Beside Windsor

(See front cover) Throughout the U. S. last week schoolboys had packed their college pennants in mothballs and were off for summer holidays, But in England, school was by no means over. At Harrow, Governor's Speech Day took place. This week at Eton prize awards are being made. Then will follow one of the year's most pleasant occasions: the Long Weekend of the Long (Summer) Term. To Lord's Cricket Ground.-- in London's pleasant suburbs will the schoolboy go, to see played the Eton-Harrow cricket match./-

He will perhaps be in charge of his aunt, a large dowager to whom this represents the last great event of the Season. She will have been to the Private View of the Royal Academy, to Ascot, to at least one of the Courts, and her flowered garden party frocks (indispensable to London ladies in the Season) will have been put through a strenuous series of functions. She will be glad when she can get off to the country, for during these three days she will find her hands full with taking her nephew to teashops, grill-rooms, music halls. After the last ball has been bowled at Lord's, she will chaperone at the Eton-Harrow dance at Hurlingham, and Monday send the "nipper" back to school, along with the other small Etonians (under 5 ft. 4 in.) in toppers and truncated jacket, large Etonians in toppers and morning coats; small Harrovians in jackets and straw "boaters," large Harrovians in tails and that same straw headgear which the school wears in all seasons. For the rest of the term--until the last of July--British public school boys have no such pother of examinations and commencements as occupy the attention of U. S. students. They study, perhaps with less application than during winter months. Most of their time they devote to sport: cricket, tennis, fives, swimming, and in a number of schools, rowing. Eton is a rowing school, and Eton's distinction between Wet Bobs (crew men) and Dry Bobs (land sports) has become almost universal in British public schools. So keen is rivalry between Wets & Drys, each regarding his sport as gentlemanly, typically British, that a master becomes known as Wet or Dry according to the prevalent temper of his sympathies. Predominantly Dry Bob and cricketish is Harrow; but Eton began playing cricket in 1730 and Harrow has no record of it before 1771. Eton has lost no Eton-Harrow match since 1908 (but eight were drawn), and Old Etonians like to remember that Old Etonian Wellington said: "The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton!" Harrovians counter by pointing out that Eton has some 1,100 students from which to choose its cricketers; Harrow only 700. Seven weeks of holiday stretch from the end of the Summer Term to the beginning of the Autumn Term. To Eton (King's College of Our Lady of Eton beside Windsor) will then come a new batch of 13 and 14-year-oldsters. As pupils in Britain's largest, most expensive (average total yearly cost: $2,000) and most famed public school,-- they will spend some five years on the green campus in the shadow of many a fine Gothic building, across the Thames from Windsor Castle. Some of them will go up to Oxford when they finish their course, spend three years there, return then to Eton to teach Latin and cricket to the boys. Their progress through the school depends quite upon their own aptitudes. They must finish the Lower School before the age of 16. Then, under the guidance of the masters of the 28 houses and the tutors who supervise outside work, they must advance through a series of divisions, a new one every term, until the course is finished. One may complete one's course at any time during the year: there is no graduation. But at the end of the term the "Head Beak" (beak = master) delivers a Leaving Address and presents each graduate with a Leaving Book. Head Beak of Eton, and perhaps Head Beak of all British Beaks, is Rev. Dr. Cyril Argentine Alington, 59, headmaster of Eton since 1916. Tall, personable, he is an Oxonian, onetime (1908-16) headmaster of Shrewsbury School, chaplain since 1921 to King George V. To carry on at Eton he refused the deanship of Canterbury Cathedral. (But his salary of more than -L-5,000 is greater than a dean's living.) His students admire his strong face and square shoulders (he played football at Marlborough). His fine, sonorous voice commands their rapt attention at every Leaving Address. Like most British schoolmen, Head Beak Alington is a versatile but chiefly intramural scholar. England knows well his "jolly good remarks" on all subjects. Samples: "I believe our taste in some matters is not as good as ihat of other nations, for example our homes, which are exceedingly ugly. . . . No class of Englishmen have a monopoly on any virtue or vice. . . . Women are frauds because they pretend to be the artistic sex, which is untrue, since there are no really great feminine poets and artists, while women musicians spend their time playing and singing music written by men. . . . Education exists to prevent people from being vulgar, stupid and ignorant." On one occasion, lecturing to his students, he proved irrefutably that the Almighty is an Old Etonian. When Douglas Fairbanks & Mary Pickford visited England in 1923 and expressed a desire to visit Eton, Dr. Alington said: "Pickford? Fairbanks? Who are they?" Dr. Alington says that by his bedside is a volume of the mystery stories of Valentine Williams, a writer much admired in Britain. Also he reads, as most knowing Britishers do, the ghost stories of his colleague Montague Rhodes ("Monty") James, Provost of Eton. The administrative and business affairs of Eton are in the hands of Ghost Story Writer James, who is furthermore a world-famed authority on early British stained glass and ancient manuscripts. Eton is the most individual and matured of British schools. But even here is that insuperable tradition which aims today as it did when Percy Bysshe Shelley was at Eton to stamp every boy with the mark of the British game-playing gentleman. Games begin in the Autumn Term with footer and soccer.-- Hardy youngsters may join the Eton Beagles and hunt hares on foot--a sport which last February the British League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports protested (TIME. Feb. 9). Everyone at Eton looks forward to St. Andrew's Day (Nov. 30) when the famed Wall Game takes place between teams representing Eton's 70 scholarship students, the Collegers (called "Tugs" from their traditional toga-like garments of black broadcloth) and the Oppidans (the rest of the students). The Wall Game is played with a football the size of a grapefruit against a long wall. Object is to dribble the ball down the wall and send it through a goal. This is almost impossible under the complicated rules; only three goals have been scored in the last century. The game lasts an hour, and since it is unlikely that any score will be made, the winner is decided according to the number of "shies" (throws) made at the goal. As a spectacle, the Wall Game offers little but the sight of numerous brawny youths scrambling in a pile against the Wall and accomplishing, apparently, nothing but the destruction of each other's clothes and complexions.

Eton's greatest holiday takes place on Speech Day. This, June 4, is the birthday of King George III, Eton's greatest patron, who is more revered even than King Henry VI who founded Eton in 1440. It is because King George III is dead that Eton keeps to its melancholy mourning garb of black suit and shiny topper. All but 29 Etonians must throughout the year observe a number of strict rules: they must leave unbuttoned the bottom waistcoat button, (and in after life they usually continue to do so). They must walk, with coat collar turned up, on only one side of the town streets. They may not carry an umbrella rolled up. The 29 leaders of the schools, the "Pops," however, are permitted proudly to exhibit the insignia of their position at all times: a boutonniere, a tightly rolled umbrella, patent leather shoes, a gaily colored waistcoat, and topper affixed with blobs of colored sealing wax.

All are privileged to dress as Pops on the day of Eton-Harrow match and on June 4. There are then cricket, fireworks, a parade of crews costumed as 18th Century sailors, and from the river the sounds of the famed Eton Boating Song. Because this is the school's gala day, Old Etonians the world over celebrate it with alumni dinners. In India one might travel 1,000 miles and dine with a score of local governors, all Old Etonians, wearing cravats of black striped with pale blue. In Manhattan this month 20 Old Etonians assembled in honor of Speech Day. The day before was the birthday of His Majesty King George V. But Eton does not celebrate that.

Wilbur's Leave

Alumni who believe that Stanford University suffers while its president, Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, carries on as U. S. Secretary of the Interior, waited anxiously last week as Stanford's Board of Trustees held its meeting in San Francisco. Few were surprised but many were increasingly dissatisfied when the Board, after what was called "considerable discussion," announced "that at the request of the President of the United States, and in recognition of the outstanding importance to the nation of the continuation to effective completion of the services of Dr. Wilbur as Secretary of the Interior, his leave be extended to and including Dec. 31, 1932." Dr. Robert Eckles Swain will continue as acting president; Dr. Wilbur will continue to draw no salary. Opponents of the plan to abolish Stanford's lower division (TIME, June 8) took comfort in reflecting that while Dr. Wilbur is absent the plan will not be consummated.

* Founded in 1787 by Thomas Lord, a Yorkshire ground bowler, Lord's is the home of the Marylebone Cricket Club, world arbiter. fAt the first Eton-Harrow match in 1801, Bowler Tom Loyg beat Harrow in one inning, caught cold forthwith and died.

* Famed young Etonians this year are: Hon. Francis David Langhorne Astor and Hon. Michael Langhorne Astor; Viscounts Chelsea and Northland; Earl of Shrewsbury. Eton's many celebrated graduates include: 17 British Prime Ministers (Harrow has six including Lord Peel, Lord Palmerston and .Stanley Baldwin), Lord Roberts, Viscount Byng, Marquis Curzon, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Major General Corn wall is, Arthur Wellesley Duke of Wellington, Novelist Henry Fielding, Poets Phineas and Giles Fletcher, Edmund Waller, Thomas Gray, Percy Bysshe Shelley (but George Gordon Lord Byron was a Harrovian).

/-At Rugby was invented the schoolboy terminology "Rugger." Other schools still say "footer" for football, which each school plays according to its own rules.

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