The History Boys Read online

  With a First, a research grant was a formality, so I stayed on at Oxford and for a time even convinced myself I was a scholar, coming up twice a week to read manuscripts at the Public Records Office, then still in Chancery Lane. But I was more a copyist than a scholar, since that was all I did, copying out medieval records with no notion what to do with them, and the longer I did it – for five years after taking my degree – the more dissatisfied with myself and the bigger fraud I felt. The truth was not in me.

  However, in addition to my so-called research I did some college teaching, and though I wasn’t much good at that either (and in today’s more demanding conditions would soon have been stopped), I did at least try and teach my pupils the technique of answering essay questions and the strategy for passing examinations – techniques which I’d had to discover for myself and in the nick of time: journalism, in fact.

  So The History Boys is in some sense an outcome of those two crucial examinations and the play both a confession and an expiation. I have no nostalgia for my Oxford days at all and am happy never to have to sit an examination again. In playwriting there are no examinations unless, that is, you count the viva voce the audience puts the actors through every night.

  What sort of school is it that can send eight boys to sit for history scholarships at Oxford and Cambridge? Not a state school, surely, even in the 1980s? I wanted it to be, partly because that’s how I’d imagined it, setting the action in my mind’s eye as taking place in my own school, Leeds Modern School as was.

  This last year while I was writing the play I used regularly to pass what had been the Modern School, now known as Lawnswood School. It was, almost symbolically I felt, in process of demolition, and the more I wrote of the play the less there was of the building. Now it has completely gone and been replaced by a new school built directly in front of the old site.

  The process of demolition was protracted because, built in 1930, the building contained asbestos. This meant I couldn’t pop in for one last look or to refresh my memory, until by chance Look North arranged to film me there a week or two before it was finally pulled down. I went along expecting it to seem smaller, which it duly did, but in memory it had a shine to it which had utterly vanished. Once there had been polished parquet floors the woodwork was of bright chestnut varnish, and particularly in the late afternoon (as was at one point mentioned in the play), the place took on a wonderful glow. Not now. It was shabby and dull and run-down.

  The Headmaster, whom I had in my mind somehow blamed for the abandonment of the building, turned out to be helpful and understanding while not surprisingly being anxious to get out of what he saw as shabby and restrictive surroundings. I had no reason for nostalgia as the time I had spent in the school had been pretty dull and unmemorable, but still, it was a good building, and the facade should certainly have been incorporated in whatever replaced it. Had it survived another ten or fifteen years it would certainly have been listed and preserved. Standing on the northern boundary of Leeds, it was always a handsome and decent piece of thirties architecture, designed in the Municipal Architect’s Department which in the thirties was one of the best in the country. I don’t know who designed its replacement, but it has none of the old building’s dignity and (this is the nub of it) none of its confidence. In 1930 the future of state education seemed assured. Now, who knows?

  On the stage the school is vaguely taken to be in Sheffield, and in my head I called it Cutler’s, and though there isn’t a Cutler’s Grammar School in Sheffield I feel there ought to have been. I made it a grammar school only because a comprehensive school would be unlikely to be fielding Oxbridge candidates in such numbers. Unlikely, I subsequently found, to be fielding Oxbridge candidates at all, or at least not in the way I’d imagined.

  When I was writing The History Boys I didn’t pay much heed to when it was supposed to be set. While not timeless (though one always hopes), its period didn’t seem important. It seemed to me to be about two sorts of teaching – or two teachers, anyway (characters always more important than themes), who were teaching more or less in the present; I could decide when precisely after I’d finished the play.

  My own memories of sitting the Cambridge scholarship examination were so vivid that they coloured the writing of the play, with Oxford and Cambridge still held up to my sixth formers as citadels to be taken just as they were to me and my schoolfellows fifty years ago. I knew things had changed, of course, but I assumed that candidates for the scholarship examination spent two or three days at whichever university, staying in the college of their first choice, sitting a few examination papers and being interviewed: after which they would go back to Leeds or Blackburn or wherever to await the results ten days or so later. That was what had happened to me in December 1951, and it was a time I had never forgotten.

  I was well on with the play when I mentioned it to a friend who had actually sat next to me in one of the scholarship examinations. He told me that I was hopelessly out of date, and that scholarship examinations such as we’d both experienced were a thing of the past, and even that scholarships themselves were not what they were. What had replaced the system he wasn’t sure, but he thought that candidates no longer took scholarship examinations while they were at school, but at the end of their first year in college when awards were made on course work.

  I was shocked and didn’t want to know, not because this invalidated the play (it is a play, after all, and not a white paper), but because what had been such a memorable episode in my life was now wholly confined to history. What had happened so unforgettably to me couldn’t happen any more; it was as outmoded as maypole dancing or the tram. And as for the now stay-at-home examinees, I just felt sorry for them. No romantic weekend for them, threading the frosted Backs or sliding over the cobbles of Trinity; no Evensong in King’s: life as in so many other respects duller than once it was. I don’t imagine the candidates themselves felt much deprived, and from the colleges’ point of view it simply meant that they had another weekend available for conferences.

  However, I now had to decide if I should adapt the play to present-day circumstances, but decided I shouldn’t, as much for practical reasons as any concern for the facts. The current system of assessment, whatever its merits, is no help to the playwright. Graduated assessment is no use at all. The test, the examination, the ordeal, unfair though they may be, are at least dramatic.

  Accordingly I set the play in the 1980s, when people seemed to think the system had changed. It’s significant that without looking it up nobody I spoke to could quite remember the sequence, which testified to the truth of Irwin’s remark about the remoteness of the recent past but is also an instance of how formless the history of institutions becomes once its public procedures are meddled with. Fairer, more decent and catering to the individual the new system may be, but memorable and even ceremonial, no, and that is a loss, though these days not an uncommon one.

  Luckily the eighties were a period with no special sartorial stamp, no wince-making flares, for instance, or tie ’n’ die. Mrs Thatcher was more of an obtruding presence then than she is in the play, but that particular omission will, I hope, be forgiven me.

  The school is not a fee-paying grammar school such as Leeds or Manchester, which are both represented at the Headmasters’ Conference and count as public schools. This, though, is what Mr Armstrong, the headmaster in the play, would aspire to, just as my own headteacher did all those years ago. I’m old fashioned enough to believe they private education should long since have been abolished and that Britain has paid too high a price in social inequality for its public schools. At the same time, I can’t see that public schools could be abolished (even if there was the will) without an enormous amount of social disruption. The proper way forward would be for state education to reach such a standard that private schools would be under-subscribed, but there’s fat chance of that, particularly under the present administration. The same hope, of course ought to animate the National Health Service, but the
future for that seems equally bleak.

  These days getting into Oxford or Cambridge or indeed any university is only the beginning of the story. Money has to be found, earned, donated by parents, borrowed from the bank or wherever student loans currently come from. It’s a sizeable hurdle, and one my generation were happy to be without, if we ever gave it a thought. At that time acceptance by a university or any institution of higher learning automatically brought with it a grant from the state or the local authority. The names of the recipients of such grants would be printed in the local paper, occasionally with their photographs, the underlying assumption being that the names of these students should be known because they had done the state or the county some service and would now go on to do more. There was genuine pride in such achievements and in the free education that had made them possible – particularly perhaps in Leeds, which had an outstanding Education Department.

  I am told that I am naive or unrealistic, but I do not understand why we cannot afford such a system today. As a nation we are poorer for the lack of it, the latest round in that lost fight the bullying through of the bill on top-up fees with this so-called Labour Government stamping on the grave of what it was once thought to stand for. Though there is much that is called education nowadays that is nothing of the sort and doesn’t deserve subsidy, yet I still hold to the belief that a proper education should be free at the point of entry and the point of exit.

  Some of these views can be put down to the circumstances of my own education but also to a book which made a great impression on me as a young man. This was Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1955), and in particular his account of growing up in the slums of Leeds, going to Cockburn High School, and eventually to Leeds University, where be was taught by Bonamy Dobree. It was a harder childhood than mine (and an earlier one) but it was reading Hoggart forty years ago that made me feel that my life, dull though it was, might be made the stuff of literature. The Uses of Literacy spawned a series of books, one of which, Education and the Working Class by Jackson and Marsden, included a study of sixth form boys who had made it to university but not done well there, the conclusion being that the effort of getting to university often took so much out of working-class boys that once there they were exhausted. This is one of Posner’s complaints in the play.

  ‘The scholarship boy,’ writes Hoggart, ‘has been equipped for hurdle-jumping, so he merely thinks of getting on, but somehow not in the world’s way … He has left his class, at least in spirit, by being in certain ways unusual, and he is still unusual in another class, too tense and overwound, I had forgotten this passage until I found it quoted in Injury Time, one of the commonplace books of D. J. Enright, who must also have found it relevant to his own case.

  Things have changed since Hoggart was writing, and the boys in the play are more privileged than Hoggart, Enright or me, but I suspect hurdle-jumping hasn’t much changed, or the strain it engenders, though maybe it shows itself less in terms of class.

  At Oxford in the late fifties some of the teaching I did was for Magdalen (which explains why it is occasionally mentioned in the text). One year I was also drafted in to help mark and interview candidates for the history scholarships. It didn’t seem all that long since I had been interviewed myself, and I was nervous lest my marks should differ from those of my more experienced colleagues by whom I was every bit as intimidated as the candidates were.

  I needn’t have worried, though, as apart from the papers of authentic Wykehamist brilliance, the other promising candidates were virtually self-selecting, one’s attention always caught by oddity, extremity and flair just as Irwin foresees. Whether these candidates were genuine originals or (like the boys in the play) coached into seeming so, the interview was meant to show up, but I’m not sure it always did. It was the triumph of Irwin.

  Candidates do well in examinations for various reasons, some from genuine ability, obviously, but others because doing well in examinations is what they do well; they can put on a show. Maybe it doesn’t work like that now that course work is taken into consideration and more weight is given to solider virtues. But it has always struck me that some of the flashier historians, particularly on television, are just grown-up versions of the wised-up schoolboys who generally got the scholarships (myself included). Here is R. W. Johnson, himself an historian, reviewing Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War:

  Both The Pity of War and the reception it has enjoyed illustrate aspects of British culture about which one can only feel ambivalent. Anyone who has been a victim, let alone a perpetrator, of the Oxbridge system will recognise Niall Ferguson’s book for what it is: an extended and argumentative tutorial from a self-consciously clever, confrontational young don, determined to stand everything on its head and argue with vehemence against what he sees as the conventional wisdom – or worse still, the fashion – of the time. The idea is to teach the young to think and argue, and the real past masters at it (Harry Weldon [Senior Tutor at Magdalen] was always held up as an example to me) were those who first argued undergraduates out of their received opinions, then turned around after a time and argued them out of their newfound radicalism, leaving them mystified as to what they believed and suspended in a free-floating state of cleverness.

  R.W. Johnson, London Review of Books,

  18 February 1999

  I had friends at Magdalen who went through this dialectical de-briefing in their first year and it used to worry me that nothing remotely similar happened at Exeter. Nothing much happened at all until my third year, when in the nick of time I began to get grips with it myself. Still, I never thought of this as a proper education, just a way of getting through the examinations.

  These considerations have acquired a more general interest as history has become more popular both on the page and on the screen. The doyen of TV historians, Simon Schama, is in a league of his own, and his political viewpoint is not in the forefront, but the new breed of historians – Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and Norman Stone – all came to prominence under Mrs Thatcher and share some of her characteristics. Having found that taking the contrary view pays dividends, they seem to make this the tone of their customary discourse. A sneer is never far away and there’s a persistently jeering note, perhaps bred by the habit of contention. David Starkey sneers too, but I feel this is more cosmetic.

  None of this posing, though, is altogether new. A. J. P. Taylor was its original exponent, certainly on television, and was every bit as pleased with himself as the new breed of history boys. Still, with nothing else to put in the frame but his own personality and with no graphics and no film, he had perhaps more excuse for hamming it up a bit. His pleasure at his own technique, the flawless delivery (no autocue) and the winding-up of the lecture to the very second allotted were reasons enough for watching him, regardless of whatever history it was he was purveying. Even with him, though, the paradoxes and the contrari-ousness could get wearisome, certainly in the lecture hall, where I remember nodding off during one of his Ford Lectures.

  Irwin’s career path might seem odd. Schoolmaster to TV don is plausible enough, but from lecturing about the Dissolution of the Monasteries to Government spokesperson is a bit of a leap, though there are odder episodes in the early career of Alastair Campbell. No subject was further from my mind when I began to write the play, and it was only as I sat in on Irwin’s classes, as it were, that I saw that teaching history or teaching the self-presentation involved with the examination of history was not unrelated to presentation in general.

  The rehearsals for the plays were unusual in that the eight young actors playing the sixth-formers had to learn not only the parts they had to act but also what they meant. The play is stiff with literary and historical references, many of which, at first reading anyway, meant little to the actors. The early stages of rehearsal were therefore more like proper school than a stage version of it.

  They read and talked about Auden, a favourite of Hector’s in the play (though not of Mrs Lintott). Auden kee
ps being quoted, so we read and discussed some of his poems and the circumstances of his life. Hardy was another subject for tutorials, leading on to Larkin much as happens in the last scene of Act One. The First and Second Wars figure largely in the play, as they seemed to do on the classroom walls of the schools we visited to get some local colour before rehearsals started, so the period 1914–45 was also much discussed. I normally get impatient when there’s a lot of talking before rehearsals proper start, but with this play it was essential.

  Maybe, too, it says something about the status of the actor. Half a lifetime ago my first play, Forty Years On, though about a very different sort of school, was as full of buried quotations and historical allusion as The History Boys. Back in 1968, though, there was never any question of educating the score or so boys that made up Albion House School. We never, that I recall, filled them in on who Virginia Woolf was or put them in the picture about Lady Ottoline Morrell. Sapper, Buchan, Osbert Sitwell – to the boys these must have been names only, familiar to the principal players, John Gielgud and Paul Eddington, but as remote to the rest of the cast as historical figures in Shakespeare. This omission was partly because with only four weeks to rehearse there wasn’t time to tell them more, but also because in those days actors were treated with less consideration than they are now, at any rate at the National Theatre.

  But these early rehearsals with Nicholas Hytner taking the class were a reminder that good directors are often good teachers (Ronald Eyre is another example) and that theatre is often at its most absorbing when it’s school.

  Always beneath the play you write is the play you meant to write; changed but not abandoned and, with luck, not betrayed, but shadowing still the play that has come to be.