Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges Page B

which everyone had to volunteer. But he did believe in it, or at least in something, as he knelt before the bishop of Salisbury and renounced for himself the world, the flesh and the devil. Nowell Smith, however, took advantage of the occasion to remark:
     
I hope he takes his confirmation seriously. If he does, he will not be content to neglect obvious duties in order to indulge his own tastes, however good in themselves.
    To Alan, the ‘duties’to translate silly sentences into Latin, polish the buttons on his Corps tunic, and suchlike, were far from ‘obvious’. He had his own kind of seriousness. The headmaster’s words would more appropriately have been directed at the outward conformity that Alec Waugh had written about:
     
As is the case with most boys, Confirmation had very little effect on Gordon. He was not an atheist; he accepted Christianity in much the same way as he accepted the Conservative party. All the best people believed in it, so it was bound to be right; but at the same time it had not the slightest influence over his actions. If he had any religion at this time it was House football. …
    These were strong words for a book which had appeared in 1917 when Shirburnians were being sacrificed at the rate of one a week. It was because of such remarks that The Loom of Youth was forbidden at Sherborne, and any boy found with it was subject to an immediate beating.
    Yet the renegade author had said little more, although in different language, than was revealed by the headmaster:
     
Mind you, I am not attacking the Public School system. I believe in its enormous value, above all in the sense of duty and the loyalty and the law-abidingness which it inculcates. But it cannot escape the dangers attendant upon any system of discipline, the dangers of submitting to mere routine, of adopting ready-made sentiments at second-hand, of a slavish, or perhaps I should rather say a sheepish, want of independence of character.
    ‘The system cannot escape these dangers,’ he continued, ‘but we individuals … can overcome them if we set the right way about it.’ It was, however, very difficult for individuals to go against the grain of a total organisation. As Nowell Smith said, ‘of all societies very few are so definite and easily understood as a school like this … we all here live under a common life, under a common discipline. Our life is organised with great thoroughness, and the organisation is directed to a definite aim. …’ And the headmaster further observed that ‘schoolboys, however much originality they may possess as individuals, are in their conduct to the highest degree conventional.’ Nowell Smith was not a small-minded man and somehow managed to reconcile this system of education with his love of Wordsworth’s poetry, of which he was an editor. Within the classicist there beat a romantic heart, and one which perhaps troubled him.
    But the problem of inspiring ‘independence of character’ within a system of ‘mere routine’ arose principally in connection with what was called ‘dirty talk’, rather than with the more elevated questions treated by the romantic consciousness. The headmaster called upon individuals to show their truepatriotism to Sherborne by avoiding it, and appealed to the boy of independent character, who
     
brought up in a civilised home, has an instinctive dislike of swearing and coarse jokes and vulgar innuendoes, and yet from sheer cowardice will conceal his dislike, and perhaps force a laugh, and even begin to learn the vile jargon!
    In an all-male school there was only one kind of ‘vulgar innuendo’ possible. Contact between the boys was fraught with sexual potential, a fact which was reflected in the effective ban on associations between boys of different houses, or of different ages. These bans, and the ‘gossip’ or ‘scandal’ associated with them, were not part of the official life of a public school, but were no less real for that. Nowell Smith