Tight Little Yacht

In a wall of England's Rugby School is a granite slab with this inscription: "This stone commemorates the exploit of William Webb Ellis, who with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the Rugby game. A.D. 1823."

Five years later, with an equally fine disregard for tyrannical tradition, Rugby's new Head Master Thomas Arnold picked up another ball. He modified the old master-&-boy absolutism into the prefect system of student government. Arnold's innovation soon spread, like the game of Rugby, through the English public (i.e., private) schools.

Now Rugby has shattered another tradition, and last week many an old public-school man wondered whether it was one too many. As its new head master, it had picked a man who had never taught a class or preached a sermon. The new head: London Lawyer Sir Arthur Brownlow fforde, 47, wartime under secretary in two British ministries (Supply, Treasury). Hard-pressed Rugby had frankly picked him because it needed someone who knew how to handle money. All week the London Times's letter columns bristled and huffed. Canon Harry Kenneth Luce, head master of Durham School, posed the question that troubled everyone: "Is a head master to be primarily a schoolmaster or an administrator. . . ?"

Judges in Israel. It was a question Rugby had never faced before, though it was founded in 1567, is now one of the top six public schools in England.* For a couple of hundred years, under head masters who didn't have to worry so much about the business side, Rugby was an "anarchy tempered by despotism." In 1797, the boys rebelled against one flogging head master, smashed his windows, blew down his door, burned his books, and only desisted at the approach of soldiers with fixed bayonets.

Head Master Arnold set up a theocracy, with himself as Jehovah and the Sixth Form (oldest) boys as the Judges in Israel. He was convinced that education's primary task was the making of a Christian gentleman, not the development of an intellectual. Arnold did his part: searing sermons in chapel about evil and temptation, a terrible eye fixed on the "Close" (school grounds) beneath his window. Arnold's Rugby was the Rugby of "fagging" and Tom Brown's School Days.

Rugby has produced such Englishmen as Matthew Arnold (Thomas' son), Lewis Carroll, Rupert Brooke, Neville Chamberlain and the new head master himself, , who as head boy of the school in 1917 occupied the famed "Tom Brown's Study," alongside the Head Master's House lie will now inherit. He also won his colors for Rugby and cricket.

Dress as You Please. Rugby's 620 boys nowadays come mainly from upper-class professional and mercantile families (the peerage prefers Eton and Harrow.). In contrast to the formal Eton attire and classic Eton curriculum, Rugbeians may dress in tweeds, flannels or what they please, take their pick of vocational (woodworking, shorthand) as well as traditional studies.

Rugby boys, curious to know how their new head master would treat them, have one incident to judge, by. When fforde built his country house in Hampshire several years ago, he told the architect that he didn't want a big house with a lot of servants: "Design my house like a tight little yacht. Young children must not be waited on. They must be self-reliant."

* The others: Winchester (founded 1384), Eton (1440), Westminster (1560), Harrow (1571) and Charterhouse (1611).

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