School magazines

Contemporary Review, July, 1998 by A.D. Harvey

ROBERT GRAVES and Kingsley Amis had their first poems printed in school magazines, and we can see why E. M. Forster was unhappy at school when we read in The Tonbridgian for November 1895 that in the previous year the school library had lent out only 15 books on art and architecture, as compared to 172 Harrison Ainsworth novels and 112 Captain Marryat naval yarns. We find that Philip Larkin wrote comic sketches somewhat in the manner of Tony Hancock soliloquies for The Coventrian. The Review: the Magazine of Hackney Downs School tells us that the twenty runs achieved by Harold Pinter, Vice-Captain of Cricket, against `Recent Departures' was the third-best score of the 1948 season: a couple of years previously The Review had printed an essay by Pinter on James Joyce: `As a very sensitive young man, James Joyce experienced seething discontent with his life in Dublin ... all his work was about Dublin, which was the one great influence of his life -- a great Irish Catholic shadow that forever lay over him.'

School magazines also provide early glimpses of future cabinet ministers practising the politician's skills of excuse-making and knee-jerk optimism, e.g., in The Nottinghamian, December 1958, Kenneth Clarke, later Chancellor of the Exchequer, explains that though the school Fives Club was easily defeated in an Eton Fives match at Mansfield, `this was hardly surprising as the court and tactics for this game are very different from those of the Rugby Fives that we play ... So long as this enthusiasm for the game is maintained, the Fives Club can continue to extend its activities and can look forward to the future with complete optimism.'

The first school magazine was The Microcosm which appeared weekly at Eton between November 1786 and July 1787, and thus predates the first undergraduate magazines, Olla Podrida (1787-8) and The Loiterer (1789-90). Each issue consisted of a literary essay in the style of Addison and Steele's Spectator: the school as such was never mentioned. Amongst the quartet of boys who produced The Microcosm was George Canning, afterwards Foreign Secretary. A similar work entitled The Trifler began appearing at Westminster in May 1788.

Eton and Westminster were at that time the largest schools in Britain, and the boys tended to come from more than averagely wealthy and sophisticated families. These early magazines were aimed primarily at readers outside the school; The Microcosm was reprinted at least five times, the last edition being in 1827, the year in which George Canning became, briefly, Prime Minister. The Eton College Magazine claimed in 1832 that `all Eton publications have, in a pecuniary point of view, been unsuccessful,' but in fact the publisher of The Microcosm had paid its authors 50 [pounds sterling] for the copyright.

With a couple of exceptions, mainly from Westminster, the school-boy magazine remained essentially an Eton phenomenon till the 1830s. All these early magazines were primarily literary ventures, but there was no standard format. The College Magazine (1818-19) was circulated in manuscript, though the editors, explaining that they were `well aware that most of the communications in prose are only partially interesting,' later issued the poetry contributions in a printed volume. The Etonian (1820-21), on the other hand, contained more than 80 printed pages in each of its ten monthly issues, much of it written by ex-Etonians up at Cambridge. The contents included reviews of Wordsworth and Coleridge, but there was also a series of would-be amusing letters purporting to be from an Eton boy to his parents, which for the first time in such a magazine attempted to give a picture of school life.

A very different type of publication was The Hazelwood Magazine (1822-1830). At Eton and Westminster there was little the teachers could do to stop older boys from producing magazines, though Robert Southey, the future Poet Laureate, was expelled from Westminster for denouncing corporal punishment in The Flagellant (1792); but there is nothing to indicate that school staffs offered any sort of encouragement. In 1819 however Rowland Hill, later of penny-post fame, and some of his brothers transferred the progressive school established by their father sixteen years earlier at Hill Top, Birmingham to Hazelwood, Hagley. Whereas both Westminster and Eton were famous for their floggings, there was no corporal punishment of any kind at Hazelwood; marks were given for good work and for voluntary labour, and were deducted as fines in cases of bad behaviour, following a trial by one's fellow pupils. A hand-copied magazine entitled The Hill-Top Chronicle had been circulated for a time at Hill Top, and in 1823 when the question of a new magazine was broached, the Hills offered the use of their own printing press, one of the brothers, Arthur, who had been apprenticed for a period to a printer, providing the boys with technical advice. As well as being one of the only school magazines to be printed by pupils, The Hazelwood Magazine was also the first one to publish artwork. In 1823 a couple of architectural drawings by the drawing master were printed; in the March 1824 issue a drawing of a horse by Edward Ratcliffe, aged 13, was reproduced. In December 1825 the first attempt at etching by Stuart Howlings, aged 14, a plan of the school and grounds, was printed, and in the British Library's copy this drawing was coloured by hand, which makes The Hazelwood Magazine also the first school magazine to have colour illustrations. Most of the written contributions have little to do with the school, but the March 1824 issue gives an account of the school's new wing, which contained a museum, library and classrooms warmed by a hot air heating system, and an article in the September 1825 issue discusses the changes in the school in the previous three years. Since little is known about this pioneering school (which established an off-shoot at Bruce Castle in Tottenham in 1827 and in effect transferred there in 1833, surviving till 1877) The Hazelwood Magazine is of some significance as a source for the history of progressive education in this country. Incidentally, as well as being the first school magazine to publish artwork and the first to have the active encouragement of the teachers, The Hazelwood Magazine may have been the first magazine to have been passed on from one group of pupils to another: this is the implication of the fact that it lasted eight years (at least) and published work by younger boys; later publications following the school's transfer to Tottenham, The Bruce Castle Magazine (1839) and The Brucian (1850-52) seem to have had a narrower editorial base.