Winchester College: the makyth of a man
On my first day at Winchester College, I walked into the wrong room. Instead of going with my soon-to-be classmates into our classroom to meet our Div don¹ , I went to a talk given by the Second Master² for the parents. So rather than a gentle introduction to my classmates and what we would cover over the year, I was treated to fire and brimstone: your children are not here to have fun, they will not have time for fun, they are here to work, and they are here to work hard. I spent the rest of the day begging my dad not to make me stay.
I spent five years at Winchester. In the end, I walked away with a complex that I have never truly understood or overcome. The common explanation for people being drawn back to their school is it was when they peaked. Yet, outside of my circle of friends, I left little mark on the place during my time there.
Academically, I was lazy, securing middling grades and entry to a reasonable university in an uncompetitive subject. In sport, my achievements extended to captaining the school hockey team for one match³ and scoring a crucial goal in an inter-house football match⁴. Musically… the less said the better. In short, I was an unremarkable Wykehamist.
And yet it keeps drawing me back. The summer after leaving, a friend and I wrote a play about our last night there. For my master’s dissertation I wrote on how my old boarding house had evolved over the generations.
Then two years ago, I found myself, quite by chance, in town with a spare afternoon when Winchester Cathedral was holding the annual Founder’s Obit service⁶. I found myself compelled to attend. I can only conclude that there is something special about the school that leads to this constant revisiting.
Wykeham founded the school in 1394, with many of the original buildings still standing today. He declared that there would be 70 scholars who would be fully paid for, all of whom should be “paupers et indigentes… habiles et ydonei” (poor and needy… able and suitable)⁷.
His motto of Manners Makyth Man was adopted as the school’s motto⁸, while two centuries later the hircocervus, also known as the Trusty Servant, was adopted as the school mascot⁹ . The school developed its own microculture, playing a game no-one else played¹⁰ and creating a whole new language of “notions”¹¹. Another level down, each boarding house created and preserved their own traditions¹².
Over the years Winchester became known for producing intellectually curious, but reserved men — Evelyn Waugh described Wykehamists as likely to unwind by writing alaic verse on the moving parts of toy trains. Despite serving the same class as the likes of Eton and Harrow and having existed for longer, Wykehamists have left little mark on the wider public consciousness. Notably, Winchester has produced a solitary Prime Minister¹³ in the shape of the eminently forgettable Henry Addington.
More famous is the endless stream of civil servants. The archetypal mandarin Humphrey Appleby in Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister was an Old Wykehamist (OW), while the real-life foreign office had so many OWs that they adopted the term “Wykehamist fallacy”¹⁴. Meanwhile, there is an endless and ever-expanding list of Wykehamists that have had remarkable impacts across science, the arts, and the humanities, yet never entered the public consciousness¹⁵.
A lead article in a 1920 edition of the school magazine attempted to reverse this:
“Up, therefore, you stately Etonian-loving Wykehamists! be not so reticent in penmanship about your great school. Belaud her in your books, raise her name to the sky in newspaper articles.”
This cry went unheeded then and Wykehamists are unlikely to change any time soon. The flaunting of social status has been taboo for decades and few are willing to bring up their privilege. To outsiders, Winchester is like any other public school and increasingly it is.
When researching my dissertation, I came across this quote from 1936¹⁶:
“If ever the time comes when our Notions are no longer in living use… …then Winchester College may be a better place or a worse; but it will be profoundly different, and it will be a school about which no more books will be written.”
That old mysterious world has crumbled, the vestiges of what remains are fading away, and we wait for the final stones to fall. The use of Notions has fallen as pupils have more exposure to the outside world. There is greater focus on exam results over learning for learning’s sake. Rising school fees have made the application pool smaller and less selective.
With the costs of running a school rising well above inflation and greater focus on exam results from wider society, perhaps these changes are inevitable; perhaps identity is a small price to pay for long-term financial stability. Yet hidden beneath the rubble, you can still catch glimpses of a school worth writing about.
When I was a boy at Winchester, there were some who hadn’t realised it was over. I think of our polyglot history teacher who decided to excavate a playing field and could do one handed push-ups, the maths teacher who was a published poet and delighted in telling of his various sexual awakenings, or the Latin teacher who would tear you apart for forgetting declensions one minute then invite you round for a cup of tea at her house to discuss classical history the next. Those were the people keeping the idea of Winchester alive. They delighted in knowledge and in the pursuit of knowledge, exam results be damned.
I remember passing an American lady on a tour of the school. Confronted by this network of buildings older than her country, she broke down into tears. “It’s just so beautiful” she said.
She wasn’t wrong. The heart of the school contains buildings that have escorted dozens of Wykehamical generations, shaping countless lives for good and for ill. From the original 14th century Chamber Court, Cloisters, and Chapel, via the 17th century Christopher Wren-inspired School¹⁸ and the 19th century Flint Court to the 20th century War Cloisters, you are constantly surrounded by buildings steeped in the past.
These buildings are curious. You know how old they are, you know that they were built by someone at some point, and yet they feel like they have always been there. Even as an emotionally stunted teenager, you cannot help but be intensely aware that these buildings are overseeing your every move as they absorb you into their history.
Now, as an emotionally stunted adult, I still feel myself as part of that history. The intellectual curiosity, that sense that everything was out there to be discovered and treasured, the confidence in our ability to find it in this little cradle of learning… When I think of Winchester, I yearn to recapture that feeling. But does it still exist? Did it ever exist? Or is that part of the magic — to trick you into believing that such a place existed and you were part of it?
Of course, I cannot return. None of us can. School is but a transitory moment in life that is over before we can fully appreciate it. Even were I to return as a teacher or a parent, that atmosphere would be out of reach. All that remains is a glorified vision of the past and the idea that such a place could, and did, exist.
- Class tutor
- Deputy Headmaster
- No other top year students were available.
- Achieved while playing for the Zs, a team made up of those who hadn’t been picked for their house team. It helped us avoid defeat for the only time that year.
- Mugging Hall is where all house meetings took place as well as where those in the first two years worked.
- Known by the boys of the school, inevitably, as Founder’s Hobbit, it is an annual commemoration service for the school’s founder, William of Wykeham.
- This noble ideal had been long abandoned by the 18th century. In 2003, two pupils gained possession of emails showing the school was conspiring with other leading public schools to raise the price of school fees. They were expelled.
- As watchers of the Kingsman franchise will know, the motto means that it is your character, rather than your wealth or birth, that defines your worth.
- The poem that was added to the mythical beast’s official portrait further explains what the school expects of its offspring:
“A trusty servant’s picture would you see,
This figure well survey, who’ever you be.
The porker’s snout not nice in diet shows;
The padlock shut, no secret he’ll disclose;
Patient, to angry lords the ass gives ear;
Swiftness on errand, the stag’s feet declare;
Laden his left hand, apt to labour saith;
The coat his neatness; the open hand his faith;
Girt with his sword, his shield upon his arm,
Himself and master he’ll protect from harm.”
10. Winchester College Football aka WinCoFo aka Winkies.
11. For example, one didn’t go to school, but rather “up to books”; nor did one go to the dining room, but rather the “grubbing hall”; the communal central room in the boarding house was the “mugging hall”; and it was very disappointing to discover that “toytime” was actually when you had to do your homework.
12. Some good: an annual drunken game of Winkies played in outrageous attire at the crack of dawn; others less so: free staircase rides locked in a trunk.
13. Stand-fast Rishi Sunak.
14. Used to describe civil servants who mistakenly believed that those they dealt with would uphold the same gentlemanly principles that they did.
15. Stand-fast Kenneth Clarke.
16. d’Firth, J (1936) Winchester.
17. The cobbles are more recent: the previous cobbles were used as ammunition against staff during one of several riots/sieges that troubled the school in the 18th and early 19th century.
18. The school has often tried to muddy the waters and say it could have been designed by Wren, but it is generally accepted to be the work of one of his students.
