The bronze plaques are mounted on the cloister wall of School Yard, right at the heart of Eton College. On them are engraved the names of all the school’s old boys, many hundreds of them, who gave their lives for their country in the First and Second World Wars.
I used to pass those plaques on my way to Chapel when I was at Eton in the Seventies, a middle-class boy given an aristocratic education thanks to a Government grant. I vividly remember how powerfully it struck me that many of these boys would have been little older than me when they died.
For all the incredible privilege that the school has long conferred, that roll call of the fallen was a reminder that Etonians were expected to give as well as take; to contribute to the society in which they lived. No matter how rich or powerful your family might be, you had to do your duty when the time came.
For hundreds of years, Etonians dedicated themselves to public service, be they generals and Prime Ministers (of whom the school has provided 19), or more humble civil servants or colonial administrators. Prince William is heir to the traditions of both leadership and service as he arrives in the Falklands for a tour of duty as an RAF search-and-rescue pilot. But how many of his Eton contemporaries can say the same thing?
Consider the picture released last week of William in his Eton days, posing with the members of the Eton Society – known colloquially as ‘Pop’. Decked out in spongebag trousers and gaudy silk waistcoats, they are the school prefects. Of all Eton’s 1,300-odd pupils, they are the 20 most powerful.
So let’s look at the boys standing around our future King. One of them, like Prince William, is in the Armed Forces: Captain Hamish Barne of the Scots Guards. Another is Eddie Redmayne, now familiar to millions as the star of the BBC’s adaptation of Birdsong and the face of Burberry.
There is also a smattering of typically Etonian stereotypes: the farmer, the environmentalist, the upper-class hippy, the musician, the academic. Yet 11 of the boys in that picture either work or have worked in just two professions: banking and law. All the lawyers are associated with firms that have their headquarters in the City.
So here are the most privileged boys in the most privileged school in the country. And more than half of them can think of nothing better to do with their lives than to stick their snouts into the great, golden trough of ‘casino’ investment banking.
By the way, you may be wondering how many of the group are involved in actual, productive industry. The answer is very simple: none.
That picture strikes me as a disturbing commentary on Eton in particular and society as a whole. Today the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time in the past century. The privileged elite seem to be sailing through the recession they themselves caused with an absolute disregard, even disdain, for the great mass of their fellow citizens.
I fear that Etonians today are more and more likely to be part of that disdainful elite. And I can’t help but wonder: what are they contributing now?
Now this may seem a bit rich, coming from a journalist who spends half his time writing novels, to accuse other people of ignoring industry or failing to contribute. But as a writer, I’m a content provider to a tough, deadline-driven, customer-satisfying, manufacturing industry. And the day I forget that is the day I go out of business.
To be fair to Eton, the school has always provided a brilliant training for writers in particular – George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Ian Fleming, to name but three – and creative, entrepreneurial types in general.
Boys are expected to be very hard-working, relentlessly competitive, highly independent and strongly motivated to succeed. Etonians have never been very interested in devoting their lives to industrial corporations and they’re not alone in that. For generations, Britain has been hampered by the unwillingness of its elite to dirty their hands with muck and brass. But Etonians have had no objection whatsoever to starting shiny new corporations of their own.
Businesses as various as the mail-order clothing company Boden; the website lastminute.com; the Ministry of Sound clubbing empire and the White Cube art gallery, which first exhibited superstars such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, were all founded by Old Etonians.
The men who started those companies are now in their 40s and 50s. But how many of their successors today have similarly enterprising ambitions? Not many, if Prince William’s contemporaries are anything to go by. Why bother when there’s so much easy money to be had in the Square Mile?
Of course, there’s nothing particularly new about the school’s links with the City. Etonians have names such as Rothschild, Cazenove, Fleming, Hambro and Baring. Their fathers don’t just work for banks. They own them.
The school has always produced large numbers of bankers, stockbrokers and Lloyd’s of London underwriters. But there has been a massive change in finance over the past 30 years. This change has made the City far bigger, more powerful and more global than ever before. But it has also divorced its members from the country around them.
When my Eton contemporaries went to work in the City in the early Eighties, it was still a patrician, public school environment, filled with chaps who were intimately interconnected by ties of family, education and military service. It was far more socially snobbish than it is now, far less open to outsiders.Yet, paradoxically, it was also much more closely connected to the rest of the UK. For one thing, most banks and brokers were still involved in the old-fashioned business of lending money, or buying and selling shares. They knew their customers and had long-term business relationships with them.
What’s more, many banks were genuine partnerships. Their partners, almost all of them British, made profits in good times but were liable for losses in bad times. They were thus more cautious. And they operated in a world in which trust, honour and decency were not just abstract principles but vital business tools.
Today, the great majority of City boys work for financial institutions that are foreign-owned. They do not think in terms of satisfying their customers. Their work consists entirely of making the deals, no matter how bogus, that will bring them the highest possible bonus. Many of them would not have jobs at all without the support of the British (or American, or German) taxpayer. But they are entirely lacking in any sense of gratitude. Indeed, they resent the very suggestion that they should be grateful.
Etonians, of course, are not alone in this. They merely represent a very sad, very dangerous trend among this country’s elite. A hundred years ago, in the Downton Abbey days, their forefathers were equally privileged, and equally unlikely, if truth be told, to dirty their hands with trade.
But they were part of a wider society. Downton Abbey is not entirely mythical: many aristocrats and landowners felt a profound sense of duty towards their tenants and estate workers. That duty found its ultimate expression on the battlefields of Ypres and the Somme.
Now Etonians just count their annual bonuses. What a terrible betrayal of all the boys whose names are engraved on those plaques.
I used to pass those plaques on my way to Chapel when I was at Eton in the Seventies, a middle-class boy given an aristocratic education thanks to a Government grant. I vividly remember how powerfully it struck me that many of these boys would have been little older than me when they died.
For all the incredible privilege that the school has long conferred, that roll call of the fallen was a reminder that Etonians were expected to give as well as take; to contribute to the society in which they lived. No matter how rich or powerful your family might be, you had to do your duty when the time came.
Prince William, top right, and his Eton contemporaries, most of whom are now bankers and lawyers
So let’s look at the boys standing around our future King. One of them, like Prince William, is in the Armed Forces: Captain Hamish Barne of the Scots Guards. Another is Eddie Redmayne, now familiar to millions as the star of the BBC’s adaptation of Birdsong and the face of Burberry.
There is also a smattering of typically Etonian stereotypes: the farmer, the environmentalist, the upper-class hippy, the musician, the academic. Yet 11 of the boys in that picture either work or have worked in just two professions: banking and law. All the lawyers are associated with firms that have their headquarters in the City.
So here are the most privileged boys in the most privileged school in the country. And more than half of them can think of nothing better to do with their lives than to stick their snouts into the great, golden trough of ‘casino’ investment banking.
By the way, you may be wondering how many of the group are involved in actual, productive industry. The answer is very simple: none.
That picture strikes me as a disturbing commentary on Eton in particular and society as a whole. Today the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time in the past century. The privileged elite seem to be sailing through the recession they themselves caused with an absolute disregard, even disdain, for the great mass of their fellow citizens.
I fear that Etonians today are more and more likely to be part of that disdainful elite. And I can’t help but wonder: what are they contributing now?
Now this may seem a bit rich, coming from a journalist who spends half his time writing novels, to accuse other people of ignoring industry or failing to contribute. But as a writer, I’m a content provider to a tough, deadline-driven, customer-satisfying, manufacturing industry. And the day I forget that is the day I go out of business.
To be fair to Eton, the school has always provided a brilliant training for writers in particular – George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Ian Fleming, to name but three – and creative, entrepreneurial types in general.
Boys are expected to be very hard-working, relentlessly competitive, highly independent and strongly motivated to succeed. Etonians have never been very interested in devoting their lives to industrial corporations and they’re not alone in that. For generations, Britain has been hampered by the unwillingness of its elite to dirty their hands with muck and brass. But Etonians have had no objection whatsoever to starting shiny new corporations of their own.
Businesses as various as the mail-order clothing company Boden; the website lastminute.com; the Ministry of Sound clubbing empire and the White Cube art gallery, which first exhibited superstars such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, were all founded by Old Etonians.
The men who started those companies are now in their 40s and 50s. But how many of their successors today have similarly enterprising ambitions? Not many, if Prince William’s contemporaries are anything to go by. Why bother when there’s so much easy money to be had in the Square Mile?
Of course, there’s nothing particularly new about the school’s links with the City. Etonians have names such as Rothschild, Cazenove, Fleming, Hambro and Baring. Their fathers don’t just work for banks. They own them.
The school has always produced large numbers of bankers, stockbrokers and Lloyd’s of London underwriters. But there has been a massive change in finance over the past 30 years. This change has made the City far bigger, more powerful and more global than ever before. But it has also divorced its members from the country around them.
Eton always provided brilliant training for writers, including Ian Fleming and George Orwell who attended
What’s more, many banks were genuine partnerships. Their partners, almost all of them British, made profits in good times but were liable for losses in bad times. They were thus more cautious. And they operated in a world in which trust, honour and decency were not just abstract principles but vital business tools.
Today, the great majority of City boys work for financial institutions that are foreign-owned. They do not think in terms of satisfying their customers. Their work consists entirely of making the deals, no matter how bogus, that will bring them the highest possible bonus. Many of them would not have jobs at all without the support of the British (or American, or German) taxpayer. But they are entirely lacking in any sense of gratitude. Indeed, they resent the very suggestion that they should be grateful.
Etonians, of course, are not alone in this. They merely represent a very sad, very dangerous trend among this country’s elite. A hundred years ago, in the Downton Abbey days, their forefathers were equally privileged, and equally unlikely, if truth be told, to dirty their hands with trade.
But they were part of a wider society. Downton Abbey is not entirely mythical: many aristocrats and landowners felt a profound sense of duty towards their tenants and estate workers. That duty found its ultimate expression on the battlefields of Ypres and the Somme.
Now Etonians just count their annual bonuses. What a terrible betrayal of all the boys whose names are engraved on those plaques.
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