"All anglophone private schools exist in the shadow of the institutions that influenced their founding. They replicate the segregation and social exceptionalism reserved for superior beings destined to lead."
Title: Sad Little Men
Author: Richard Beard
Pages: 278
Published by: Harvill Secker (2021)
It’s 2021 and the UK government is embroiled in scandal.
Boris Johnson has to front up to parliament and apologise for partygate — a series of parties that took place at the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns — but appears unwilling to do so.
Remarkably, this will not bring his government down. That chapter, featuring a certain ‘Pincher by name, pincher by nature’ will unfold later.
But his bluster, deflection, and obfuscation reveals a naked exceptionalism about men like Johnson that will define his, and many others’, legacies.
This is where Richard Beard’s Sad Little Men picks up, promising an exploration of the origins behind the UK’s political leaders for the past century.
Sad Little Men
An Overview
“At an English boarding school [...] the world they enter is enclosed and has much in common with the asylum at Bethesda, Maryland, where [Erving] Goffman did most of his research”
Sad Little Men makes the case that the culture of boarding schools produces highly flawed individuals. Beard, who attended boarding school at the same time as Boris Johnson and David Cameron, though not at the same institution, chronicles UK private school life throughout the ages, adding his own experiences throughout.
Lacking in empathy — and by extension the necessary qualities for a role in politics — Beard builds a picture of emotional deprivation and strident exceptionalism.
Ultimately, this damage trickles down to the electorate through bad policymaking and toxic rhetoric.
A word on the audiobook version. It’s exceptional, and arguably the best way to experience the book. The narrator, John Sackville, delivers a performance that’s well spoken in the manner of an old Radley College boy, but also quietly vulnerable with trauma leaking into the pronunciation of every word.
Sad little men and the fallout from ‘boarding school syndrome’
Plenty has been written about ‘boarding school syndrome,’ and even more research into attachment theory and its role in separation anxiety.
It’s in this vein that Beard questions how healthy it is to remove a young boy from his family home, to instead be raised by a surrogate parent such as a matron or schoolmaster — especially under the guise of it being ‘good for you’.
And boarding schools as a hotbed of extraordinary social privilege with crippling emotional deprivation, is Beard’s core thesis.
Private schools, declassified
Good old ‘regular’ private schools do not escape Beard’s condemnation either.
He argues that Eton, Winchester, Radley, and Harrow are simply the blueprints of success for every other private school in the land.
These schools exist in their own space and time, Beard argues, retaining many of the cultural and social-economic quirks and antics of previous decades.
On the one-hand, this could be seen as a sweeping generalisation. However, it’s hard to deny the evidence presented. On numerous occasions, Beard consults diary entries of famous alumni, including Orwell and Churchill, and points out the extraordinary similarities in culture across the decades.
These include the glorification of war, the ‘banter’, and the language used. The ‘tuck shop’ features — where young chaps can get their sweets — as does ‘prep’ time after school.
Any reluctant private school attendee will recognise at least a handful of these.
Conclusion
Sad Little Men is unlikely to change the hearts and minds of the reader who has entrenched views on private schools.
Those who are in favour of private schools may — unkindly in my view — deride the book as a hit job from a disgruntled ‘old boy’. Meanwhile, readers with preconceived notions will likely find their prejudices bolstered by Beard’s book.
That’s not a criticism of Beard’s book, but more a reflection on our own time, where entrenched ‘sides’ and binary opposition thrive in the absence of nuance.
Regardless, Sad Little Men is at its best as an insightful look into the workings of private schools past and present — and a crucial intervention into the public conversation on the UK education system.