The Honours Board

The Honours Board is set in an English Preparatory School for boys whose parents intend them later to serve a four to five year stretch at a traditional English Public School. But this brilliant novel is only incidentally about the boys at Downs Park. Its major concern is with the men and women who form the teaching staff – a small world as inward-looking as a ‘family’ of hippies – and whose lives are intertwined not only with each other’s but with the moral and emotional tendrils, grown sturdy and gnarled over the years, of this admirably conducted though less than typical bastion of the English middle classes.

Downs Park is admirably conducted, but under the regime of its sympathetic, intelligent, headmaster-owner, it loses more money than it makes – nor does the honours board record scholarships to the great public schools. It is, in fact, ripe for take-over, and the headmaster knows it. The second master, self-regarding, plausibly ambitious, rich and sexually athletic, knows it too. As this quiet but desperate struggle reaches a critical stage, the whole structure of the group is threatened and everyone is forced to look beyond the comforting bars of his cage.

In Pamela Hansford Johnson’s masterly hands, this novel has the force of life itself.

Pamela Hansford Johnson was born in 1912 and gained recognition with her first novel, This Bed Thy Centre, published in 1935. She wrote 27 novels. Her themes centred on the moral responsibility of the individual in their personal and social relations. The fictional genres she used ranged from romantic comedy (Night and Silence, Who Is Here?) and high comedy (The Unspeakable Skipton) to tragedy (The Holiday Friend) and the psychological study of cruelty (An Error of Judgement). Her last novel, A Bonfire, was published in the year of her death, 1981.

She was a critic as well as a novelist and wrote books on Thomas Wolfe and Ivy Compton-Burnett; Six Proust Reconstructions (1958) confirmed her reputation as a leading Proustian scholar. She also wrote a play, Corinth House (1954), a work of social criticism arising out of the Moors Trial, On Iniquity (1967), and a book of essays, Important to Me (1974). She received honorary degrees from six universities and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She was awarded the C.B.E. in 1975.

Pamela Hansford Johnson, who had two children by her first marriage with journalist Gordon Neil Stewart, later married C. P. Snow. Their son Philip was born in 1952.