07-15-2025, 08:37 PM
Preface
My three-part Scholar’s Tale and A Time were set at Yarborough School in my own day, which was long enough ago. This is another story about Yarborough, but set in the even more distant past, far beyond living memory. It is not really my own work, and what lies behind it demands a deplorably but necessarily long explanation.
Ernest William Hornung (1866-1921), the son of an émigré from Transylvania, was a prolific British novelist, befriended by Rudyard Kipling and H. G. Wells and married to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s sister. While he never quite matched his brother-in-law’s success with Sherlock Holmes, he did create the equally memorable figure of Raffles the gentleman crook; who has proved equally long-lived, for almost all the Raffles books are still in print. Here, however, we are concerned not with them but with one of Hornung’s later novels, Fathers of Men, published in 1912, reprinted only once in 1919, and now virtually forgotten (but available online at
Its setting is the Yarborough School of 1880 to 1884, when Hornung himself was there as a boy.
Victorian school stories were almost two a penny, but few are memorable. Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), the best known, sets out to preach a very deliberate sermon and is populated by rather cardboard characters. Kipling’s Stalky & Co (1899), arguably the best written and full of lively portraits, is a very deliberate satire. Fathers of Men, it seems to me, has much deeper insights than either. Nor am I alone in this view. Hornung himself felt it the best of all his works. His biographer Peter Rowland (Raffles and his Creator, 1999) tends to agree. Reviewers praised it highly: to quote two verdicts, it is ‘a fresh and penetrating study of that eternal problem — the human boy,’ and it is ‘serious, compassionate, absorbing, and deeply intelligent.’ It seems well worth resurrecting.
Nonetheless there are difficulties. The first half, with its leisurely setting of the scene, is undeniably slow. The second half, where the real action lies, does in places resort to over-worn conventions and stock figures such as the untutored prodigy of a cricketer. On top of that, the style can be horribly convoluted and wordy; to quote a not untypical sample, ‘The anxious submissiveness of the really good boy, with the subtle flattery conveyed by implicit obedience to an overbearing demand, had so far mollified the master; but Jan did not avail himself of the clemency extended.’ Language of this kind hardly makes for easy reading.
But perhaps the biggest problem is that, in Victorian times as for long after, school stories, almost by definition, had to be wholesome and uplifting. Orthodoxy and prudery forbade any serious challenge to convention. Individual boys, then as now, undoubtedly questioned the accepted religious and moral code, but few dared question it in public. No more could novelists allow them to question it in print. And however well-observed their characters, whatever other complications might tangle their heroes’ lives, these authors invariably left one unmentionable element unmentioned. They could not admit that boys were aware of, let alone preoccupied with, anything so sordid as sexuality. In that sense if in no other, their tales are neither whole nor real.
Why, then, resurrect this story on a gay site? The answer is intriguing. Hornung, though placidly married, was gay. There can be little doubt about it. As a grown man he befriended boys. The relationship between Raffles and his sidekick Bunny is latently homosexual. And Hornung deeply admired Oscar Wilde. Indeed when he christened his only son, at the very moment of Wilde’s downfall and disgrace, he gave him the name of Oscar. This was as clear a sign of his sympathies, and at the time almost as scandalous, as a father in 1945 naming his child Adolf.
What is more, it seems that Fathers of Men was originally neither orthodox nor ‘wholesome.’ Hornung sent an early draft for criticism to a close friend, who pounced on unspecified episodes and dialogue ‘which seemed likely to spoil the book.’ Hornung’s arm was twisted, and he spent wretched months making the necessary changes. Many years later this same critic was praised by a third party for saving Hornung’s reputation. The very guarded language in which all this is recorded strongly suggests that the offending passages were not only sexual in nature but, given the context, homosexual.
We will never know exactly how that early draft ran. But a few hints have survived the alterations; possibly, indeed, they were deliberately allowed to survive. These I have developed into a new thread, matched as best I can to the texture of the original and woven into the fabric of the tale at places where there seem to be obvious gaps. Because the topic, so revolutionary for those days, would hardly be picked out in too garish a shade, Hornung’s expurgated thread was surely subdued in colour. So too, therefore, is my replacement thread. It is too much to expect it to follow the original pattern, but I hope that it may restore a touch of reality and wholeness to what is both a good story and an instructive social commentary on its period.
I have also done a great deal of tinkering. Two complete chapters, which contribute nothing to the development of the plot or of the characters, have gone by the board. Throughout, short passages have been added here and subtracted there. In particular, I have adjusted almost every sentence to make the style more simple and succinct. As a result the overall length has shrunk by a quarter, with the loss of no substance and, I hope, a gain in readability. But I have hardly touched the words which Hornung puts into the mouths of his characters. Such parlance as ‘I say, chaps, I had a jolly ripping time in the hols’ may make present-day toes curl. But in it we hear the authentic voice of the Victorian public-school boy. A critic of the day, a teacher by trade, castigated standard school stories — Tom Brown included — because ‘no boys ever talked as their boys did,’ but he heaped praise on Hornung for ‘reproducing boys’ talk as it actually is.’
On the subject of boys’ talk: then as now, it surely included swear-words, and Hornung, in his quest for authenticity, would surely have liked to include them. But while this would raise few eyebrows today, his publisher could hardly have allowed it then. In line, therefore, with what was the utmost permissible a century ago, I have toned down with asterisks the few swear-words that I have ventured to introduce.
In short, I have tried to retain not only the essence of the story but its period flavour too; for it is very much a period piece, and so it ought to remain. This raises minor problems. Because education at places like Yarborough was dominated by the classics, there are constant references to Greek and Latin. There are snippets from current Gilbert and Sullivan songs. There is period slang and school slang which (except where it is too obscure) I have retained and sometimes explained. But such details are fine brush-strokes which hardly affect the overall painting: if they escape the reader who does not know Patience from Pinafore or a dactyl from a spondee, it does not matter a hoot. What is much more important is to steer clear of reading modern nuances into period language. The present-day connotations of ‘queer’ and ‘gay’ lay, at that date, far in the future. When a boy called someone ‘straight,’ he meant honest and honourable. A fag was no more than a junior boy doing menial jobs for a prefect. If, to the house-master, ‘boys are dearer than men or women,’ that does not make him a paedophile.
A greater difficulty for some non-British readers may be the cricket which looms large in the second half of the tale. Passing mentions of the long-departed Lillywhite’s Cricketers’ Annual and the still-surviving Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanack can be taken in their stride. But there are whole pages of ball-by-ball commentary. Drastic pruning here would not only destroy a fascinating insight into the game at a time when there were only four balls to the over and serious bowlers could still bowl underarm, but it would also spoil the story. I have therefore retained these passages. Here too a knowledge of the rules is not essential, but to those who wish to know more I once again commend the excellent website of the Seattle Cricket Club and especially its page on Explaining Cricket to Americans. And, after all, is not baseball a cousin — some would say a descendant — of cricket?
The school’s organisation, which may be another puzzle to non-Britons, deserves explanation. It comprised three distinct groupings, by house, by form, and by games. Every boy belonged to a house — there were twelve of them scattered around the town — where he lived and ate and which claimed his loyalty. He joined the school at, usually, thirteen or fourteen, and was graded academically by ability alone. A form might therefore contain boys of very different ages. The sequence of forms, as far as it concerns us, is laid out in Chapter 2. It is important to remember that, as is still general in Britain, the Sixth Form, and specifically the Upper Sixth, was the highest, corresponding in level to the American Twelfth Grade. Prefects (known officially as praepostors, unofficially as pollies) were drawn from the Upper Sixth, and boys left at eighteen if they had not left before. There were three terms in a year (Winter, Easter and Summer). The normal weekday timetable ran thus: school prayers, first school (that is, lessons), breakfast, second school, dinner, games, third school (except on half holidays), tea, private work, house prayers.
Games (fives, athletics, and above all football and cricket) were organised partly on a house and partly on a school basis. For each game, every house had its own two teams — All Ages and Under Sixteen (or sometimes Under Fifteen) — which competed for the inter-house challenge cups. Football and cricket were played on three grounds, the Lower, the Middle and the Upper. New boys would be placed in teams on the Lower or Middle and progress, if they were good enough, to the Upper. The pinnacles of achievement were the Fifteen and the Eleven (graced with capital letters), which were the school’s first teams at football and cricket respectively. With football, however, Yarborough had not yet adopted the Rugby rules and still played its own version of the game.
The novel’s original title was based, of course, on the proverb that the child is father of the man. The new slant to the story suggests a new title, drawn from George Herbert’s poem which I have woven into the fabric in Chapter 31.
A word too on the Headmaster’s sermons. Hornung’s apparent quotation from one in Chapter 30 is in fact of his own composition, but the extracts I have inserted into four other chapters are the genuine article, drawn from the old man’s published works.
As we look back from the relatively liberated and egalitarian present (the emphasis being on relatively), we must allow for much social change. Yarborough has long been a pioneering and liberal school. Not perhaps when it was founded in 1584; but it is pioneering today, it was so sixty years ago in my own time, and it was so — markedly more than the Rugby of Tom Brown — at the date of this story. But even the most liberal public school of a hundred and thirty years ago preached what seems to us a very stern morality and tolerated what seems to us a great deal of injustice. Four historical facts should above all be borne in mind:
- Society was stratified by class and caste — contempt for him who ventured above his station.
- School life was regulated by harsh discipline — the cane for the rule-breaker and the slacker.
- Education was permeated by religion — a foretaste of hell-fire for him who, in the Headmaster’s eyes, transgressed.
- The gravest transgression of all was sexual activity between males — unmitigated shame, the full stigma of the moral leper, upon him whose conscience surrendered to such lust. Lust it was invariably taken to be, for same-sex love lay beyond the comprehension of Victorian authority.
Above all, some aspects of Jan Rutter, the hero of the tale, were borrowed from a boy who was a contemporary of Hornung’s and in the same house. I could name him, but will not. In due course this boy’s son also went to Yarborough and ultimately became a master there. He was still a master in my own day, and a most endearing and memorable one. It was only recently that I learned of this connection; too late, sadly, to discuss it with him before he died. But, now that I do know, I count it a privilege to have sat at the feet of Jan’s son.