Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes. Richard Davenport-Hines
and serene. Those who were privileged to visit Harvey Road with him, I think, know why.’18
While a pupil at St Faith’s, Maynard shared his father’s enthusiasm for stamp-collecting, golf, puns and word-play. Conning and appraising stamp catalogues as a boy was training for his adult skill in scrutinizing catalogues of rare books (butterfly-collecting and classification was the avocation which Neville shared with Margaret and Geoffrey). Maynard played golf with his father at Royston links, and compensated for his indifferent performance in competitive games by his cleverness at sporting statistics. Neville took him to circuses, firework displays and theatres. All the children enjoyed happy, revitalizing holidays at pretty, salubrious middle-class resorts, notably Hunstanton, Ventnor, Tintagel and the Lake District.
‘Goodchild is still most enthusiastic about Maynard,’ Neville Keynes noted in January 1897. ‘I am already too proud of the dear boy. My pride in him and my love in him feed each other.’ When Maynard went to his grandmother’s house at Bedford for ten days that April (bicycling both ways), Neville was doleful and apprehensive. ‘I have got Maynard & his school very much on my mind just now,’ he wrote when the boy had been gone for twenty-four hours. His quandary was whether to enter the boy prodigy for Eton’s scholarship examination. ‘It worries me at night & in the early morning.’ He brooded over the boy’s imminent departure from day-school and home. The fact that the boy’s voice began to break and that he grew three inches in the first half of 1897 only emphasized the looming changes, and the end of an idyll. In the week of Maynard’s fourteenth birthday in June father and son began rising early so that they could have an hour’s cramming before breakfast. He received intensive tuition in maths and classics from other coaches. His stammering increased under the pressure. ‘It is a grief to me’, wrote Neville that month, ‘to think that the dear boy will not … do his work very much longer with me in his study. I like to see his books arranged opposite me; & I like all his little ways.’19
On 5 July both parents took their son to Eton, where they installed themselves in lodgings in the High Street. This intrusive parental involvement must have set Maynard apart. It is improbable that both parents of other scholarship candidates journeyed to the town in order to form a tight protective phalanx around their sons. Their fretting may not have helped. ‘Frightfully noisy,’ Neville fussed about their lodgings. ‘Maynard went to bed a little after 8.30 and at 10.30 I found him still awake, and again at 11.15. We then went to bed ourselves but were worried at the idea that Maynard might still be staying awake.’ The boy seemed calmer than his father. His parents fed him Valentine’s Beef Extract to fortify him before the day’s examinations. Sixty-two candidates sat seventeen papers over three and a half days: their examinations lasted from 7 a.m. until 5 p.m. The general paper required an essay of up to thirty lines on a choice of subjects which show the disposition of the Eton beaks: ‘The uses of an aristocracy’; ‘Your favourite poet with reasons for the choice’; ‘Westward the tide of empire holds its course’; ‘God made the country, but man made the town’; ‘Free Trade and Protection’.20
Neville Keynes itched with disquiet until on 12 July a telegram confirmed that the boy was placed tenth among the scholars. Mathematics had proved Maynard’s strongest subject. The family were acclaimed in Cambridge: congratulations tumbled through the letter-box; when Florence attended garden-parties, her reception ‘seemed like a triumphal progress’. In addition to swimming-lessons as preparation for Eton, Maynard was taught by the Harvey Road cook how to fry, boil, scramble and poach eggs: ‘Skill in this respect will be required of him by his fag master.’21
The squalls of puberty had blown up. ‘The dear boy Maynard worries both Florence & me just now by a certain fractiousness & apparent want of consideration for others,’ Neville noted in September. ‘Every point must be argued, & to get him to do anything that he at all dislikes doing is an arduous task.’ His parents hoped that school life would improve him, and ‘correct our tendency to spoil him’. Certainly he was seldom punished as a child, but subjected to the discipline of reason.22
For five years, from September 1897, Maynard was a King’s Scholar of Eton. He was demarcated from the ruck of Etonians by living in College – that is, at the centre of the school buildings rather than in one of the surrounding boarding-houses. The seventy Collegers were distinguished by wearing gowns, and hence had the epithet of ‘Tugs’ (alluding to togas) applied to them. Keynes as the star product of a Cambridge day-school was typical of Collegers in coming from a less smart preparatory school than most boarding-house boys. This disparity rooted the conviction in other pupils that Collegers were their social inferiors, and that ‘brains were no part of a gentleman’s make-up’, according to Esmé Wingfield-Stratford, who went to Eton a year before Keynes and was elected a Fellow of King’s in 1907. In Harvey Road Keynes had appreciated the studious habits, intellectual ambitions, restrained emotions and moderate behaviour of his parents: he found nothing there to resent or fight. At Eton, too, he found no causes for rebellion. His fag-master (son of the head of detectives at Scotland Yard) was considerate. There was much to stimulate, amuse and fulfil an inherently happy boy. The beauty of the buildings, their historic associations and time-worn fabric, enchanted and transmuted him: the imaginative pleasures of living in College amid such beauty made him a devoted Etonian for life. As a pupil there, he was flecked with the dust of apathy or boredom less than most. Living in College with other cerebral King’s Scholars, there was little impingement from the unreflective games-players whom Rudyard Kipling in 1902 stigmatized as ‘the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals / Given to strong delusion, wholly believing a lie’.23
At Eton Keynes continued his family’s process of social betterment by education. What sort of a school was it?
Eton was no longer the unruly schoolboy rough-house which had been notorious in the early Victorian period. It was more like a counterpart of the Indian Empire, with the head master as a remote, awe-inspiring viceroy, the house masters as state governors under him, and an administrative hierarchy which sometimes exerted rationality, but generally relied on violence. The Lower Master of the school, Edward Austen-Leigh, ‘a shortish, pot-bellied, and apoplectic-visaged old boy, with a bull-terrier squeak and a sardonic manner’, strong on wholesome piety, was known to boys as The Flea – acknowledgement of ‘his skill, not to speak of delight, in drawing blood from the lower boys whom he was privileged … to birch’. Robert Vansittart, who overlapped for two years with Keynes and found Eton in the 1890s ‘lovely’, recalled that the birch, as swished by Austen-Leigh or other teachers, stung less than fag-masters’ bamboo canes: ‘we should all have been astonished to hear that corporal punishment ever harmed anybody’. As Maynard half boasted to his brother Geoffrey after a few weeks at the school, insubordinate boys were punished by older pupils whacking them with rubber tubes which were meant for siphoning water into baths.24
Percy Lubbock, the younger brother of Keynes’s classics tutor and Keynes’s near contemporary at Eton, said that their head master, the Reverend Edmond Warre, educated nobody. Neither ‘his odd jumbled storehouse of a mind’ nor ‘his musing wandering speculating humour’ caught the attention of boys. ‘He brought forth his lore, he quoted the poets, he harangued us upon the grammar of the ancients; but he absolutely lacked the gift of the kindling spark, nothing that he touched ever sprang to fire in his teaching.’ Warre was more voluble than intelligent – ‘a portly dignified John Bullish sort of man’, said Keynes’s future sexual partner George Ives. Keynes was satirical about Warre’s sermons on Sundays, with their mouldy ideas and asinine wordiness. ‘In chapel he stirred nobody,’ agreed Percy Lubbock, ‘he was merely a headmaster doing his duty; he preached as the old head of an old school may be expected to preach, with all his dignity and sonority, with round faces that rolled away to the roof unnoticed till he came to an end.’ Yet perhaps Warre’s conventionality was apt for his audience, for Eton boys were shocked when a colonial bishop, preaching one Whitsunday, mentioned ‘cigarettes’. Daily