Some interesting stories about Eton are contained in a new book, “Seventy Years Among Savages”—by Mr. Henry S. Salt, who was there both as a boy and a master, leaving it because his vegetarian principles forced on him the conviction “that we Eton masters, however irreproachable our surroundings, were but cannibals in cap and gown.” He describes the famous college as a stronghold of savagery, and a contemporary of his wrote that “a man who has never been at Eton has a poor conception of what idleness is.” There was one master under whom it was “as dangerous to be a member of the class as it was for a well-disposed citizen to be mixed up in a street riot.” He distributed punishments freely, and it was said he once set a punishment to a bird. To sing and to whistle were common practices in his class, and when a bird perched near the window and chirruped in an interval of the din, he rounded on it blindly with a cry of “A hundred lines.”
The masters had a good deal to put up with. On one occasion the boys drove a cow into a class-room, but she was headed back by the master shouting at the top of his voice. The same master complained in a letter to the Head about a boy who persisted in knocking loudly on his study door—“P.S. He is knowing still.” One master was remarkably impersonal in his floggings. He would enter into conversation with an offender during the punishment, especially when he knew his “people” personally. On one occasion he enquired of a boy on the “swishing block,” “Have you seen your uncle lately?” One wonders what the boy thought. It is almost like the “Lovely weather” of the dentist as he pulls a tooth out.
The Derby Daily Telegraph, January 22, 1921, 2
Book Reviewed: Seventy Years Among Savages