Glory on the Hill

Pray charge your glasses, gentlemen,

And drink to Harrow's honor.

May Fortune still attend the Hill,

And Glory rest upon her.

Last week many Old Harrovians fondly grunted Harrow's Stet Fortuna Domus as they leafed through just the kind of book that Old Harrovians like. Put together by other Old Harrovians, bound in deep Harrovian blue, it was called Winston Churchill and Harrow, Memories of the Prime Minister's Schooldays, 1888-1802.

To Old Harrovians it seems more than a matter of pride that Winston Churchill should have gone to Harrow. It seems inevitable. But when small, redhaired, freckled Spencer Churchill, W. L., as he was known on the register, attended the school 50 years ago the Harrow community did not entirely approve of him. Some of the masters and the more model boys felt that he was scarcely the son of his father", Lord Randolph Churchill, then at the peak of his Parliamentary career. Young Churchill was careless with the school's traditions, which have the flexibility of the Swiss Alps. His marks were only middling and he disliked the classics, then the sine qua non of Harrovian scholarship.*

But for most of Harrow young Churchill performed the miracle of being highly popular while remaining an individual. His Headmaster, the late J. E. C. Welldon, who became Bishop of Calcutta, noted the 14-year-old boy's "love and veneration" for the English language. He quoted Shakespeare by the scene. Canon James William Sackett Tomlin of Canterbury writes: "The one vivid memory that I have of him is [his] darting up during a house debate, against all the rules, before he had been a year in the house, to refute one of his seniors and carry all before him with a magnificent speech."

Young Churchill wrote to his mother: "I am making my room very pretty & 'chic' with lots of silk 'draperies.' We want it to be the prettiest room in the house." But the esthete also kept silk worms that munched on mulberry leaves he brought from a nearby yard. He tinkered with carpenter's tools. He kept two dogs, against the school rules, and walked them at night with his friend, the town detective. Once he manufactured a time bomb to blow out a well bottom which was supposed to lead to an underground passage. When he peered down the well to see why the bomb didn't go off, it did, and young Churchill's face was badly scorched. In his last school year he won the Public Schools Fencing Competition at Aldershot.

In the face of such transparent manliness, most of Harrow could forgive young Churchill nearly everything. Writes Vicar Edgar Stogdon of Harrow, who was at school with young Churchill: "If your mother wrote to ask if she could come down to see you, you told her what hat to wear, and if her figure was beyond the accepted standard, you suggested postponement. . . . Mr. Winston Churchill invited his old nurse down ... to her intense happiness; she arrived in an old poke bonnet, her figure had attained ample proportions, and Mr. Churchill walked arm-in-arm with her in the street! It is about the nicest thing a Harrow boy has ever done!"

Though London's suburbs have thickened around it, Harrow school has changed little since young Churchill's time. In Winston Churchill and Harrow it is observed: "To many Old Harrovians the greatest change in Harrow school life in the past fifty years--apart from the advanced curriculum of modern days--is the abolition of private tuck shops."* This occurred 30 years ago.

Winston Churchill has remained as unorthodox an Old Harrovian as he was a young one. At his last visit to the school in December 1940, he said: "Herr Hitler, in one of his recent discourses . . . declared that the fight was between those who had been through the Adolf Hitler schools and those who had been at Eton. Hitler had forgotten Harrow, and he had also overlooked the vast majority of the youth of this country who have never had the privilege of attending such schools. . . . When this war is won ... it must be one of our aims to work to establish a state of society where the advantages and privileges which hitherto have been enjoyed only by the few, shall be far more widely shared by the men and the youth of the nation as a whole" (TIME, Feb. 17). But Old Harrovians are still able to take such heterodoxy--from Winston Churchill. He is, after all, an Old Harrovian himself, a present day "Glory on the Hill." Harrow's Headmaster A. Paul Boissier writes that he has been told that often "on occasions when affairs looked overblack, Mr. Churchill . . . would sing an appropriate verse or two from one of the [Harrow] songs and then get back to business." Recently the Harrovians have given Old Harrovian Churchill a new stanza to the old Stet Fortuna Domus to sing if he wishes:

While in the fight to guard the Right

Our country you defend, Sir,

Here grim and gay we mean to stay,

And stick it to the end, Sir.

* Since then, wily Old Harrovian Churchill has often quoted Latin in Parliament and, jibing at Harrow's ancient rival, offered to translate "for the benefit of any Old Etonians present."

*Food shops. Harrow had existed 300 years before anyone got the idea that the school itself might make money by selling the between-meals food its boys wanted.

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