There are two published accounts by old boys of life at
Bembridge in the 1920s and 30s, in the autobiographies of the journalist Robin
Day (perhaps the school’s best-known alumnus) and the poet John Heath-Stubbs
(both of whom, incidentally, received bursaries). Although for the school
newspaper Day wrote with some affection of his time at Bembridge (much of it
spent at Coniston), in Grand Inquisitor he
strikes a brusquer note, especially regarding academic standards, which he
thought were decidedly low (and having previously attended a grammar school he
had a definite basis for comparison). He attributes his own success in getting
to university mainly to the special interest shown in him by the masters Baggaley
and Stedman, and even suggests that Whitehouse’s own lack of higher education led
him to discount its benefit to others.
Heath-Stubbs’s more wide-ranging recollections are also very critical
of the school, in fact rather relentlessly so. He recalls Whitehouse as a
‘monster of egotism’. His account is marked by his obvious unhappiness as a boy
at Bembridge (there is some evidence from his contemporary Tony Doncaster confirming
this) though he acknowledges that the Island itself, and particularly the
natural history of Whitecliff Bay and Brading Marshes, made a lasting
impression on him - and despite the sourness he can be an astute
observer. An apparently somewhat old-maidish boy, of poor eye-sight, dyspraxic,
and essentially intellectual, he was clearly in the wrong place. Reading him we
miss entirely the sense of idyll evoked by Whitehouse in Creative Education, and elsewhere: propaganda, to be sure, but for
many boys of a less academic bent close to reality. Heath-Stubbs does have a
little to say about the printing room, however. The tone is characteristic:
In the printing classes we produced the school magazine…We also
set up various works of Whitehouse himself. Every year he would write a
Nativity play for the boys to perform. This was printed and sold, of course,
for the chapel fund. It would have been much more sensible if he had encouraged
the boys themselves to create these Nativity plays, but nothing of the sort
ever happened.
This is interesting as a description of what one might expect
to have occurred at a slightly earlier date (before 1930), but contains one
notable inaccuracy. None of the nativity plays written by Whitehouse (ostensibly
in collaboration with the current head boy) from 1932 on was actually printed
in school, though some of them bear the imprint ‘for the Yellowsands Press’. What Heath-Stubbs was actually
remembering were probably programmes or invitations.
The matter of the imprint is not insignificant. There are
fewer than half a dozen books with Yellowsands as a publishing imprint. They all
date from this period, and most were produced for Whitehouse by John Johnson,
Oxford University Printer. They include the two nativity plays The Road to Bethlehem (1933) and The Mystic Spring (1935) and the
miscellany (containing Whitehouse’s address at the inauguration of the school
chapel) Thy Youth and Age (1934).
They speak to the contemporary urgency of Whitehouse’s ambition to express his
own and the school’s influence through works that, while it would have been
good to have produced them at Bembridge, lay beyond the scope of his schoolboy
printers.
Although after 1931 Yellowsands printing became more
productive, mainly because the new printing room attracted many more boys
working in their own time, as regards school printing this extra capacity was
probably largely taken up by the expansion of the newspaper (while for much of
the earlier part of each term the printers were tied up with work on the Hymn Book). There could be no question
of interfering with production of what was one of the main points of contact
between what one parent described quaintly, but aptly, as the ‘Commonwealth of
School and the Home Circle’ - as well as a wider world including the growing
number of Old Bembridgians (who automatically received a copy of the newspaper).
The newspaper had also become important to Whitehouse in
another (if largely symbolic) way, providing some compensation for what he must
have increasingly realised was the permanent loss of his political career:
In the strange world we live in we find ourselves in
disagreement with the principles and methods of many European governments. We
find false and inadequate the methods of making mass opinion by radio,
newspaper and politician. We rejoice therefore that we have had in our
newspaper a medium for expressing our faith in the unchanging message of the
Prince of Peace.
Faith and politics were inextricable. An alternative to the
exercise of official political influence lay at hand in a kind of sacred drama.
He had seen in the nativity play the possibility of reaching a potentially far
wider audience than the community of his school, and to exert influence again on
a broader stage, and perhaps even in a higher realm. As the lights began to dim
over Europe, he saw an opportunity for his school to rise to the challenge of
the age with specific spiritual action.
From 1936 the autumn number of Bembridge School Newspaper is changed to the Christmas number (it
had been so named before, but not consistently). To Whitehouse Christmas was
‘the greatest of all festivals’ (there was no cross in the school chapel in
Whitehouse’s day). Everything about it, its stories, its poetry, its carols, were
to be delighted in. And as he told his boys it was ‘a home festival’:
The happiness of your home is your greatest inheritance, and
this we realise at Christmas. Let it lead you to the happiness of the spiritual
world and to the friendship of the Great Friend.
The story of the nativity, which he saw as the first refugee
story, symbolised ‘all that was necessary to a civilised world’.
The nativity plays Whitehouse wrote in the years leading up to
the second world war are not among his most engaging writings. Stilted and
didactic, they show little ear for dialogue. They are essential to an
understanding of the man, however. They are by no means straightforward
variations on a theme, but responses (at whatever distance) to the pressure of
real current events, and incorporate in places allegorical elements reflecting
them. They should be seen, as well, as part of the developing crisis of a man
who, as Stuart Eagles remarks, was deeply haunted by the prospect of war, and the
vulnerability of all that he had created at Bembridge. This was not just the
school and his boys - his vital, living
heroes - but his great collection and championing of John Ruskin, the public
reputation of whose work was then perhaps at its lowest ebb.
The last of these plays is ‘The Peacemaker’. It appears never
to have been printed. It was first produced at Bembridge in the autumn term,
1939, and performed again the following January in London at the Rudolf Steiner
Hall, specially hired for the occasion, where it was played to an invited
audience. The summary of the plot in the review published in the school
newspaper has the following:
The three Magi travelling to find the Prince of Peace are
challenged by Herod and his soldiers. They are unable to prevent their [the
Magi] going on and when they have gone Herod’s soldiers refuse to carry out the
deeds of further violence he would have them do.
The surviving guard-books of Yellowsands ephemera contain
numerous programmes and cast-lists for ‘The Peacemaker’ which was revived in
school again and again during the war and the years immediately following. Of
the earlier, published plays The Road to
Bethlehem did enjoy modest sales and was available from the Oxford
University Press until well into the 1960s, though it never made much money for
the school, as was discovered after Whitehouse’s death, the printer’s
distribution and warehousing costs nearly wiping out any profit from the royalties.
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| The woodcut, by Geoffrey Eyles, was much favoured by Whitehouse. |
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