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father and grandfather had been Harrovians. His choice for Pat and Fraser was Uppingham, a tiny, unsalubrious, sixteenth-century grammar school in Rutland which, under its evangelical headmaster, Edward Thring, was recognised as one of the most progressive public schools in the country. Thring was a powerful personality, ‘quick and articulate, charismatic, quarrelsome’, the school historian describes him. It was he, rather than Dr Arnold of Rugby, who today appears the radical pioneer in mid-nineteenth-century education. Arnold had been at Winchester and Oxford; Thring at Eton (under the brutal regime of Dr Keate) and Cambridge. Arnold emerged a pessimist, Thring an optimist. Thring was also passionately egalitarian, insisting that ‘every boy in the school must receive equal and full attention’, and that ‘ordinary boys needed as much time as the brilliant’. This inclusiveness contrasted strongly with Dr Arnold’s regime of public expulsions and private removals founded on the belief that, boys having ‘an essential inferiority’ as compared with men, ‘the first, second and third duty of a schoolmaster is to get rid of unpromising subjects’. In Thring’s opinion, Dr Arnold was ‘a very great man, but a bad schoolmaster’. It was true that he had added mathematics, modern history and languages to the school course; but so had Thring added them – as well as chemistry, drawing, carpentry and music too. Both were ordained clergymen, driven by a sense of moral purpose, but Thring’s temperament was far less morbid than Arnold’s. He was a New Testament man and his sermons never lasted longer than ten minutes. Above all he was a genuine innovator, establishing workshops, laboratories, an aviary and gymnasium at Uppingham, emphasising the skill needed even in elementary teaching, discouraging the multiplication of prizes as motives for work, and campaigning on behalf of a liberal education for girls.
    When Thring came to Uppingham in the early eighteen-fifties the school contained twenty-five boys. Thirty years later there were over three hundred boarding in eleven houses, and thirty masters. It could have grown still more but, believing that most public schools were too large, Thring restricted the number of boys to a maximum of 320 with no more than thirty in each house.
    My great-grandfather was one of the last parents to interview Thring who died in the autumn of 1887. Six months later the Major-General’s elder son Pat arrived at Uppingham, and he was followed a year later by his brother (my grandfather) Fraser. Within these eighteen months Uppingham had grown to almost four hundred boys and in one respect at least begun to change. Thring argued that ‘organised games received excessive attention’. Though he encouraged games at which masters could play in the teams – this being a good way for everyone to get to know one another better – he disliked the worship of competitive athletics which he considered unfair to the ordinary boys. A year after Thring’s death, however, rugby football began to be played at Uppingham and the spirit of Dr Arnold entered the school. The great man there in the late eighteen-eighties and early eighteen-nineties was H.H. Stephenson, the legendary cricket coach, who had captained the first English team to tour Australia.
    I occasionally heard my grandfather speak of Stephenson as we drank our cider together in the evenings. His tone was reverential, for we were after all discussing one of the great heroes of the game and ‘the best cricket coach at any school’. I loved these stories of my grandfather, but generally he was too barricaded by worries to entertain me with them, though I sometimes pleaded with him and made him smile. Only at moments would he bow down his head, hush his voice, and whisper, ‘Ah! Stephenson!’ Such an exclamation conveyed more than any inventory of facts. I would stare into the past and nod my understanding. I got the impression that he