Fatal Glamour by Paul Delany Page A

recovered, Reddie decided that he should go out and found a school of his own. Carpenter’s father had died a few years before, leaving him £6,000; he contributed funds, and Reddie started Abbotsholme School in 1889. Its ideal was “the nurturing and disciplining of the young child so that it might come to live the life of true freedom; to be a law unto itself, and a beneficent power in the world.” 20
    Unfortunately, Reddie was an autocrat and a crank as well as an idealist, and he kept Abbotsholme in a perpetual uproar. His personal style was completely at odds with his principles. He took it for granted that he should have absolute rule, not just over the boys, but over the staff too. Abbotsholme, he said, was like a battleship, and he was the captain on the bridge. Everyone in the school had to wear a Simple Life uniform of his own design: a Norfolk suit of grey tweed with big pockets and knee breeches. The regime of cold baths and manual labour was too much for the thirteen-year-old Lytton Strachey, who was sent home after a few months. Justin Brooke was another dropout.
    Racked by desertions and mutinies, the “battleship” could not steer a straight course and Reddie suffered a series of nervous breakdowns. He could not recognise his own lust for power, nor his pederastic instincts. Between the ages of eleven and eighteen, he believed, schoolboys should go to a single-sex school, with only bachelor masters. “Worship of the male type,” he wrote, “is the natural hero-worship of adolescence; and comradeship is the natural outlet for the affections among normal boys during this period . . . The greatest crime against youth is the crime of accelerating puberty.” 21
    When Reddie was at last forced to retire, in the 1920s, there were only three boys left in the school. It was J.H. Badley who made progressive education work. The son of a country doctor, he arrived at Rugby in 1880 at the same time as a new master: Parker Brooke. Superficially, Badleyseemed to bend to the public school yoke. He became both the top pupil in classics and a member of the First XV at rugby. His ambition was to return to Rugby as a master. But at Cambridge he became a Simple Lifer, influenced by such friends as Roger Fry, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and Carpenter himself. When Reddie founded Abbotsholme, Badley signed on as one of the first teachers. After three years, however, he broke with Reddie. He wanted two things that were anathema to his headmaster: to make Abbotsholme co-educational, and to marry. “My greatest friend at Cambridge,” he recalled, “came of a rather well-known feminist family – Garrett Anderson – and he converted me to co-education as being the right thing to be done. Eventually I married his sister, who was of course still more keen, and who insisted if we had a school it must have boys and girls together.” 22
    Like almost everyone who features in this biography, Badley had “a bit of capital” to back up his ideals. He found a country house called Bedales near Haywards Heath, Sussex, and opened his own school in 1893. For the first five years, it was a school for boys only, since Badley had his hands full without the added stigma of sexual mixing. “Old Bedales,” as it came to be called, held faithfully to Carpenter’s ideals. Here is what impressed one ten-year-old boy on his first day there: “Mr. Powell, the second master . . . wore clothes unlike other men’s, a pale blue tweed suit with leather at the cuffs, grey stockings and a red tie, and on his feet were very large homemade leather sandals. Everything in his house was very clean; the walls were whitewashed with few pictures; there was plain oak furniture and bare boards. After the evening meal, Mr. Powell went into the kitchen to help his wife wash up.” 23
    The atmosphere of the school was spartan. The boys (and later the girls) had a