In Terence Rattigan’s 1948 play The Browning Version (filmed in 1951 starring Michael Redgrave), a public-school classics teacher called Arthur Crocker-Harris is appalled to discover that he is known to his pupils as ‘the Himmler of the Fifth’.
According to the Guardian and the BBC, the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was a fan of Himmler’s boss, Adolf Hitler, when he was a student at Dulwich public school half a century ago. I suspect that those who are enthusiastically mining this story for its anti-Farage political potential did not attend single-sex male boarding schools in the 1970s. Given the war had ended just a few decades before, it was scarcely surprising that it was the common currency of schoolboy playground conversation.
I attended two similar schools to Dulwich in roughly the same era as Farage, and I can testify to the obsessive fascination with the war, the Nazis and all things connected to that hideous event that dominated our parents’ lives. The generation above us had fought against the Nazis, or had endured the Blitz; we studied the Third Reich in our history curriculum; we watched films like The Dambusters and Sink the Bismarck every week; and we read comics from publishers called the War Picture Library featuring a character called Captain Hurricane, who bawled remarks such as ‘Eat lead, death to sausage eaters!’ as he sprayed German soldiers with machine-gun bullets.
In short, Hitler and Himmler lived permanently rent-free in all our heads. In one of my schools a boy was caned by his housemaster after a copy of Mein Kampf was found in his locker. The teacher wielding the cane had spent the war debriefing prisoners from Rommel’s Afrika Korps, so was slightly parti pris, and the fact that the guilty culprit had found Hitler’s autobiography in the school library did not save him from six of the best.
So even if the teenage Farage made the sort of remarks attributed to him – and he has denied doing so – he would be entirely typical of his class and generation. Though it would offend our tender sensibilities today, the atmosphere of traditional public schools at that time was – to use a wartime analogy – akin to Colditz Castle: racist abuse was not just common currency, it was standard practice. Corporal punishment was normal (in my school, prefects as well as masters were allowed to inflict it, though they used rubber-soled gym shoes rather than canes). Sadistic bullying was also rife: I once witnessed a boy beaten on his bare buttocks with running spikes. If you want a picture of the atmosphere in which our elite was educated, watch Lindsay Anderson’s movie If, in which the boys take a violent revenge on their oppressors using second world war weapons.
The film was not a million miles from the reality in which we moved. We joined the Army Cadet Force, carried and fired second world war Bren machine guns and .303 rifles, wore scratchy second world war uniforms, and fired live ammo at images of charging Wehrmacht soldiers. I and a group of comrades planned to emulate Malcolm McDowell in If by raiding the school’s armoury and using the firearms therein to stage an armed revolt, but only got as far as loosening the bars on its windows.
Hitler and Himmler lived permanently rent-free in all our heads
One positive thing about my schools was the number of pupils sent from abroad to experience the joys of the British public-school system. At my prep school, an African boy was awoken one morning to be informed that his father had mounted a military coup in Ghana and was now that country’s president; and I have happy memories of scoffing tinned eels brought to the school by a Chinese boy from Hong Kong to supplement our inadequate diet. And although crude insults and rough abuse were the constant background music to our lives (I myself was branded a ‘spazz’ for my poor performance on the rugby field), naked anti-Semitism was mercifully rare.
The current campaign to brand Farage, like Crocker-Harris, as the ‘Himmler of the Fifth’ (and the third, fourth and sixth forms too) is such an obviously desperate smear by Reform’s many enemies that it will probably fail in its purpose. It may even boost his support, just as the attempt to jail Trump did in the USA.
Finally, an admission of personal interest: I knew Farage, once gave him lunch at my club and came close to writing his biography. In 2016, quite by chance, I encountered him making a pilgrimage to a British war cemetery in France, as he often does. In my estimation he is a patriot with not a scintilla of sympathy for the Nazis. He may have been a Flashman – the Rugby School bully who roasted Tom Brown – but the Himmler of the Fifth he is not.
Comments