About the Book
This book is an experiment undertaken fifty-seven years on by Jamie Bruce Lockhart and Alan Macfarlane to try to recall and analyse their life at an English boarding school (Dragon School, Oxford) between 1949 and 1955. The book is a period piece and also an account of a rather special school. This has both advantages and disadvantages. It means that the school cannot be held to be representative of preparatory boarding establishments of that time. On the other hand, the Dragon appears to us to be interesting both in the way it was run and in the kind of pupils it recruited and what it made of them. The school was founded on concepts which went against much of the educational philosophy of late Victorian imperial education, even if it also retained much of an earlier Edwardian tradition of boarding schools in which our teachers had been reared. Unlike St. Cyprian's of the early twentieth century as described by some of its old boys including Cyril Connolly and George Orwell, the school tried to overcome some of the traumas of this kind of socialization.
It forms a bridge between the muscular Christian, imperialist, attitudes of the aftermath of Thomas Arnold through to our modern, post-imperial, world. It is also an interesting school because of the later distinction of a considerable number of its former pupils. n a wide variety of fields The Dragon has helped to shape our national life and it is now helping to educate new rulers who are sending their children to it from China, Japan, India and elsewhere. This remarkable effect, and the atmosphere it has created, leads some who have the experience which qualifies them to make a judgement on its relative merits as a school. One such view is the appraisal of Sir Eric Anderson, an important and widely experienced teacher. He taught at Fettes and Shrewsbury schools, was a most distinguished headmaster of Abingdon School and of Eton, was later Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford and Provost of Eton. The schools he was involved with received a number of Dragons, and his children and grand-children went to the school. 'First, they're not a type; they're all individuals.
The Dragon does not mould boys; it encourages them to become more interesting and lively people but still to be basically themselves - Secondly, Dragons are very good with adults; easy, talkative, direct and frank. They treat you from the first meeting as an intelligent equal. I put that down to the exceptional relationship between masters and boys at the Dragon School, that unique easy familiarity which somehow, despite the nicknames, co-exists with mutual respect. Thirdly, they expect to do well and expect to have fun while doing it. Again that is inculcated by the spirit of the school. You worry that at some of the schools to which they go on life cannot possibly be quite as good. In my view the Dragon School is quite simply the best preparatory school in the world.
Table of Contents:
Preface, Whence we came; Alan, Jamie. Material life; Landscapes, Material Life, Pain, Dormitory Life. Dragon Alchemy; A Different School: the Skipper, Dragon Culture, Dragon Society, Dragon Staff, Boarders and Day Pupils, The Ceremonial Cycle. Passing through; Purgatory: Alan's first three years, Paradise: Alan's last two years, Passing through: Jamie's five years, The art of writing letters from school. Teaching and learning; Learning in class, Local and general knowledge, How Alan was taught, Classwork - Jamie and Sandy. Imagined worlds; Reading, Films, Entertainments and expeditions. Oral culture; Lectures, speeches and sermons, Public speaking, rhetoric and debates. Creating meaning; Arts, Music, Drama and Dance, Craft skills and pursuits. Games and Life; Games and Life, Winter - rugger, Spring - football and hockey, Summer - cricket, Summer - other sports. Playground worlds; Winter games, Marbles and conkers, Summer - bikes and rivers, Other playground games. Serious play; Playtime, Crazes and toys, The child and the man, Alan's reflections, Jamie's reflections. Epilogue: some reflections on the Dragon. After the Dragon: Alan, Jamie and Sandy.
About the Author :
Alan Macfarlane was born in India in 1941 and educated at the Dragon School and Sedbergh School, Yorkshire. He received his M.A. and D.Phil. in history from Oxford, an M.Phil. in anthropology at the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies. Elected a Research Fellow at King's College, Cambridge in 1971 and a Lecturer in Social Anthropology in 1975, a Reader in 1981, and Professor in 1991, he was elected to the British Academy in 1986. He is Emeritus Professor at Cambridge and a Life Fellow of King's College. Among Alan Macfarlane's eighteen published books are: Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (1970); The Origins of English Individualism (1978); The Riddle of the Modern World (2000); Letters to Lily - On How the World Works (2005), and Japan Through the Looking Glass (2007). His website (www.alanmacfarlane.com) contains a large amount of his work with his wife and colleague Sarah Harrison. Jamie Bruce Lockhart, born in Sedbergh, Yorkshire, in 1941, was also educated at the Dragon and at Sedbergh School. He then read modern languages and economics at St John's College, Cambridge. Following spells in banking in Paris and London, he worked for three years in the Central Planning Office of the Fiji government on preparations for the country's first economic five-year plan ahead of Independence. In 1973 he joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, serving in London and in diplomatic missions abroad in Nicosia, Vienna, Lagos and Bonn. After retirement he ran a charitable trust in London, where he launched a forum for dialogue between Greece and Turkey, bringing together leading private individuals from both countries. He has edited the travel diaries, and published a biography of Hugh Clapperton, Commander RN, and edited journals from the Lander brothers' 1830 Niger expedition. He lives in Suffolk with his wife, Flip, where he enjoys painting watercolours and sailing his 21-foot classic Loch Long on the River Alde. The collection of letters on which this study draws include those of Jamie's late brother Sandy, Lord Bruce Lockhart, farmer, for ten years Leader of Kent County Council, a former chairman of the Local Government Association and latterly chairman of English Heritage.
