The Rest Is History - 367. The Real Harry Potter: Magic, Empire and Beastly Bullies

Episode Date: September 10, 2023

Eclectic traditions, obscure codes and cryptic ancient languages: the world of Harry Potter has captivated the imagination of children from all backgrounds for decades. A fantasy series inspired by a long lineage of stories, from Tolkien to Narnia, all committed to the importance of the building of moral character. Join Tom and Dominic in the first part of our series on Harry Potter, as they trace the roots of J.K. Rowling’s novels, and demystify the world of eminent headmasters, weird sports, prefects and houses. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Research: William Finlator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Dear Mr. Potter, We are pleased to inform ye that ye have a place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment. Term begins on the 1st of September. We await your all by no later than the 31st of July. Yours sincerely,

Minerva McGonagall, Deputy Headmistress. So that, Dominic, as the half a billion people who I gather have read Harry Potter across the world will need no telling, is from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, published in 1997. And as the author of The Great British Dream Factory, The Strange History of Our National Imagination, a book that looks at the impact of British culture on the imagination of the world, how would you rate the impact of J.K. Rowling? Well, first of all, everybody, I'm so sorry. I actually suggested to Tom that he do that in a Scottish accent. And now I've paid the price, I suppose.

Well, it was the accent of Maggie Smith. Right. Of course, plays Miss McGonagall in the film. Is it Miss McGonagall? Miss McGonagall, it must be. Professor Tom. Professor McGonagall. Give her a title. You're doing that thing that people always do with female academics, aren't you? You're downgrading them.

Yes, I am. I apologize. It was a more sophisticated impression then than I gave it credit for. You're doing Maggie Smith doing a voice, aren't you downgrading them yes i am i apologize it was a more sophisticated impression than i gave it credit for because you know you're doing maggie smith doing a voice aren't you yes so harry potter it's an extraordinary phenomenon isn't it and um i underrated it actually in that book you talked about the great british dream factory and i think i was wrong you're very rude about it i was wrong because harry potter um has a claim it's one of the single most important stories in the minds of people under the age of, what, 30, 35, who've grown up with these stories. And one of the reasons J.K. Rowling is now so controversial is that for some people, she had the status of a kind of moral

teacher, didn't she? Yes. And a lot of people will say, I got my moral code from Harry Potter. Yes. So it's not just entertainment. It carries this kind of charge, which has always been the case with some children's stories, as we will see in this podcast. Because Dominic, a question. Do stories about people going away to boarding schools that carry a hefty moral charge, is this something that J.K.

Rowling has invented? No. Or does it have a long lineage? That's a lovely link, Tom. Absolutely beautifully unscripted. It does have a long lineage. So when you advertised this episode on social media, you said we were going to be talking about the origins of Harry Potter,

the stories behind Harry Potter. I saw there were a stream of replies in which people were saying, are you going to talk about this? Are you going to talk about that? And there's a whole load of books that people have pointed to in the past. So the stories of Enid Blyton, the Narnia stories or Tolkien, The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper. Have you read that, Tom? I have. In your book, you also cite Sword in the Stone. Sword in the Stone by T.H. White. People point to The Worst Witch by Jill Murphy,

the Crestomancy stories by Diana Wynne-Jones, or the Discworld stories by Terry Pratchett. And I think one of the reasons for J.K. Rowling's success actually is she wove lots of elements of those stories. Or you could say that she is drawing on the material that all those other authors are also drawing on. Yes. So at his heart, I think, I would argue, and I'm not the first person to argue this by any means, at the heart of Harry Potter is a school story. I mean, that is the essential trajectory of the story. It's a coming-of-age story in which, I mean, who listening to this doesn't know that Harry is an orphan who grows up under the stairs in his kind of foster family's suburban house.

And he has this remarkable letter that you read out so beautifully at the beginning of the program. And off he goes to school, to a boarding school, to learn witchcraft and wizardry. And that device, the boy who goes from kind of obscurity, discovers the school, this extraordinary medieval building, is introduced to new friends, to the school bully, to scary teachers, to new codes, to a secret language, all of that kind of stuff. That is a very old device in British fiction. So Dominic, could I just read a passage from a novel that I read over the weekend in preparation for recording this episode? Do Tom, I'd love that. And it describes a boy going to a boarding school, very like Harry Potter goes to Hogwarts.

Tom followed his guide through the schoolhouse hall, which opens into the quadrangle. It is a great room, 30 feet long and 18 high or thereabouts, with two great tables running the whole length and two large fireplaces at the side with blazing fires in them. Obviously, I don't need to tell you, of all people, that that comes from Tom Brown's school days, written by Thomas Hughes, published in 1857, and a book of which you say, it is hard to think of many other Victorian books, indeed many other books of any era, that have left such a deep imprint on the British imagination. Yeah, I stand by what I said. You agree with yourself? I agree with myself. Shocking scenes. So Tom Brown's School Days, for people who don't know, as I said,

written in the 1850s, it is a foundational text of Victorian Britain, and not just of Victorian Britain, of schools all around the world. It's a foundational text of the culture of international sport. Yeah, so the Olympics and all that comes from this, doesn't it? Organized sports, of the idea of manliness, the idea of service, of moral character, all of these things. It's one of the best-selling books in any genre of the idea of manliness, the idea of service, of moral character, all of these things. It's one of the best-selling books in any genre of the 19th century. As late as 1940, it was still one of the top four books read by British children after Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, and I think it's something that maybe Gulliver's Travels or something like that. So I had never read it.

I have read Flashman, who is the bully in Tom Brown's school days, who tosses Tom Brown in a blanket and roasts him in front of a fire and all kinds of things like that. And it becomes the hero of George MacDonald Fraser's series of novels in which Flashman, this coward, poltroon and bully, becomes a much garlanded hero. And so I had always assumed from that that Tom Brown himself was a terrible kind of wuss and a wet, but actually he isn't at all. And the story is great. I mean, it's very, very gripping. I really enjoyed it.

Well, it's effective with the story. It's all school stories. It is, yes. So Tom arrives. Well, just to give you a sense of the story, I suppose, before we talk about the story behind the story. So Tom is from rural Berkshire. He's a kind of kind-hearted athletic boy, a bit of a sort of a rascal.

His father, the squire, when Tom is 11, decides to send him to rugby school to make a gentleman of him, I suppose. And to make a man of him. And to make a man of him. And Tom goes to rugby. He falls in with a friend straight away, his version of Ron Weasley, Harry Potter's friend. His friend is called Harry- Scud East.

Scud East. Yeah. There's a school bully, a Draco Malfoy, who is Harry Flashman, who then becomes the hero of his own series of novels. Tom goes through a series of trials. He cheats, doesn't he, in his lessons and ends up reforming. He adopts a boy called George Arthur, who is a cross between, if you've read Harry Potter, for the Harry Potter fans, he's like a cross between Dobby the House Elf and Neville Longbottom, so Harry's useless friend. He's a kind of angelic swat, isn't he? He is.

I was very amused to see that evidence for his swattishness is that he reads Herodotus for pleasure. Well, not only that, Tom. Most famously, he prays, doesn't he? Yes, he does. He prays by his bedside. He shames the other boys into praying by there. But this is a tremendously transformative moment for Tom Brown. So he previously

hasn't been praying. He's been embarrassed to do it. And he is shamed by this weedy little wretch into praying every night. It's a very, I find it quite a moving scene, Tom, because I kind of admire

that moral earnestness. Well, now I find out. Yeah. After whatever, 350 episodes of you bullying me like Flashman. Exactly. Tom because I kind of admire that moral earnestness well now I find out yeah after whatever 350 episodes of you climbing me like flashback exactly if you just mention this you bring a tear to my eye see there's the final scene which is a cricket match isn't it climb the climax is a cricket match yeah brilliant where Tom puts uh George Arthur into into bat doesn't he and he does really quite well he does all right they lose though don't they they still lose yeah they still lose but

that's fine you know it's playing the game and all right. They lose though, don't they? They still lose. Yeah, they still lose, but that's fine. You know, it's playing the game. And also they have a brilliant boxing match, don't they? They do. With Slugger Williams. Bizarre. There's going to be a fight. Oh, Slugger Williams, between Slugger Williams and Tom Brown.

And the Slugger is massive. Yeah. Absolute, you know, Mike Tyson or whatever. But the Slugger looks rather sodden as if he didn't take much exercise and ate too much tuft. Oh, no. That's shocking scenes. So the story behind the story is that this is written by a guy called Thomas Hughes.

Thomas Hughes, you would love Thomas Hughes, Tom. He's a fascinating man. He himself had been a pupil at rugby school. He went on to become a lawyer and a liberal MP. And would you believe he tried to set up a kind of utopian society in Tennessee? Did you know this? God, so many of our people are doing it. Ignatius Donnelly, who wrote about Atlantis, did something very similar, didn't he?

He did. So Thomas Hughes tried to set up a utopian society in Tennessee with its own library in croquet lawn and newspaper. But not cricket pitch. But do you know what he called it, Tom? No. Rugby Tennessee. Rugby Tennessee.

Brilliant. And he was a great enthusiast for muscular Christianity. So this idea that you would teach Christian principles and kind of sporting prowess side by side, a healthy mind and a healthy body. And Thomas Hughes would tour the land, not just the land, but he would go up specifically to northern towns, the kind of towns actually that ended up having football clubs later on, kind of Premier League championship football clubs. He would go up there and preach the gospel, not just of Christianity, but of sport. And that's, of course, why I think sport is such a

major part and sport as forming character. Well, so many of the earliest football teams derive from churches. One thinks of Aston Villa, for instance. Yes. Founded by Methodists. Wolves, my team, I think was founded by a church. Everton was founded by a church. Sports and religion were very, very closely interwoven in the 19th century. It's thanks to the preaching of people like Thomas Hughes. It doesn't seem to me that it's about becoming too much of a Christian. It's also about becoming a decent chap.

Yes, it is. Absolutely. And the key about Tom Brown is right from the beginning, he is a decent chap. So Scud East, when he meets him, says, this is on his first day, a great deal depends on how a fellow cuts up at first. If he's got nothing odd about him and answers straightforward and holds his head up, he gets on. And that is basically the kind of ideal that underruns all of it, that you don't want to be actually too brilliant at anything. This is Harry Potter, Tom. Harry Potter want to be actually too brilliant at anything. This is Harry Potter, Tom.

Harry Potter is actually, he's not especially academic. He is brilliant at sports. He's extraordinarily gifted at Quidditch. We'll come on to talk about Quidditch. Cock of the school is the slang in Tom Brown's school days for chief jock. Yes. Cock of the school is probably not a nickname you would welcome now at a British public school, is it? Well, and another expostulation, which is what the senior boys say to the young boys is, you young muff. And of course, shall I tell you how Tom Brown is described? Do. And this

will be particularly shocking to our American listeners. The most reckless young scapegrace among the fags. Yes. So fagging is a really important part of school stories. Do you want to explain what fags are for our American listeners? A younger boy will act as basically a servant to an older boy, and they'll be assigned to the older boy as his fag. That means they will have to bring him toast. They'll have to shine his shoes. They'll have to do errands for him, carry messages,

all of these kinds of things. So fagging, yes, our American listeners will find this hilarious because of the connotations of the word, but fagging persisted in British schools until after the Second World War and then was eventually phased out. So Tom Brown is very obviously the template for Harry Potter. He's a slightly bland, but generally decent and admirable boy who goes through this rite of passage to make him a man through a series of trials. But the other thing, of course, is that a key part of Tom Brown's school days is the influence of the headmaster. So you mentioned Dumbledore. Dumbledore is a huge figure in

Harry Potter. It's Gandalf Merlin-like figure who is the headmaster of the school. And Tom Brown's school days has its own Dumbledore in a character called Dr. Arnold, a real life person. So the person who had been Thomas Hughes's headmaster. Dr. Arnold lived from 1795 to 1842. He was head of rugby from 1828 to 1841. And he really, do you think I'm exaggerating, Tom, when I say he's one of the absolute founding fathers of the Victorian age, the Victorian ethos? No, not at all.

I mean, he is absolutely a towering figure, isn't he? And influential, as you said earlier on, not just on Britain, but on the ideals of sport and manliness and all that kind of thing that the British Empire exports. Yeah. So he becomes a myth, Dr. Arnold. So for those people who are listening to this podcast and think, well, this is two public school boys talking about public schools and they think this is terribly interesting, but it's not very important to anybody else. Dr. Arnold would have been a name recognisable to almost any educated person. Certainly in Britain and beyond Britain, actually, his influence was carried into the colonies, into the United States and so on. Because Baron de Coubertin is directly influenced by his example in setting up the Olympics, isn't he? He carried with him Tom Brown's school days. And he said, what Dr. Arnold did at rugby school is one of the great transformations in all cultural history. Coubertin was obsessed with Thomas Arnold, as so many people were. How does he have this stature?

I mean, you know, a head of a school. I mean, it seems an odd. Yeah. You couldn't imagine that happening now. Arnold had been himself educated as a boarding school at Winchester, arguably the first true public school, which we'll talk about much later on. Arnold himself, on his first night at Winchester, which you believe, Tom, he had knelt and prayed by his bedside and he'd been physically attacked by the other boys for doing so, which is very

heartening. Was he tossed in a blanket? Yeah, roasted over a fire. Arnold became one of the great kind of advocates of political liberalism and anglicanism broad church anglicanism in the middle of the 19th century he's appointed to that to be head of rugby school in 1828 he almost quintuples the number of boys at the school and he has this extraordinary project which now i into some degree, I think, because so many schools are not just private schools, bear Arnold's imprint. We take for granted, but the time was truly radical. He argued that schools should be laboratories to turn out little Christian men, and that the

important thing in school was not to fill your mind with stuff, with education. It was to form your character, your moral character. So he says, his first comment on being appointed to the headmaster of rugby, he said, my object will be, if possible, to form Christian men. And in his book, Tom Brown's School Days, Thomas Hughes writes of the tall gallant form, the kindling eye, the voice now soft as the low notes of a flute, now clear and stirring as the call of the light infantry bugle of him who stood there Sunday after Sunday, witnessing and pleading for his Lord. And this idea that the headmaster

of the school was going to become this kind of great, almost this evangelist, this idea of Christian manhood. And he would send out legions of boys to be Christian men to govern Britain and its empire. This absolutely caught the imagination of the Victorians. So Arnold was an inspirational figure. And the interesting thing about him is, when Harry arrives at Hogwarts, he's already been told that there is this sort of, this undercurrent of danger in the character of Voldemort, who is the Dark Lord, and there's the dark arts, and there's this kind of evil. But Arnold absolutely believed this. I mean, he didn't call it Voldemort. For him, it was sin. So he thought that all teenage boys were threatened by sin. And actually, to be a teenage boy was kind of sinful in itself.

So he said there are six sins endemic among schoolboys, profligacy, falsehood, cruelty, disobedience, idleness, and the bond of evil. I thought there was going to be another sin. Go on, Tom. I know the way your mind works. To which teenage boys were particularly prone. No. So people don't care about this in the 1840s. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking about teenage boys being beastly, aren't you? I'm thinking of onanism and beastliness. Don't worry. You'll get your beastliness. Okay. But you aren't worried about beastliness at this stage because they're not over-obsessed with sexuality. So for Arnold, it's more amorphous than that. It's telling lies and

not doing your bit and cheating and all these kinds of things. And he believes that life is a constant struggle to overcome this sin. And this is obviously what lots of Christians believe. And that he can guide the boys towards a sort of higher state. And the way he would do that is through a character called Percy Weasley. Do you know the Harry Potter books very well, Tom? Do you know who Percy Weasley is? I can't, they all blur. So Percy Weasley is Ron Weasley's older brother. And at the beginning of the book, he's introduced to us, Harry's cashing the train and the Weasleys are there. And the Weasleys are all giving Percy a bit of grief because he's actually going to be a prefect. And Arnold wanted to use the prefect system. So being a prefect is very important. So being a prefect is being a senior boy who acts as a kind of conduit between the headmaster and the other boys. There had always

been prefects. So in the 14th century, when Winchester College was set up, there were prefects there, senior boys who kind of represent the boys. Derived from Merton College at Oxford. Exactly. Yes. Arnold's idea was that the prefects would actually now be, instead of leading revolts against the headmaster, they would be working for him. And he calls them, or his disciples call them an aristocracy of talent and worth. So the prefects would dine with Arnold and they would sort of marshal the other boys and lead them towards better behavior. So a question then, to go to a public school, you have to pay for it. That's why they're called public. They're open to everybody who can afford it. Who can afford it, yeah. So by definition, people who go to these public schools are from the elites. Is Arnold

self-consciously training them to go out and govern Britain and to govern various parts of the world that have been painted pink? Is that an idea that he is training a moral elite? I don't think it's an obsession for Arnold, but it becomes an obsession for, as it were, the myth of Arnold. So Arnold himself is not, I think, as interested in the empire as his successors are. Not looking at the empire then, just looking at Britain. Is he thinking, it's important that I do this, not just for the sake of the souls of the individual boys, but for the good of the entire country the individual boys, but for the good of the entire country. Oh yeah, undoubtedly. Undoubtedly, all public school headmasters

are conscious that they are training an elite of boys who are going to become cabinet ministers, churchmen. I mean, if you look at the kind of people who go to public schools in the 18th and 19th centuries, they all go on to become generals, to become the governors of colonies, to become MPs, all of these kinds of things. Absolutely, they do. So in Harry Potter, Dumbledore has a host of kind of disciples. They call themselves Dumbledore's army, the people who kind of worship Dumbledore, who want to carry on his example. So does Arnold. So the heads of schools like Marlborough and Harrow, the headmaster of producer Jack's

old school, King Edward's Birmingham, he was a disciple of Arnold's. And these people go out and for the next 50 years or so, they create this kind of regime of Arnoldian schools. So almost every school in Britain, every private school in Britain is true to Arnold's ethos. And grammar schools, right, as well. So to explain for overseas listeners, grammar schools are open to everybody, but you have to get in on basis of exams. Yes. So grammar schools will be in a small town. Shakespeare went to a grammar school. They were initially set up to teach really Latin, but you're not necessarily boarding as a grammar

school. Well, you're not boarding as a grammar school. But the grammar schools increasingly kind of ape the grammar school. Well, you're not boarding as a grammar school. But the grammar schools increasingly kind of ape the rugby look. Oh, absolutely they do. Prefects. In the second half of this episode, we're going to go through lots of the aspects of the Harry Potter stories, the sport, the boarding houses, and talk about the history of those. Schools, not just in Britain, but across the world, copy what they see as Arnold's formula. And where they're getting Arnold's formula from is from Tom Brown's school days. So it came out, as we said, in 1857. It sold 11,000 copies in

its first year. It has been through 52 editions within about 35 years. You mentioned Pierre de Coubertin already. He talked to the powerful figure of Thomas Arnold, the glorious contour of his incomparable work. I mean, de Coubert is absolutely obsessed with Arnold, as we said. Just two more examples to give you a sense of the massive impact. One, 1911, so this is after Britain has set up state schools, which at this point didn't exist. In 1911, the British Board of Education recommended that every single school in Britain must have a copy of Tom Brown's School Days in its library as an example to the pupils. The other example, one of the first most influential boarding school set up in India, which is Rajkumar College, founded in 1870. The headmaster of that school used to read out, Tom, it will please you, the cricketing passages

from Tom Brown School Days at school assemblies instead of Christian sermons, because he thought it would better influence the boys to become upstanding gentlemen. I was reading that Tom Brown school days was used in Japan after the Japanese had opened up to the world and were trying to learn English. Boys would be set to translate Tom Brown school days into Japanese, but they would omit the detail of the cricket match because that was too challenging. That's really? I couldn't see that. So that's where Japan went wrong. So Tom Brown's School Days, just the last few minutes of this half of the episode,

Tom Brown's School Days becomes the template for a host of stories that are, I would argue, by far the most influential stories on children in Britain, and indeed in the British environment more broadly, between, let's say, 1860 and 1950 or 1960 or so. And these are the school stories that are colossally, colossally popular. So the most famous examples of this in something like the Boys' Own Paper. The Boys' Own Paper, we still talk, don't we, in Britain, of Boys' Own Stories, stories of pluck and daring do. The Boys' Own Paper sold a quarter of a million copies, and each copy was read by about four children. So its readership was about one million. Extraordinary. And the weird thing about that is that it's being read by children who have no prospect of going to an ivy-clad Gothic public school.

Yeah, I find this absolutely fascinating. So the other two great publications that sort of embodied the school story were The Magnet and The Gem. So these were boys' papers. By the way, they are read by girls and there are girls' equivalents of them. And they are in the 1900s, 1910s, 1920s. George Orwell wrote a brilliant essay about them, about school stories and about their influence. The most famous series of stories that run in them are the Greyf, about school stories and about their influence. The most famous series of stories that run in them are the Grave for Eyes school stories starring Billy Bunter. And those stories are read by people from all across the social spectrum. As you say, Tom,

they have far more readers who will never, ever go within 10 miles of a boarding school than they are boarding school boys. And they're being read in the colonies, aren't they? So I think of C.L.R. James, the great Marxist historian of cricket, and there aren't enough Marxist historians of cricket, but he was hugely influenced by them in his approach. I mean, he's influenced by Marx, and he's influenced by Thomas Hughes. It's such a weird blend. I'm glad you mentioned C.L.R. James. So C.L.R. James went to a school called Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain. He's arguably the greatest intellectual that the

Caribbean, well, one of the greatest intellectuals that the Caribbean ever produced. His brilliant book, The Black Jacobin, as you say, great Marxist historian, great writer on cricket. And in his autobiography, Beyond a Boundary, he talks about Thomas Arnold's legacy. And he says, one of the most fantastic transformations in the history of education and of culture. And he says of the code of kind of manliness, decency, fair play, team spirit that he got from the school stories, he says, from the eight years of school life, this code became the moral framework of my existence. It has never left me. I learned it as a boy. I have obeyed it as a man,

and now I can no longer laugh at it. It's such an odd fusion, isn't it? The Marxism that inspired him throughout his adult life seems absolutely to have interfused with that public school spirit. Yeah. So Tom, just before we go into the break, lots of the younger people listening to this will think back with similar fondness, I would say, to the Harry Potter stories. Thomas Hughes said at Tom Brown School Days that he wrote it to get the chance of preaching. And the Harry Potter stories are quite preachy books. So the moral lessons that each book kind of provides. J.K. Rowling was doing nothing unprecedented at all. And there were lots of stories in between, school stories that did exactly the same thing.

So the Greyfriars stories, for example, the stories of Harry Wharton and his friends. So we will be talking about them, by the way. I'm obsessed by these stories, as you know. I'm absolutely obsessed. I do. And I will be talking more about them in our bonus episode for Rest Is History Club members,

which will be out either tomorrow or Wednesday. So if you are not a member of the Rest Is History Club and you pine to hear me talking about Billy Bunter. The fat owl of the removed. The fat owl of the removed. This is your chance. So these stories were enormously influential on working class children. In his brilliant book, The Intellectual Life of the English Working Classes, Jonathan Rose, great historian, has loads of examples of incredibly implausible people who found these stories, their equivalent, these were their Bible. They drew their moral code from these stories. I'll give you two examples.

One, a boy growing up in the South Wales coalfield called a Nairn Bevan, the founder of our beloved National Health Service, Tom. And Nairn Bevan worked as a butcher's boy. And he would go to the newsagent every week to pick up his copies of The Magnet and The Gem, full of boarding school stories. His father, a miner, banned them from the house. This was very common. Because they were seen as being badly written or because the kind of moral lessons were disapproved of? Often parents would regard the misbehaviour of boys in the story.

Stealing jam, fighting, falling out of windows, wrestling with tramps and footpads. Isn't that what Billy Bunter says when he's being caned? Yes, when he's being beaten by Mr. Quelch. For stealing jam. Always stealing jam. Or other boys' hampers. So lots of parents would ban them. They said, you should read something better. Mr. Quelch. For stealing jam. Always stealing jam. Or other boys' hampers, Tom. So lots of parents would ban them.

They said, you should read something better. You should read something more improving. Bevan would sneak out and buy them anyway, and he hid them under a railway bridge near his house. I mean, it's extraordinary that somebody who is thought of as being one of the absolute titans of socialism did this. And the other example is a great working class historian called Robert Roberts, who grew up in Salford and wrote a book about it called The Classic Slum. He said, for boys like him, he said, grey friars became for us our true alma mater,

to whom we felt bound by a dreamlike loyalty. Over the years, these simple tales conditioned whole generations of boys. The public school ethos, distorted into myth and told among us weakly in penny numbers, set our ideals and standards. And in the final estimate, it may well be found that Frank Richards, who is the author of the Greyfriars stories, had more influence on the mind and outlook of young, working class England than any other single person. Okay, well, that's brilliant, Dominic. I think that you've absolutely shown that there is a living link between Tom Brown's school days

and Harry Potter, and people can see how that thread would have been woven through 150 years or more of British popular culture. When we come back, we will look at how all the famous elements in the Harry Potter stories are prefigured in the Victorian public school. listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome to Hogwarts, said Professor McGonagall. The start of term banquet will begin shortly. But before you take your seats in the Great Hall, you'll be sorted into your hooses. The sorting is a very important ceremony because while you're here, your hoose will be something like your family within Hogwarts. You will have classes with the rest of your hoose, sleep in your hoose dormitory and spend free time in your hoose common room. The four hooses are called Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin.

Each hoose has its own noble history, and each has produced outstanding witches and wizards. While you're at Hogwarts, your triumphs will earn you hoose points, while any rule-breaking will lose hoose points. At the end of the year, the hoose with the most points is awarded the Hoos Cup, a great honor. I hope each of you will be a credit to whichever Hoos becomes yours. So that, Dominic, was obviously J.K. Rowling and Professor McGonigal again from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. And that's Harry and his chums who've come from, what's it, Platform 9 and 3 quarters, King's Cross to Hogwarts. And this thing about houses, as we south of the border call them, what is Professor McGonagall going on about? Where she's got this idea from? Does it perhaps go back to Victorian public schools?

It does. It does, Tom. So just before we get to the houses, one second. Harry is with his family. He gets his letter. He gets his hour. He gets all his gear. He goes off to school. In almost every element of the story, he's doing something that people in public school stories have done before. So crucially, he gets the train.

So you know the Hogwarts Express. I mean, even people who haven't read Harry Potter will know about the Hogwarts Express. It goes from platform nine and three quarters at King's Cross Station. That is a well-used device in school stories because, of course, so many people did go by train to public schools. And actually, the existence of the British public school network depends on the Victorian railway system. Because often, the point of these schools is that they are on isolated moors or provincial towns a long way from the urban centres that presumably are producing the wealth that enables parents to pay for these schools. Exactly. It's precisely that point in the 19th century when people are very anxious about the

consequences of the Industrial Revolution, the expansion of the city, the kind of fetid air of the cities, all of industrial modernity, all of these things, and they're looking for an escape. This is the kind of cause of great criticism for public schools, isn't it, over the 20th century? This idea that it's industry that creates the money that then gets spent on sending the children of these industrialists off to medieval, faux medieval schools in the countryside. Well, you're absolutely right, Tom, that the medievalism is the point. So many of the great public schools of England, what I regard as So many of the great public schools of England, what I regard as the totemic public schools of England, are really 19th century fake medieval

foundations. If you take my own school that I went to, Malvern, which was founded in 1865, it's in a spa town that you get to even now. It's at the end of the railway line from London, Paddington. People would go there on the train. The point is that you're going to the countryside and you're leaving industrial modernity behind. The point is that you're going to the countryside and you're leaving industrial modernity behind. The buildings of the school, like Hogwarts, which is a castle, the buildings are done in a kind of medieval Gothic. So many schools are done in this style. Theo, our producer, so Theo, as regular listeners will know, purports to be a Frenchman. In fact, Theo was educated at Wellington College, which was set up in 1859

for the Sons of Soldiers. Was that named after the Duke of Wellington? After the Duke of Wellington. Now your own school, Tom, I'm sorry to say is a much more recent Arriviste Foundation, isn't it? Isn't it 1920s Canford? Well, that's because I'm of humble, lower middle class stock, Dominic. Clearly, clearly. But so many of these schools, if you look at their websites, you will see that they are kind of mock medieval Gothic buildings, which are sort of weighted. Which, of course, King's Cross is as well.

It was assumed that J.K. Rowling chose King's Cross because that's the train that goes to Edinburgh, where she wrote it, from London. But maybe also the fact that it's cod medieval, St. Pancras and all that, is part of it as well. You're in the shadow, St. Pancras and all that is part of it as well. You're in the shadow of St. Pancras with the kind of huge Gothic spires of St. Pancras, and you're going to another kind of Gothic-ish building. But what about houses? Well, houses, you mentioned houses. Before the 19th century, most boys had kind of boarded in very ramshackle

kind of surroundings. They might've all stayed in one. They might have slept in the schoolroom. They might have stayed in the headmaster's house. But the point of houses is that Dr. Arnold and his imitators want a much more disciplined regimented system, which will institutionalize- And you say regimented. I mean, presumably literally like regiments. Literally, exactly.

Literally, as Hogwarts is. Hogwarts is divided into four competing houses. So the spirit of competition is divided into four competing houses. So the spirit of competition is built into the school. This was a 19th century idea that you will teach the boys team spirit, absolutely central

to Arnold's vision, to the entire ethos of the kind of Victorian ruling classes, and of course, to the ethos of Harry Potter, that the individual is never bigger than the team,

that the most important thing is the collective rather than your own personal gain. And the house is the kind of embodiment of that. The other thing about the house, the house is governed by an incredibly complicated series of rules that an outsider finds utterly impenetrable and impossible to understand. And the impenetrability is the point. The impenetrability is the point. Now in Victorian schools, and this persisted well into the late 20th century, you would learn the rules of the school and the special language of the school, and you would be given a test after two weeks. And if you didn't pass it, you would be beaten, you know, or you would be punished in some way. Now, Harry, when he arrives, you know, he's nervous as people are, and he is told and he is made to learn the rules of the

school. His peers in Gryffindor, his house and the senior children in Gryffindor are guiding the juniors and explaining to them the rules of the sports, all of this kind of thing. The other thing, one thing they don't have in Hogwarts, which is part of the regimentation of the Victorian public school, the regimentation of the Victorian public school went hand in hand with a kind of cult of emotional reserve, of not exposing your emotions. I mean, the importance of that is- Of not crying because you're missing mummy. Right. It's self-discipline. But it's not just a way of beating homesickness. The point, I mean, the Victorian teachers in the shadow of arnold believed that

self-discipline was a positive good well this is the stiff upper lip it's exactly stiff upper lip it's the you know you're under fire in the sudan with with general gordon and you don't show a flicker of it i mean it's really important for an imperial power to have this kind of but i mean internationally this becomes the image of the English gentleman, that he's cold, emotionless, ice in his veins. James Bond is nothing, I mean, as we talked about before in our James Bond episode, he's nothing if not a public school hero, a classic public school hero, the ice in his veins, as you say, Tom.

And of course, one way that the regimentation, the competition and the spirit of self-discipline, one way that they are all inculcated in the boys is through sport. So this brings us to Quidditch. So Quidditch, Tom, you haven't read all the Harry Potter stories, have you? I haven't read all of them. But you know what Quidditch is, right? Yeah, I've read some of them and I've watched the film. So yeah, of course. I mean, everybody does. It's part of what everybody knows. So the joke about Quidditch to some degree is that Quidditch is a kind of made up, intricate, bizarre, absurd sport. But of course, all sports, you know, cricket, to many of our American listeners, it's no

matter than cricket or baseball. Well, yes, American football is the ultimate ridiculous sport of course but um or rugby so rugby devised at rugby school um it's this kind of sublimated violence because that's the thing isn't it that that all these sports are individual to various public schools basically yeah and it's this mania for codifying games that in the long run will feed into the codification of games like football and rugby and so on. Yeah. Public school boys, instrumental, of course, in all of this. But you still famously have the Eton Wall Game, which is quite quidditchy. I didn't really know

what it is, but I imagine it involves a wall and it seems to involve people rolling in mud. But the Eton Wall Game is one of many such games at the time. The only reason that's notable is because it's survived. Most schools had versions of the Eton wall game or something similar, some kind of weird game. So I think at Charterhouse, they had a game which was a bit like rugby, except they used boys instead of balls. And one boy died. That toughened him up. But Dominic, just against that, I mean, cricket is distinctive because already by this point, it is a national sport. And so in Tom Brandt, you have, I think it's Scott East or one of those chaps, says of cricket that it is the birthright of British boys, old and young, as habeas corpus and trial by jury are of British men, which is a splendid sentiment that you would do well to reflect upon. But I think what happens in the 19th century with cricket is that the public school embrace of cricket kind of elevates it from a fun game that people played. They imbue cricket, just like Scott East does it there, with this kind of moral Arnoldian- Again, famously more than a game, an institution, they say.

Yeah, exactly. It's this sort of grandiosity of the sort of public school moralism you know the corinthian spirit that people apply to all these games now by the end of the 19th century the funny thing is actually by the way dr arnold himself wasn't interested in sports at all it was his disciples who made this great attempt to institutionalize sport people sometimes complain now that British private schools are too concerned about sport. But in the 1880s at Uppingham School, for example, boys played vast quantities of football every single day.

The headmaster made them do it. Schools like Eton would have a huge variety of sports that people would be doing because sport was seen as the essence of, it became seen it became dare i say sacralized tom as the absolute essence of manliness and moral character but was it not also enshrined and you we mentioned beastliness before as a way of stopping boys from obsessing about girls and other boys i think there's no or i can say it's i don I think there's no... All I can say is I don't think there's any great concern

about boys obsessing about girls in this period. I think the issue of boys obsessing with other boys is part of it. We'll talk about the beastliness a bit later, but just one thing about sport. So, yes, some headmasters are obsessed with the dangers of beastliness and they uh they they make they believe that the best way to do this to fight it is for the boys to do nothing at sport all day so they're too tired to think about anything else and cold showers do they have cold showers they must they do yeah of course they do however some masters think that

they notice that the boys obviously when they're playing sport, their legs, for example, are exposed. So there's a fantastic story that at rugby, the guy, one master, he made all the boys wear really long shorts. And then the ends of the shorts were fastened with elastic bands. So no hint of flesh could be seen by the other boys in case they became excited by one another while they were playing football or rugby or whatever. Cripes. So, yeah, you don't get that in the Billy Bunch stories, Tom. One thing that people who've read Harry Potter will know is that there is this kind of cult of the athletes, so Victor Crumb or Cedric Diggory.

Cedric Diggory is the character that I most resemble, Tom, because I, like Cedric Diggory, am in Hufflepuff, the house of very kind boys and modest boys. And he's the cock of the school, isn't he? He's a tremendous fellow. He's played, as I would be, if there were a film with the rest is history, by Robert Patterson. So if you know Robert Patterson. Yeah, the vampire guy.

Vampire guy. He would play me. You, of course, would be played by Tom Holland in a public school story. So yeah, there's the cult of the athlete. And of course, that leads into the kind of cult of this sort of, not just the sportsman schoolboy, but later on the soldier, lots of Gerald R. Tolkien, his former rugby team,

virtually all of them kind of enlist in the Great War. Lots of them are killed. So there's a kind of link between the sporting team and the sort of the teamwork of military service, service for the empire, which you get in that famous Henry Newbolt poem. And which in due course, again, comes to be seen as a kind of index of British decadence, ironically. So Kipling has the famous lines about muddied oafs and flannel fools. Muddied oafs, exactly. We should talk a bit about magic of course tom yes so in his lessons harry is taught effectively a bizarre and impenetrable code that outsiders cannot possibly understand

but which works to kind of bind the pupils at hogwarts together as a community separate from the outside world so that's magic magic. Expelleramas. Or in real life, of course, it's classics. Tremendous. So the fetish of Latin and Greek at public schools. This is a leftover from the medieval period to some degree, but... And definitely the Renaissance, as we will discuss. Yeah, of course.

I mean, people have taught classics all the way through. I mean, classics have been there from the way through. I mean, classics have been there from the very beginning of the public schools in the 14th century all the way through, as we will discuss next time. But there's a brilliant book called Gilded Youth by an academic called James Brooke Smith. He says,

the profound linguistic alienation of classical study formed a complex network of rules and regulations that subsumed the individual within the collective life of the institution. He says, why is it that so many public school was so defensive about the study of Latin and Greek, which they've never used since? It's because they bear the indelible stamp of the public school initiation right. Latin and Greek were tools for identity formation as much as they were bodies of knowledge. For many, their appeal lay in a realm beyond the rational

and utilitarian concerns of education. That's magic, Tom. And so those who don't have Latin and Greek are muggles. Exactly. Equivalent, Tom. Exactly. So people who in the Harry Potter universe aren't witches or wizards. Yeah. Do you think that's fair?

I think that's exactly it. Latin and Greek is one of a series of secret languages that you will get at a boarding school. So the other secret language is the language of the school itself with all the weird terms. The slang and things. The slang and the tuck shop and so on. But the idea of the secret language, I think, is really important in what you might call public school humor. So much British humor, elite humor, is about institutions and secret languages and things. So Lewis Carroll, the Molesworth stories in the 1950s,

the Centrinians, Monty Python, you know? Yeah. The absurdism of Monty Python, which is so often about sending up institutions and mocking the language of institutions. That's very public school humor, I would argue. Private eye. Exactly. We haven't talked about the teachers.

Right from the start, Harry Potter is frightened of one teacher in particular, Professor Snape. Actually, most of the teachers at Hogwarts are pretty benign. This was maybe, I think it's fair to say, not always the case at Victorian public schools. So they're full of terrifying Alan Rickman, Professor Snape figures. And of course, the thing that a boy would fear more than anything else is punishment, is beating. And we did a podcast recently about the Marquis de Sade. He would have loved life in a British boarding school in the 19th century, Tom. Well, he loved regimentation and depersonalization and all that kind of thing,

which is basically what Victorian public schools are all about. Yeah. So there's a great Canadian sociologist in the 20th century called Irving Goffman, and he talked about total institutions. And the Victorian public school was the ultimate total institution. But that is why they work so well as stories, because it's a self-contained world. And actually, it's true of Star Trek. It's true of the Aubrey and Maturin books that I've been reading, the Patrick O'Brien, that actually self-contained worlds with their own hierarchies, their own rules, their own language are brilliant for stories. Of course they are. And kids adore them.

The critic Catherine Hughes, many years ago, was writing about Harry Potter, the appeal of Harry Potter. And she said, children who are never going to go to a boarding school often love boarding school stories because they love the idea of all the rules they have to learn, all the traditions of the school, the codes of conduct. I remember reading to Katie when she was young, my elder daughter, so she was going to the local state school. So absolutely no houses or trains off to boarding schools or whatever. But the book that she adored were the Twins at St. Claire's by Enid Blyton, which is kind of like Mallory Towers as well, which is about girls boarding schools. And I remember when I read her the last of these novels that she burst into tears because she would never hear them again for the first time.

Oh my word. Absolute kind of evidence for the incredible hold that these stories can still have on children in the 21st century who know nothing about this world. Well, any parent who's read the Harry Potter books to their children or seen their children read the Harry Potter books will know the power that the school story can have. I was like that with Billy Bunto. I discovered Billy Bunto when I was about 10. It was baffling to me, a lot of the stuff about translating Virgil and the beatings and stuff, but I was addicted to it. So just on the beatings, Tom, I know you love a beating. As part of the institutionalization of Victorian public schools,

public ritual of flogging or beating was absolutely central to this. So at Charterhouse, people would be beaten with a bunch of birch switches. At rugby, they had a thin wooden cane and they had lead. It was weighted with lead at the end. And you were generally beaten on the buttocks. They would have special flogging blocks at schools, like a kind of altar, like a wooden altar. How long did this go on for? Oh, I mean, decades. Canes with birches and lead on the...

Yeah. Kind of up to when? After the Second World War, it started to decline. Yeah. People thought this was poor form. Blimey. I had no idea. I thought it was the slipper. You would often be, other boys would assemble. It would be a great public spectacle. Oh, it's an if, isn't it? It is an if. At Eton, you would go up the stairs to the headmaster's study. The stairs would be lined by boys.

Like being taken to the guillotine. You can imagine the atmosphere. Some boys, their faces stricken with fellow feeling. Other boys, their faces contorted with glee as the victim was. The historian Heather Ellis says that this had a kind of political resonance, that actually the more trouble the British Empire was in, the more it seems that public schools were keener on flogging because they're more anxious about forming character and about discipline. That the greater the sense of anxiety in society as a whole about the state of the nation,

the more beatings, floggings, canings seem to have increased. Well, I mean, do you think that this is, hence the obsession with fagging and being beaten, is that this is schooling you then to go out and- I think so, absolutely. Dominate people, have servants and beat them. So I was reading a very good book by David Turner, The Old Boys, The Decline and Rise of the Public School, in preparation for this. And he quotes a teacher at Harrow School in 1928, that to learn to obey as a fag is part of the routine that is the essence of the English public school system. Those who hope to rule must first learn to obey. And that has an obvious relevance, I guess, for a ruling class

that is anxious about the possible collapse of the empire. Yeah. You're going to go on from a public school into another institution. It could be the Church of England, it could be the civil service, you're going to be a colonial official in India, it could be the army or the navy. So you're going to move into another hierarchy where you will be once again at the bottom and you'll have to work your way up to the top. So that idea of obedience and giving orders, it's really, really important. One other consequence of the beatings, Tom, one historian reckons that about half of all the erotic works published in late 19th century Britain had flagellation as the key

theme. Well, it's La Vie Sanglaise, isn't it? The Mistress of Flagellation, The History of the Rod, The Quintessence of Birch Discipline. These are the titles. Now, not only that, these are books aimed at a public school audience because they are too expensive for working class readers. There are two or three guineas. So in other words, you have to be rich to buy them. They're aimed at that particular clientele. There are also special flagellation brothels in London. But not just in London, right? I mean, in Paris as well and across the continent,

because this is seen again as a kind of very English specialization. Right, right. And there's no doubt that it comes from the schools. So a pornographic publisher called George Cannon, who wrote about these brothels, he said, why are they so popular? Because hundreds of young men, through having been educated at institutions where the masters were fond of administering Birch discipline and recollecting certain sensations produced by it, have imbibed a passion for it and have longed to receive the same chastisement from the hands of a fine woman. So even at the time, people think, hmm, there's something odd going on here. And of course, you mentioned before anxieties about the boys interfering with each other.

They are definitely there. So Theo, our producer, who was at Wellington College. Where are we going with this? He may well be able to shed some light on whether they still have to install barbed wire entanglements on the top of the dormitory cubicles, Tom. Is that what they did? To stop the boys breaking out at night to interfere with each other after the master's back. Well, so we've got Theo. Let's ask Theo.

Is this what happened at your... He's not replying. Thanks for that, Dominic. Yeah, I can confirm that. That was no longer the case when i was there okay thank you theo excellent contribution there from theo it's great it's great it's great to have theo on the show so just one more thing before we move on to um something we have not talked about at all this is classic rest is history we haven't talked about girls um The boys are not just interfering with one another. There's a very famous story by a guy called John Addington Simmons.

Now, John Addington Simmons was a harrow in the 1850s, and his memoir of his time there was not published until 1984, Tom, because it was so scandalous. John Addington Simmons said, at Harrow, when you arrived, the better-looking boys were immediately given female names by the older boys. Well, that's in Tom Brown's school days.

Yeah, there's a hint of that in Tom Brown's school days. Well, no, so they say that, you know, Arthur, the guy who prays and likes eroticism, is obviously weed. And it's referring to him and other kind of new boys like him, that this new boy would most likely never get out of the clothes and would be afraid of wet feet and always getting laughed at and called Molly or Jenny or some derogatory feminine nickname. Yes. But they're not being called Molly and Jenny in a derogatory way. They're being called Molly and Jenny in an appraising way. Because John Arlington Simmons said.

It's the same, surely. Well, he said what would happen is the better looking boys, you would be adopted by an older boy as, and I quote, his bitch or his tart, and then you would perform various services. Simmons said that at Harrow in the 1850s, one could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation, the sports of naked

boys in bed together. Now, our executive producer, Tony Pastor, Tom, is obsessed by this kind of stuff. When we went to America for the American tour, he spent the entire flight on the way out endlessly quizzing me about what happened at boarding schools. Was it true we'd done this, that, and the other? So he would enjoy this.

At one point, Simmons' best friend, a guy called Alfred Preta, comes to him and he says, I've got interesting news. I've actually been having an affair with the headmaster. Wow. So the headmaster. Wow. So the headmaster was one of Arnold's disciples, a man called Charles Vaughan. I shouldn't laugh. He had become headmaster of Harrow at 28.

You know how cricketers are talked of as a future England captain, Tom? Yes. He was talked of as a future Archbishop of Canterbury. But presumably this didn't help his cause. It didn't help his cause because basically, Simmons told his father, his father kind of blackmailed Charles Vaughan. Charles Vaughan had to step down as head of Harrow for having had an affair with this boy. And he ended up becoming a parish priest in Doncaster, Tom. Well, bit of a come down.

So that was the end of him. Now, this doesn't happen in Harry Potter for one key reason. Girls. key reason girls hogwarts has girls so hermione granger who is a very very i have to say a very girls school story stereotype isn't she she is just an annoying yeah girly swat she has a blue stocking yeah so um hogwarts has girls of course there weren't co-educational schools in the 19th century they didn't really come in until after the second world war when boys schools started to to admit there were always girls schools tom i know because i you know mallory towers and st claire's exactly the the prototype for a lot of girls schools cheltenham ladies college set up in 1853 and rodine isn't it and rodine 1885 wickham abbey

1896 downhouse 1907 so often these are schools for people who are going to go overseas. So their parents are going to go overseas. They want their girls to stay in Britain to be educated. Girl schools, I hope girls' school products listening to this will not be offended when I say they were regarded generally as atrocious academically by comparison with the boys' schools. So Cheltenham ladies, they would spend a quarter of their time doing music. A lot of the time they would do needlework. They would learn modern languages, so they would learn French rather than Latin. They do a lot of sport, don't they? They play hockey,

so jolly hockey sticks and lacrosse. And lacrosse. They don't have the culture of beatings and the sort of physical, all of that stuff. They have a whole load of absolutely mad rules. My favourite ones were from North London Collegiate where girls were banned from gathering in groups of more than three. This was a very serious business. I think it's seen as beastly. I don't know. And the other thing that I love is they were specifically

very strictly forbidden from getting wet on the way to school. It was unladylike. Right. And the government did a report in them, it's called the Taunton Commission in the 1860s. And the Taunton Commission said there were two problems with girls' school teaching. One was that the teachers didn't know anything about teaching.

And the two was that the teachers didn't know anything about their subjects. But apart from that, they were brilliant. I guess one of the big changes, and this is obviously coincided with JK Rowling starting the Harry Potter series, is that public schools now, they're co-educational and they live or die by their exams. I mean, that's why people spend all the money they do. It's not really to learn character or manliness or womanliness or whatever it is they're teaching. It's basically to get very, very good grades and go to university. But one of the things that Harry Potter does is to kind of re-import that idea of the Victorian idea that you become a better person. And that is something that public schools are now kind of buying into again.

That's absolutely central to the public school ethos, Tom. You visit any public school website and they will tell you right from the outset that character, we are forming the citizens of tomorrow, the change makers of the 21st century. But is that actually true or is it just kind of fashionable window dressing? So again, I was reading up that St. Paul's Girl School has actually abolished the title of head girl because it's too binary. Right. Yeah. They're very woke. Some public schools are very woke now. Well, so Eton is decolonizing its curriculum. Yes. So the funny thing about Hogwarts, therefore, Tom, is that Hogwarts, it's multicultural. It has the kind of Patil sisters. It has Lee Jordan, who is black.

Rowling goes out of her way to make it diverse. And the existence of girls means that although it looks like a Victorian public school, in that sense, it's nothing like a Victorian public school because it's far more feminized than a Victorian public school would be. But at the same time, you still have this idea that they are an elite, that they are separate from the muggles. I mean, that remains hard-baked into it. And in that sense, public schools remain absolutely separate from the vast mass of children who are going to state schools or whatever. And I think that that opens up a whole question, which we haven't really discussed in this first episode, which is where do public schools come from? Yeah. And that is something that in your book, The Great British Dream Factory, you talk about. Tom, this is a lovely advert. Thank you. Well, one comment you make about J.K. Rowling is that pace and brevity are not her strong points, though I may not necessarily be the best person to make that observation, which I think is a very wise, self-aware comment to make.

Tom, you know I didn't mean it. I don't think that of myself. We absolutely need to finish this episode now. But you do have a very interesting comment about how Hogwarts supposedly is founded before the Norman conquest, and it's a castle to which you attach the footnote. It would probably be unbearably pedantic to observe that this makes Hogwarts very odd since there were no castles in Britain until the Normans arrived. In fact, the first Scottish castles were not built until about 1200. Horrible little boy you must have been. A horrible, horrible little boy. But Tom, I went to a good school and I was made into a fine, upstanding Christian gentleman. A prefect. But I think that that opens up the question of, you know, we've been talking about the Victorian public school and Hogwarts and all the public school stories and traditions that

lie in between Tom Brown's school days and J.K. Rowling. But where did the whole concept come from? How old is it? Does it go back to before the Norman Conquest? If not, when does it go back to? So I think that we should do a separate episode and look at the prehistory of Dr. Arnold and Tom Brown and ask where the public schools come from. Because actually, it's an amazing story that involves riots, the militia being called out and all kinds of extraordinary stories and takes us back to a world that is

actually pretty unfamiliar. Brilliant. Tom, you know I would love that. So everybody, we will see you all next time. But of course, if you are a member of the Rest is History Club, you can listen to Tom. I can imagine that you would like nothing more than to listen to us talking

even more about public school stories. And we will be doing that on this week's bonus episode for Rest is History Club members only. And of course, if you are a member of the Rest is History Club, if you are a member

of what I like to think of as the prefects, then you can listen to the second episode of this series right now, as is always the way with our chat community. And on that bombshell, Tom, we say goodbye. Goodbye. I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment

it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works

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