Alfred Hitchcock Read Online Free PDF

William and Emma Hitchcock had to get on the train to arrive daily by 8:45 A.M. for Mass before classes. The train ride from Limehouse stimulated the imagination. “The boys of my form would come armed with scissors and knives,” Hitchcock recalled, “to cut up the seats and luggage racks.”
    By the time Hitchcock was enrolled as a “new boy” in the fall of 1910, the small original facility had been expanded into an Elementary School, New College, Church, and Chapel (the latter still under construction), and the enrollment was rising to nearly 250 students. They came from all back-grounds.Although the Hitchcocks were able to afford the tuition, a growing number of board of education “free place” boys, the progeny of clerks, tailors, accountants, and laborers, joined the sons of solicitors and physicians.
    Students attended classes in a jacket and tie, some with Eton collars; everybody wore a school cap marked with the letters
S.I.
on the front, leading local wags to refer to them as “silly idiots.” Silly idiots they were not, however. With its rounded and liberal intermediate education, St. Ignatius guided some boys toward higher education while preparing others for technical or commercial careers. To this end the school had organized an ambitious curriculum emphasizing science, physics, mathematics, English and literature, and modern and classical languages. Latin was mandatory; Greek, French, and German were optional. Longfellow, Defoe, Dante, Dickens, and Shakespeare—committed to memory and performed annually in their entirety—were part of the curriculum.
    Any boy who showed signs of religious vocation was sent to a seminary. Among the students during Hitchcock’s era was John C. Heenan, who rose to become England’s highest-ranking Catholic prelate, the archbishop of Westminster. Another was Ambrose King, later one of England’s leading authorities on venereal disease and the author of a standard textbook on the subject. A third was Reginald Dunn, who went from schoolteacher to IRA assassin (of whom more later). A fourth, Hugh Gray, wrote essays and dabbled in film writing and later translated André Bazin’s criticism. Among these only Gray was counted as a friend, someone Hitchcock kept up with until the end of his life, when Gray taught film at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).
    The prefect of studies from 1905 to 1914 was Father Charles Newdigate. According to the school’s official history, Father Newdigate was unfailingly courteous and cheerful, “ever ready to see the best” in his boys, yet “almost too ready, perhaps, to be a good disciplinarian.”
    The Jesuit ethic of corporal punishment was a dubious tradition of the school. Archbishop Heenan described in his memoir how the teachers (mostly young Jesuits not yet priests) called out infractors to “receive the ferule” on the palms of their hands—or worse, on their knuckles. The ferule was like a flat ruler, yet “considerably more menacing,” wrote Heenan. “It was, I believe, made of gutta-percha and caused a very painful swelling. The delinquent was ordered to receive three, six, nine, twelve, or for exceptionally serious offenses, eighteen (called, perhaps because it could be administered in two sessions, twice-nine).”
    Students were usually allowed twenty-four hours in which to choose from one of two “tolley masters” assigned the duty of punishing boys. * This “excellent system,” wrote Heenan, “forbade a master who ordered punishment to be the executioner.”
    The beating (which could also be administered with a strap or wooden cane) was also ordered for poor scholastic performance, although Heenan said he was punished less than once a year during his time at St. Ignatius, and that end-of-day general amnesties were standard. And it’s important to remember, added the archbishop, that “stupid boys in those days were beaten in every type of school almost as a matter of routine.”
    The effect