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to endure much at the hands of her husband and offspring.
    At ten, Lewis and Basil were sent to Hodder, Stonyhurst’s prep school. They proved successful schoolboys, both in the classrooms and on the sports field, winning prizes, Basil wrote later, without extravagant effort. Edward’s letters to his sons display the same relentlessly didactic spirit as do those of his own father Hugh to himself, a generation earlier. Because the boys had never known any other kind of father, and lived in an age and a family powerfully influenced by religion, they seem to have been untroubled by screeds which were, more often than not, exam papers.
    ‘My darling son Basil,’ Edward wrote from Herm on 10 October 1892,
I have your letter of 6 October. I notice you by mistake left the name of the archbishop blank. Please (1) supply the blank. Mamma has received the manual of Prayers for Youth, and I have got the list of books, for which I thank you. (2) please send the timetable. Please (3) answer question 34 more fully. I have told Gladys you thank her for her letter. (4) find out the derivation of the word ‘blandyke’. (5) what does ‘Night Studies’ in the Stonyhurst Calendar mean? (6) have you got Ethel’s umbrella? (7) have they any rules at Hodder, and can you send me a copy of them.
    There followed an extract from Gladys’s journal of their Channel Islands holiday, then further bullet points, culminating with:
(17) I regret to hear of the drowning of the Jesuit you mention…By the bye – don’t call us your parents, but ‘my dear pater and mater’. It is a point of the utmost significance that when you leave Stonyhurst you should enter the world well apprised of its dangers and infinitely on your guard against bad company and the love of vanities and pleasures. You cannot fortify yourself too much against these evils. You must bring along with you all your religion. I wish you to pray to God to know your vocation.
    The barrage of questions was punctuated with fragments of whimsy: ‘Have you asked for Lumley’s Select Plays Of Shakespeare ? – which you lost. Responde mihi . Have you found Smith’s Latin Grammar?, respondez s’il vous plaît . I thank you for the programme of the concert of the 1st of November 1892 which was not, as you allege, a Sunday, but a Tuesday – Please apologise.’
    Soon after Basil was promoted from Hodder to the main school at Stonyhurst, on 15 February 1893, his father demanded:
Did you cry when you left Hodder?
    Do you suck your thumb still?
    Do you feel at home at Stonyhurst?
    Do you like any of the boys?
    Do the boys kick or ill-treat you?
    Please answer all questions.
    And a week later:
We were sorry to hear that you were spending your holidays in the Infirmary. Did you offer up the sickness to God ‘all for thee, Oh my God – To do thy will, o God’. If you did not – you missed a grand opportunity of earning merit in the sight of God, for this sickness was a great disappointment to you – entailing as it did the loss of 15 days skating. Did you get any skating at all before you were taken ill? The 3rd term’s Report has come. You have attained only 13 marks in Religious Doctrine as against a possible 75 of marks attainable!!!
    Edward’s obsession with recording trivia amuses his descendants, but suggests eccentricity of heroic proportions. In great-grandfather, pedantry tipped over into dottiness.
    Basil’s Stonyhurst diary was as banal as most schoolboy records, as shown by this entry in 1894: ‘84 more days…Retreat began today. Association. I played right-wing and got two goals, 17 marks for my Greek theme. I have saved 9d. Xmas presents: Lewis got 2 pocket knives, a top hat, a purse; I got a pack of Snap cards, 2 coloured tops; sweets; a steerable balloon; parlour cricket; an artificial nose.’ More interesting was his catalogue of books read. First, there were those from the Spiritual Library: St Paul of the Cross , St Elizabeth of Hungary , The Little Flowers of St