The Loom of Youth | Page 3

a critic and a publisher was one of the
most loved and respected figures in the world of letters. Many were
anxious to give his son a chance.
The book had a flattering reception. Nothing of any particular interest
was being published at the moment and reviewers welcomed it. J.C.
Squire, Gerald Gould, Ralph Straus, C.K. Scott-Moncrieff, E.B. Osborn,
all made it their book of the week. Nor was it noticed only in the book
sections. Richards had suggested that Thomas Seccombe who was then
history professor at Sandhurst and had introduced the book to him,
should write a preface. That preface discussed the Public School

system in the light of contemporary events. The system, Seccombe
wrote, "has fairly helped, you may say, to get us out of the mess of
August 1914. Yes, but it contributed heavily to get us into it." The
preface encouraged and helped a journalist to use the book as the text
for a general article. Within a month it had received twenty-four
columns of reviews and was in its third impression. Grant Richards
told my father that with any luck he would sell five thousand copies.
That was at the end of the August. Three weeks later the schools went
back and half the housemasters in the country found their desks littered
with letters from anxious parents demanding an assurance that their
Bobbie was not subject to the temptations described in this alarming
book. In self-defence the schoolmasters hit back and by mid-November
the book had become the centre of violent controversy. In many schools
the book was banned and several boys were caned for reading it.
Canon Edward Lyttleton, the ex-headmaster of Eton, wrote a ten-page
article in The Contemporary--then an influential monthly--explaining
how biased and partial a picture the school gave. The Spectator ran for
ten weeks and The Nation for six a correspondence filling three or four
pages an issue in which schoolmaster after schoolmaster asserted that
whatever might be true of "Fernhurst", at his school it was all very
different. Grant Richards adeptly fanned the conflagration. He had
initiated that summer an original style of advertising. He inserted each
week in the Times Literary Supplement a half column of gossip about
his books and authors. It was set in small heavy black type, and caught
the eye. Richards was a good writer and it was very readable. He was,
I think, the first publisher to exploit the publicity value of unfavourable
comment. Richard Hughes, at that time in the sixth form at
Charterhouse, wrote, as his weekly essay, an attack on The Loom of
Youth. His form master, Dames Longworth, a fine old Tory, sent it up
to The Spectator, as a counterblast to such "pernicious stuff". Next
week Grant Richards quoted him. Mr Dames Longworth called the
book "pernicious stuff", but Clement Shorter prophesied in The Sphere
that it would prove "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Public School
system". By Christmas the book was a best seller.
A modern reader will wonder what all this fuss and indignation was

about. Two points are to be remembered. First that before World War I
Britain's imperial destiny was never questioned, and the Public School
system as a bulwark of Empire was held sacrosanct. Second that no
book before The Loom of Youth had accepted as part of the fabric of
School life the inevitable emotional consequences of a monastic
herding together for eight months of the year of thirteen year old
children and eighteen year old adolescents. On that issue such a
complete conspiracy of silence had been maintained that when fathers
were asked by their wives, and schoolmasters by parents who had not
themselves been at public schools whether "such things really could
take place", the only defence was a grudging admission, "Perhaps in a
bad house, in a bad school, in a bad time."
I followed the controversy with mixed feelings. I was delighted of
course at the book's success. At the same time I was distressed at being
accused of having libelled the school where I had been so happy, to
which I was so devoted, and to so many of whose masters--in particular
its headmaster--I owed so much.
Well, that is all a long long time ago, and usually nothing is more dead
and dated than the book which once caused controversy. Yet The Loom
of Youth has continued to sell steadily from one year to the next; in
1928 it was included in Cassell's Pocket Library; in 1942 it was issued
as a Penguin and now that the original plates are wearing out, Mr
Martin Secker and the directors of The Richards Press feel that it is
worth their while to reset the type and give the book another lease of
life. I hope that their confidence