continuously sinking into them, a beneficent influence’, recalled another old boy, Harold Acton. It was the school where the English aristocracy sent their boys. No school had a higher proportion of titled young men on the roll. It had close links with the royal family. Windsor Castle lies at the far end of the street.

The masters or ‘beaks’ were in many respects lesser beings than some of the boys. The more servile of them would long to be asked to the boys’ great homes, sometimes long even for the mere opportunity to talk to the most important boys.

Yet Cyril Connolly and Anthony Powell (another Old Etonian who would become a novelist and a friend of Waugh’s) both stressed that a boy’s status depended not on family money or rank, but rather ‘on a curious blend of elegance and vitality … and the gift of being amusing’. Powell thought that this made Eton different from Oxford, where he too went on to become an undergraduate: ‘I recall no sense of inferiority on account of many boys’ parents being richer and grander than my own, though of course many were. Indeed the first powerful impact of snobbery and money was brought home to me, not at Eton, but at Oxford.’

Nevertheless, this small and exclusive world existed on a finely graduated but keenly felt code of manners. Editorials appeared in the school magazine on such subjects as ‘The Top Hat’. Rules were strict. Boys were prohibited from driving in motor cars on Sundays, for example. One wonders at how many other schools a sufficient number of boys would have had motor cars to make such a rule worth writing.

The education of the Honourable Hugh Lygon and his older brother Lord Elmley at Eton and then Oxford followed a pattern that had endured in the family since the early nineteenth century. They were considered ‘important boys’ by the masters, since their father, Lord Beauchamp, was a prominent establishment figure. Despite the great wealth and social standing of their father, the boys were lacking in pretension and snobbishness. Anthony Powell thought that it was impossible to conceive a lord less snobbish than young Elmley.

Hugh Lygon went to Eton in 1918. Then as now, there were seventy scholars or ‘Collegers’, known as ‘tugs’. The fee-paying boys were ‘Oppidans’. Housemasters were called ‘m’tutor’. A ‘new-tit’ was a new boy. A ‘Scug’ was a boy who didn’t have his colours. A ‘dry bob’ played cricket, a ‘wet bob’ chose rowing, a ‘slack bob’ did neither. Each school term was known as a ‘half’. ‘Tuck’ was known as ‘sock’, ‘messing’ was cooking tea together in groups of three (who took turns to eat in each other’s rooms). There were no dormitories: each boy was given his own room simply furnished with a ‘bury’ – a chest of drawers with a desk on top, supporting a small bookcase. A fold-up bed was stowed behind a curtain. Boys were permitted to furnish their rooms to their own taste, typically with ottoman, armchair, boot box, brush box and pictures from Blundell’s.

The boys wore tailcoats and top hats, but if a boy was elected to ‘Pop’ he could wear flamboyant waistcoats, black and white check trousers, and white stick-up collars. Boys in the self-elected and elite group ‘Pop’ were permitted to beat younger boys. This ‘privilege’ did not extend to the schoolmasters. Pop was a body of twenty-eight boys, who exercised overall authority as prefects and were generally worshipped by the other boys. The group was based overwhelmingly on athletic prowess but members were sometimes admitted for their good looks, charm and wit. It was regarded as the summit of school distinction. Some boys never got over having been passed over for Pop. Julian Mitchell’s play Another Country is based on the not outrageous premise that Guy Burgess was so scarred by the experience of not getting into Pop that he turned against his country and became a Russian spy. One desperate boy offered his sister for sex if he were elected. Connolly observed that ‘Pop were the rulers of Eton, fawned on by masters and the helpless Sixth Form’. The Sixth Form Select, consisting of twenty or so academically gifted boys, followed Pop in status. The double-file procession of seniors – largely Pop and the Select – into chapel after everyone else was seated was known as the ‘Ram’.

Good looks, charm and wit may have been as important as social status, but it was best of all if the whole package came together. When it came to Pop, brains did not count for much. Hugh Lygon was typical of Pop in being admired for his floppy blond hair, his handsome face and his charming demeanour rather than his intellectual capacities, which were distinctly limited.

The dress code and the quasi-feudal system of ‘fags’ and ‘fagmasters’ – junior boys performing menial tasks for senior ones – conjure up images of Flashman in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, but many of the boys of Hugh Lygon’s generation had memories of kindly fagmasters. A fag’s duties included making boiled eggs and toast and running errands to the shops on Eton High Street. Some fagmasters of course abused their positions and, as Cyril Connolly put it, ‘developed into lifelong flagellants’. Connolly claimed that he was damaged for life by his beatings from older boys, often administered for being ‘generally uppish’. The small boys would be in their tin baths as they waited in fear for the summons of a ‘wanted’ man. When his name was called, the victim would be summoned to ‘the chair’, which would be placed in the middle of the room. The waiting was the worst part. Once the chair was in place, a storm of accusation broke out. It was advisable not to answer back. Then the boy would kneel on the chair, bottom outward and hands stretched over the back. The beating would begin: ‘Looking round we could see a monster rushing towards us with a cane in his hand, his face upside down and contorted.’ When it was over, one of the older boys would say ‘Goodnight’. ‘It was wise,’ Connolly reported, ‘to answer politely.’

A boy’s house was very important because Eton was so large, and the housemasters were both autocratic and independent. Each ran his house as he wished. Hugh Lygon boarded at Walpole House, a building of red brick that looked rather like a clinic. Run by Arthur Goodhart, its reputation was as the worst house in the school, with a low sporting record, its only silver trophy being the Lower Boys’ Singing Cup. Tolerant scepticism was the keynote. Goodhart was an eccentric, a repressed bisexual who had a fetish for ladies’ shoes. This he made no effort to disguise: he would encourage the boys to admire his latest volume of Feminine Footwear Through the Ages. In his fifties, with high forehead and walrus moustache, he had a ‘look of unreliable benevolence, an awareness of being always prepared for the worst, and usually experiencing it’. Anthony Powell described him as: ‘In certain respects a typical schoolmaster; in others, an exceptional example of his profession.’ He wore the Eton master’s uniform of black suit and white bow tie, and was old-fashioned enough to retain the starched shirt and cuffs of an earlier generation, often remarking that in his own time at Eton a boy who did not put on a clean stiff shirt every day was ‘an absolute scug’. Goodhart deplored special sports clothes and considered an ‘old tailcoat’ to be entirely suitable for the Wall Game (of which he was a star).

Goodhart was a classics teacher whose real love was music. The boys in his house were encouraged to sing a hymn at house prayers every night. Goodhart accompanied them on the harmonium. One night he chose ‘Good King Wenceslas’. They reached the verse: ‘Heat was in the very sod/ Which the saint had printed’. Goodhart observed a boy laughing. It was Lord Elmley. He kept him behind and gave him a dressing down. Powell takes up the story: ‘‘‘You were laughing at the word sod. Do you know what it means?’’ He was foaming by now. ‘‘It is in vulgar use as short for sodomism – the most loathsome form of dual vice’’.’ There was a certain amount of discussion amongst the boys afterwards as to what he regarded as the less loathsome forms of ‘dual vice’.

Powell says that ‘romantic passions’ were much discussed, though ‘physical contacts were rare’. He does nevertheless mention ‘brutal intimacies’ taking place. ‘The masters might look on the subject as one of unspeakable horror; the boys behaved much in the manner of public opinion as to homosexuality today; ranging from strong disapproval to unconcealed involvement.’

Goodhart was also responsible for bringing back theatrical performances by the boys, following a ban that had been in place for fifty years. There was no Eton Drama Society, but individual housemasters began to put on plays. In July 1919, Goodhart’s House Dramatic Society produced Doctor Faustus. Harold Acton remembered it as a ‘superlative performance’ of Christopher Marlowe’s play, with Lord David Cecil playing ‘a nervously saturnine Mephistopheles’ and Hugh Lygon as a ‘cherubic Helen of Troy’. The Eton College Chronicle singled out Hugh’s performance for praise and the success of this production gave Goodhart the courage to try The Importance of Being Earnest. Once again, Hugh played a female role, this time Cecily Cardew. Again, he was singled out for his abilities: ‘he proved an excellent ingénue and made more of the part than is usually possible in the circumstances’. The best moment of the play, said the Chronicle, was when Cecily filled Gwendolyn’s tea with sugar. Hugh may not have been a sporting boy, or a clever boy, but he was clearly gifted dramatically. His beauty made him a convincing female. A photograph of him cross-dressed as Cecily shows his delicate features.