Sir Edward Sassoon did not shine as a parliamentarian. He became an established backbench MP who took an interest in trade, improving international telegraph communications and the idea of building a Channel tunnel. His place in the House of Commons, the mother parliament of the British Empire, may have enhanced his standing in political society, but it was not somewhere he needed to be. He was paving the way for his children so that they could go on and attain the heights of power and prominence in the British establishment that for him were out of reach. Like all parents, he was ambitious for his children, and he clearly hoped that Philip would use the wealth, title and connections he would inherit to launch his own great career in British public life.
The formal education Edward and Aline chose for Philip was one they hoped would equip him to be a leading member of the British ruling class. He attended a boarding prep school in Farnborough, before being sent to Eton College. Fathers put their sons down for a place at Eton on the day or at least in the week of their birth. In the early 1900s the purpose of the school’s entrance exam was not to select the best students, but to determine into which form a boy should be placed. After Eton Philip would spend four years at the University of Oxford, where many of the young undergraduates would attend the same college as previous generations of their families, often inhabiting the same set of rooms. This was the tried and tested production line designed to mould the future elite, one that had produced in good order prime ministers, generals and colonial governors. When Philip started at Eton in spring 1902, the then Prime Minister Arthur Balfour was among the school’s alumni, as had been his immediate three predecessors going back over twenty years. Edward wrote to tell his son as he embarked upon his school life that ‘You will find diligence in studies particularly helpful when you join the Debating Society at Eton, an institution in which excellence means a brilliant career in Parliament later on.’7
Philip was the first generation of his line of the Sassoon family to receive his schooling in England, although he did have five cousins at Eton, all members of the Ashley Park branch, and grandsons of S. D. Sassoon.fn7 There were other boys he knew from his mother’s circle, particularly Julian and Billy Grenfell, and Edward Horner, the sons respectively of Lady Desborough and Frances Horner. Eton would not be a complete leap into the unknown for Philip, but nor was he a native of his new habitat.
Arriving for his first term, the thirteen-year-old Philip Sassoon was an exotic figure to those English schoolboys. He had a dark complexion, as a result of his eastern heritage, and a French accent from the great deal of time he had spent with his mother’s family. In particular he rolled his ‘r’s and at first introduced himself with the French pronunciation of his name: ‘Pheeleep’. Philip had a slight build which did not mark him out as a future Captain of Boats or star of the football field; Eton was a school which idolized its sportsmen, and they filled the ranks of Pop, the elite club of senior boys. For Philip, just being Jewish made him unusual enough in the more conservative elements of society, as it aroused suspicion as a ‘foreign’ religion.
While it was well known that Philip’s family had great wealth, this was not something that would necessarily impress the other boys, particularly when it was new money. Any sense of self-importance was also strictly taboo, and likely to lead only to ridicule. To be accepted, Philip would need to master that great English deceit of false modesty.
He was placed in the boarding house run by Herbert Tatham, a Cambridge classicist who had been a member of one of the university’s secret societies of intellectuals, the Young Apostles. The house accommodation was spartan, and certainly bore no comparison with Philip’s life in Park Lane and the Avenue de Marigny. Lawrence Jones, a contemporary at Eton, where his friends called him ‘Jonah’, remembered that in his house:
no fires might be lit in boys’ rooms till four o’clock, however hard the frost outside, and since the wearing of great coats was something not ‘done’ except by boys who had house colours or Upper Boats, we shook and shivered from early school till dinner at two o’clock … we snuffled and snivelled through the winter halves … If there is anything more bleak than to return to your room on a winter’s morning, with snow on the ground to find the door and window open, the chairs on the table and the maid scrubbing the linoleum floor, I have not met it.8
Unlike many other English boarding schools of the time, boys at Eton had a room to themselves from the start, which gave them a place to escape to and a space which they could make their own. This was one definite advantage and Jones recalled that ‘For sheer cosiness, there is nothing to beat cooking sausages over a coal fire in a tiny room, with shabby red curtains drawn, and the brown tea-pot steaming on the table.’9 There were dangers too in these cramped old boarding houses, and in Philip’s first year at the school a terrible fire would destroy one of them, killing two junior boys.
One of the senior boys in Philip’s house was the popular Captain of the School, Denys Hatton, who took him under his wing when he started. Denys would not allow Philip to be bullied, and in return he received overwhelming displays of gratitude and admiration which at times clearly disturbed him. On one occasion when Denys was laid up in the school infirmary with a knee injury, Philip rushed to his side with lavish gifts including a pair of diamond cufflinks and ruby shirt studs. Denys received them with disgust, throwing them on to the floor, but he later made sure to retrieve them.10 Philip remembered Denys’s kindness, and when he had himself risen through the school’s ranks he was similarly considerate to the junior boys. At Eton it was the tradition for the juniors to act as servants or ‘fags’ for senior students. Osbert Sitwell, the future writer and poet, fulfilled this role for Philip and they remained friends thereafter. Sitwell remembered that Philip was ‘very grown up for his age, at times exuberant, at others melancholy and preoccupied, but always unlike anyone else … And extremely considerate and kind in all his dealings.’11
Among Eton’s unwritten rules was that, to become one of the club, you first had to become clubbable. Philip sought to gain favour with his contemporaries by throwing generous tea parties in his room, with the help of Mrs Skey, the house matron.fn8 There he would amuse his guests with his great gift as a mimic and storyteller, making full use of London gossip from his parents’ social circle. He was an enthusiast of the energetic cross-country sport of beagling, he rowed for his house, and he enjoyed tennis and the school’s traditional handball game, Eton Fives. In his last year Philip would also receive the social distinction of rowing on the Monarch boat in the river pageant for the school’s annual celebrations on 4 June, in honour of the birthday of Eton’s great patron King George III.
Later in life Osbert Sitwell would state in his entry in Who’s Who that he was educated during the Eton school holidays. The education of English gentlemen at that time was traditional, limited in its curriculum and designed to mould and shape, rather than to inspire and encourage. Senior Eton masters responded to such occasional criticism by pointing out that the school regularly produced brilliant and inspirational young men, so it couldn’t be all bad. In the early 1900s, the Eton classrooms were even older and more basic than the boys’ accommodation. The future leaders of the Empire were educated in facilities that any school inspector would today close down on sight without a moment’s hesitation. Junior boys were taught in a dark, low-ceilinged, gas-lit schoolroom, with the view of the master interrupted by blackened oak pillars. It was not heated in winter, and was airless in summer. Their small wooden desks were too narrow to write at, and were carved with innumerable names of generations of boys.
The main subjects in the curriculum were Latin and Greek, with the boys required to spend many hours each week learning off by heart great tracts from Ovid and Horace, Virgil and Homer. History and maths were taught well, but science was limited and any kind of study of