An eyewitness account of the Coronation

This was originally posted 19 August 2010 under the title ‘Genes, prep schools and Eton’. It has been re-posted ahead of the 60th anniversary of the Coronation.

In connection with the absurd claims by Alan Ryan (former Warden of New College, Oxford) that it is 'crazy' to look for a genetic element in determining intellectual ability, I may comment that I have never known, or known about, a family in which the innate variations in IQ and other aptitudes between the various members were not very definitely recognised by both parents and siblings. My colleague Charles McCreery was decidedly the most precocious of his family, although some of the others had IQs well above average, and his precocity aroused hostility and obstruction even within his own family.

Photograph of Charles McCreery
taken by Hay Wrightson, London,
at the time of the Coronation, 1953.

Below is an article by Charles (written when he was 11) which was published in the magazine* of his preparatory school after he had been a page at the Coronation. It aroused agitated reactions, and mockery of the vocabulary he had used, perhaps partly because it was accidentally published with no adult editing or alterations, so that it was unmistakable evidence of Charles’s precocity.

His form master was agitated to find that Charles had handed it in to the headmaster – ‘Oh, but you were supposed to show it to me first’ – and the headmaster, perhaps assuming that it had already been edited, published it in the magazine with no alterations at all. (The spelling, as well as the vocabulary, was all Charles’s own.)

On seeing the article, his mother also became agitated and asked him repeatedly if he had written it entirely without help. Was he sure he had? Really sure? She reverted to this issue so often that Charles started to feel guilty, as if he must have done something wrong.

At about this time his mother was colluding with his headmaster, who was also hostile to him, to prevent him from taking the scholarship exam for Eton, as it had always been assumed that he would. This was allegedly to spare him ‘stress’, but actually ensured that he would get nothing positive out of his time at Eton.

Scholars at Eton were in a different position from the others. Although a bit looked down upon socially, as they included some boys whose parents could not have afforded to pay the fees, they were the only ones in whose case it was regarded as socially acceptable to work; so it was really a necessary position for someone like Charles who had strong academic inclinations. Everyone who was not a scholar at Eton was expected to manifest indifference and to be interested only in sporting activities.

MY CORONATION EXPERIENCES

Acting as page to Lord Alanbrooke at the Coronation was a wonderful experience for me as it is a thing I will remember all my life and I will be able to tell my children when I grow up.

I met a lot of very famous people such as Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister and the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl Marshal, whom I thought was wonderful in the way he managed everything alone and yet remained calm and impassive. I was also greatly struck by the demeanour of our Queen who too remained cheerful yet dignified.

The music was very moving and impressive, with a choir of 400, an orchestra of sixty and a large organ. The service began with the Psalm "I was glad when they said unto me", some of the verses of which I learnt during Scripture.

I got to the Abbey on Coronation Day at 6 a.m. in the morning, and had to wait, in the specially built annexe, about four hours with nothing to do but watch and wait, in rather uncomfortable clothes, for the arrival of the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. At last the Queen arrived, amid cheers from the people, and, after about ten minutes interlude, took up her place in the already formed procession for the entering of the Abbey. I myself did not carry a coronet because Lord Alanbrooke, being Lord High Constable, and the Earl Marshal, have two pages and my partner, being older than me, carried it instead. Beside me were four other pages, all but one carrying coronets and not far behind them the Queen herself with her six maids of honour carrying her train. On either side of the nave, west of the screen, were tiers of specially constructed seats. Although these people had a wonderful view of the procession in and out of the Abbey they saw nothing of what went on in the Theatre. My parents however were lucky and had seats on the top right of the peers who are on the right of the dais in the centre of the Theatre, on which is the real throne, and saw practically everything. When my row of pages reached the dais four of us turned to the left and one to the right; I turned to the left and proceeded up a gangway between the lovely blue velvet chairs in which the peeresses were seated. About half way through the ceremony, at a signal given by our "Goldstick", all the pages walked back down the gangway, carrying their coronets, and delivered them with a bow, to their respective peers and returned to the steps where they had been sitting. I, however, did not have to do this as my partner went by himself while I remained seated. At the historic moment when the Archbishop, Dr. Fisher, placed the crown on our beautiful Queen's head, all the peers and peeresses put on their coronets, (some of which were so small that they had to be kept on with hair combs, elastic etc.), to the sound of a fanfare of trumpets and great guns being fired from the Tower of London.

At the end of the service, all the pages walked to their peers and formed up for the procession out, to the triumphant music of the National Anthem.

C.A.S. McCreery, (aged 11).

* Cothill House Magazine, Vol. LXIX, September 1953, pp.17-18.

Statement by Charles McCreery: ‘With regard to Dr Green’s piece introducing my contemporaneous account of the Coronation service, and which describes my mother’s reaction to my essay, I can vouch for its accuracy since it is based on accounts I have given Dr Green over the years concerning this episode, and I read over her account before she published it.’

We appeal for funding to enable Dr Charles McCreery to continue and extend his Oxford doctoral research into hallucinatory experiences in normal people, which would have practical and theoretical implications both for the fields of psychopathology and for the philosophy of perception.

Mother Joseph of the Ursulines

text of a letter about the headmistress of my convent school, the Ursuline High School in Ilford, who later became head of the Ursuline order in England

Mother Joseph Powell

Thank you very much for the photograph of Reverend Mother Joseph Powell. I certainly remember her with very much that expression on her face.

She was sufficiently exceptional (and old-fashioned) to come near to giving me the chance in life which I needed to have; but not exceptional enough to stand by me against the opposition which was aroused.

My father was often blamed for wanting me to have a chance in life, but in fact it was not he, but the Reverend Mother, who proposed that I should take the School Certificate exam at the last chance before the age limit came into force.

Being prevented from taking the School Certificate exam left me in a terrible position from which I have never been able to recover, although my position now is less bad than it might be. But the harm done to the lives of my parents was never remedied, although I was always trying to improve my position by building up capital sufficiently to allow me to do so.

Potential supporters or associates could come to live nearby, perhaps by buying a holiday home in the first instance. Cuddesdon is a pleasant hilltop village with clean air and good views of countryside, accessible to Oxford and the main road to London.

Many thanks again for the photograph.

Margaret Thatcher and the BBC

Where she [Margaret Thatcher] did not think she was among friends … she scarcely made the effort to convert anyone. Most Leaders of the Opposition take great pains to woo the BBC: not so Mrs Thatcher. In her demonology, the BBC was the very heart of the pinko-liberal conspiracy which was dragging Britain down. The Director-General, Ian Trethowan – a good friend of Ted Heath – insists that the broadcasters were not ill-disposed towards her. But she certainly believed she was venturing into hostile territory: ‘the lady arrived with all guns firing, she showed scant interest in, let alone tolerance of, the editors’ problems and berated them on their failings over a wide area, particularly their coverage of Northern Ireland.’ Mrs Thatcher came into office in May 1979 already determined to bring the BBC to heel. (John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher: The Grocer’s Daughter, Jonathan Cape, 2000, p.408)

Margaret Thatcher

John Campbell seems to suggest that Margaret Thatcher was mistaken in her attitude to the BBC. Actually she was right in identifying it as a central element in the ‘pinko-liberal’ movement that was ‘dragging Britain down’. The use of the word ‘conspiracy’ is unhelpful, as it deflects attention from what was clearly going on, to insoluble questions about who originated these tendencies, who said what explicitly to whom, and so on.

Communists knew that in taking over a country it was important to infiltrate its centres of influence. Marxist ideas were in evidence when Margaret Thatcher was at Oxford in the 1940s; and active exponents of them at the BBC interacted with like-minded Oxford academics.

Dame Janet Vaughan was already Principal of Somerville College, and Mary Adams was Head of Television Talks at the BBC, both of them committed Fellow Travellers, as communist sympathisers were then called.

A decade later, when I was at Somerville, the ideological revolution had progressed; the Labour landslide and Education Act of 1945 signalled the onset of the Welfare State.

From the start, the forces of collectivism and egalitarianism scarcely even hinted at their real objectives. One needed extensive experience of what results were being brought about in practice to see that a far more extreme and well worked out agenda was being acted upon, overriding previous principles of respect for factual objectivity, for an individual’s right to make decisions about his own affairs, or for individual differences in ability, and so on. This, however, happened without the previously accepted set of principles having been explicitly rejected.

Mary Adams

Mary Adams of the BBC was the mother of a friend of mine at Somerville, so that I often visited her house. On one such occasion, hearing my father's voice on the telephone when he came to pick me up, Mary Adams said dismissively, ‘He sounds very common’. She did not invite him in to hear his interesting views on education in East London, of which as headmaster of a primary school he had direct experience. The only times she spoke to people with accents as common (or commoner) than my father's was when they were members of the Labour Cabinet and hence freely welcome at her tea parties.

Of course, the people I have described as ‘communists’ were usually careful not to identify themselves as such. Like the Fabians, radical socialists in sympathy with communist ideology had to proceed slowly and cautiously. They might agree with every element of the Marxist perspective, but being described as a communist has typically been controversial, and was therefore to be avoided. Rejecting innate ability, inheritance, private capital, inequality of outcome (at least for others), and the idea of anyone having servants, people such as Mary Adams nevertheless had to call themselves ‘socialists’ and wait patiently until the things they believed in came to be regarded as harmless and normal, indeed barely ‘socialist’ at all – which they duly did.

E. Nesbit and the Fabian Society - a topsy-turvy world

Extract from Five Children and It:

[The Psammead to Jane] ‘Just wish, will you, that you may never be able, any of you, to tell anyone a word about Me.’

‘Why?’ asked Jane.

‘Why, don’t you see, if you told grown-ups I should have no peace of my life. They’d get hold of me, and they wouldn’t wish silly things like you do, but real earnest things; and the scientific people would hit on some way of making things last after sunset, as likely as not; and they’d ask for a graduated income-tax, and old-age pensions and manhood suffrage, and free secondary education, and dull things like that; and get them, and keep them, and the whole world would be turned topsy-turvy. Do wish it! Quick!’

Anthea repeated the Psammead’s wish ...

(E. Nesbit, Five Children and It, Puffin Books 1959, pp.213-214)

Edith Nesbit wrote a number of highly popular children's books, under the name ‘E. Nesbit’. Five Children and It, first published in 1902, is about children who find a Sand-fairy, or Psammead (a small furry creature which is able to grant wishes) in a gravel pit.

Edith Nesbit was a founder-member of the Fabian Society, dedicated to social reforms in a generally socialist direction, so she may well have been in sympathy with the developments which the Psammead deplores as likely to turn the world topsy-turvy.

The Fabian Society took its name from a Roman general* noted for his delaying tactics, and its motto was ‘Festina Lente’ (hasten slowly). Its logo was a tortoise. The Fabian Society was soon superseded by other socialist societies with a more aggressive and collectivist approach, which eventually led to the Welfare State in 1945.

By now we have all the social reforms which the Psammead would have liked to avoid (and more), Western civilisation is on the verge of collapse, but almost no one would question the desirability of ‘free’ secondary education, of the vote depending only on reaching a certain age, or of graduated income tax, as well as of miscellaneous ‘benefits’.

The national health service had not yet been thought of in 1902, and Nesbit does not mention it in the extract quoted. But it was not difficult to predict that reforms of this kind, once they started to be made, could never be reversed (Margaret Thatcher’s ‘ratchet effect’) and would eventually ruin any society which adopted them.

* Fabius Maximus

Margaret Thatcher and the educationalists

[The Department of Education and Science] was a department with an entrenched culture and a settled agenda of its own which it pursued with little reference to ministers or the rest of Whitehall. The convention was that education was above politics: government’s job was to provide the money but otherwise leave the running of the education system to the professionals. Political control, such as it was, was exercised not by the DES but by the local educational authorities up and down the country; the real power lay with the professional community of teachers, administrators and educational academics, all of whom expected to be consulted – and listened to – before any change in the organisation or delivery of education was contemplated ...

Politically as well as temperamentally, Mrs Thatcher was antipathetic to the DES. She instinctively disliked its central project, the spread of comprehensive schools, and the whole self-consciously ‘progressive’ ideology that lay behind it. She disliked the shared egalitarian and collectivist philosophy of the educational establishment ... (John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher: The Grocer’s Daughter, 2000, Jonathan Cape, p.212)

No doubt Margaret Thatcher was inhibited in what she could do as Education Secretary and had to implement the intentions of Ted Heath’s government. And no doubt she was also inhibited with regard to the ideas she could express without fear of condemnation.

Expressing approval of grammar (selected) schools was as far as a public figure could go in supporting the idea that there were differences between individuals and that the object of education should not be to iron these out, but to provide opportunities that corresponded to individual aptitude and inclination.

The body of agents of the collective, referred to as being considered ‘above politics’ – the teachers, educational experts, etc. – were actually almost universally left-wing, and this had a strong correlation with their attitudes in practice to educational issues. Margaret Thatcher was in favour of young people being able to rise in the world by their own efforts and by using their abilities as effectively as possible.

The grammar schools were modified by their increasing dependence on the state and by the increasing dominance of egalitarian ideology.

My experience (as a student) of grammar schools and universities was about a decade later than that of Margaret Thatcher, and by that time it was clear that the idea of people rising in society by virtue of exceptional ability and purposefulness was no longer acceptable, even at grammar schools.

Both the headmistress of the Woodford County High (a grammar school) and Dame Janet Vaughan, the Principal of Somerville College, were clearly against this idea. The former stated explicitly that if someone were able to take exams at an earlier age than usual, or to work simultaneously towards exams in more subjects than usual, these things would be unfair advantages and they should not be allowed.

Dame Janet took the view that if a person encountered any difficulties in achieving their career objectives, they should give up. Since, according to her, innate ability did not exist, their ambitions could not be based on anything objective, and they should be told to settle for something more modest.

My unfunded independent university, which could be publishing analyses of the complex issues involved in the area of education, has been effectively censored and suppressed for decades. Meanwhile, misleading and tendentious material on the topic has continued to flood out from socially recognised sources.

I hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed research department. I make this appeal to all universities, corporations and individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.

Margaret Thatcher memorial fund proposal

I propose that a fund be set up in memory of the late Baroness Thatcher, provisionally entitled the Margaret Thatcher Memorial Fund for Academic Exiles.

The fund would be dedicated to giving financial support to those high-IQ individuals whose academic opportunities were damaged by the hostility of members of the education system such as schoolteachers, local education authorities and college principals.

In view of her own experiences, I am sure Margaret Thatcher herself would have been delighted that a fund in her name was helping such individuals by providing them with financial support, to enable them to carry out work which might assist them in regaining the academic positions and status of which they have been unjustly deprived as a result of opposition from the educational and academic establishments.

Margaret Thatcher believed that grammar schools were necessary to help people from backgrounds like hers to “compete with children from privileged homes” [1]. As well as being handicapped by the lack of a private education, she appears to have suffered from social and ideological bias against her at university. Her background, demeanour and political outlook may all have contributed to her being dismissed or despised by people who were well set up in life.

She was, for example, said to have been turned down for a job at Imperial Chemical Industries because she was regarded as “headstrong, obstinate and self-opinionated” [2]. But these may be just the superficial characteristics that go with having the drive and ability necessary to make major intellectual advances.

1. speech to the Conservative Party Conference, 14 October 1977
2. quoted in K. Sathyanarayana, The Power of Humor at the Workplace, 2007

Thomas Jefferson – liberty, security and freemasonry

There is a quotation ascribed in various forms to Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States of America (although it may in fact have originated with Benjamin Franklin). This runs something like this: A country, or a person, that is prepared to sacrifice a little liberty for greater security will lose both and deserves to have neither.

One may well question this on various grounds; how do you define either liberty or security, and what could be meant by deserving something? However, its essential meaning is clear, and is plainly illustrated by modern society. Once state intervention has been allowed to arise, there is no longer such a thing as individual liberty.

The income support handed out by the state is known euphemistically as ‘social security’. Security in this sense and individual liberty are incompatible. You may have one or the other, but you cannot have both.

Thomas Jefferson was one of the Founding Fathers of the USA, some of whom appear to have been Freemasons.

It has been suggested that freemasonry may be a descendant, via medieval military orders such as the Knights Templar, of Gnostic ideas.

Gnostic Christianity, particularly in its secret and persecuted forms, such as Catharism, appears to have had anti-social (or at least asocial) and pro-individualistic ideas. It certainly seems to have been considerably different from the exoteric forms of Christianity as a mass religion with which we are familiar at the present day.

It is possible that Gnostic ideas have had more influence, through the action of esoteric societies such as the Masons, on the development of civilisation than is generally realised.

We appeal for £1m as initial funding for a social science department in my unrecognised and unsupported independent university. This would enable it to publish preliminary analyses of areas in the history of ideas that are currently being ignored because they do not fit with the prevailing ideology.

Margaret Thatcher and Oxford’s radical leftists

Further on the topic of the late Lady Thatcher and the former Principal of Somerville College, Dame Janet Vaughan, this is an extract from Margaret Thatcher: The Grocer’s Daughter by John Campbell:

To Janet Vaughan, proud of Somerville’s left-wing reputation, Miss Roberts was an embarrassment, a cuckoo in her progressive nest.

Campbell quotes Ann Dally, an ex-Somervillian, about Thatcher:

In wartime Oxford, most students were left-wing, especially at Somerville ... We used to laugh at Margaret Roberts when she knocked at our doors and tried to sell us tickets for the Conservative Club ball or a similar event. She seemed so solemn and assured about it and we were intolerant of other people’s certainties ... She fascinated me. I used to talk to her a great deal; she was an oddity. Why? She was a Conservative. She stood out. Somerville had always been a radical establishment and there weren’t many Conservatives about.

There is a strong taboo against any suggestion that those who are running other people’s lives can be adversely motivated towards them on account of their personality. In the case of Margaret Thatcher, vague speculations are entertained that Dame Janet’s discouragements may have influenced her direction in life. But even if so, they are not regarded as damaging, since she was ultimately outstandingly successful as a politician.

In the case of those whose prospects in life might be regarded as damaged by Dame Janet’s discouragement, the possibility is not even entertained that Dame Janet should be regarded as in any way responsible.

There are many more ex-Somervillians who have plainly failed to get into the sort of career they wanted or needed to have than there are who have become Prime Minister.

Dame Janet is described as socialist. Indeed, she was what at the time was called a Fellow Traveller, and was in sympathy with much of what went on in communist countries. This included the rejection of innate ability.

It is not usually supposed that differences of political opinion between educator and student can have an impact on the academic work and success, or otherwise, of the student. However, it is unrealistic to think that the attitudes of those involved in someone’s education may not be significantly favourable or, alternatively, damaging, even if it is not clear why their reactions to a particular person should be negative. (In Margaret Roberts’s case, the reactions were partly due to politics. In my own case, the hostility was not obviously linked to any differences in world view between Dame Janet and myself.)

It can never have been easy for a person to rise to a different social class by exercising exceptional ability. Those already in the higher social class would be threatened by the potentially intrusive outsider. Those who managed to get to Oxford from state schools, such as Margaret Thatcher and myself, aroused antagonism and a wish to prove to the newcomers that they were not so clever as they might think.

Dame Janet’s attitudes were mirrored by those of the Somerville dons, when I was there.

An undergraduate at Somerville who had obtained a scholarship in classics despite her unfavourable state school background, and who was particularly proficient in writing Greek poetry, was told by one of her tutors when she had a Latin epigram published in a prestigious Oxford magazine, ‘It's the first thing you have done since you came up that justifies your scholarship.’ Subsequently, she was told that her tutors did not think she was good enough for an academic career, although they thought she should be able to hold down a non-academic job.

Dame Janet seemed to look down on those from a less exalted background than her own, but tended not to be antagonistic to students from an upper-class background, nor to those of a socialist inclination. However, even being a thorough-going socialist from an upper-class background was not necessarily enough to protect a student from arousing her hostility if the student was also ambitious, especially if they had ambitions to become an academic.

We appeal for £1m as initial funding to enable the relevant departments of my unrecognised and unsupported independent university to publish more adequate analyses of the many unexamined issues in the fields of education and academia. It is high time that an airing was given to many issues which contribute to the ongoing deterioration of modern society.

Trying to compete us out of existence?

I was disgusted, although of course in a familiar way, to hear recently that someone is receiving a grant (from the Perrott-Warwick Fund, administered by Trinity College, Cambridge) to work on an area of research that was initiated by myself and Dr Charles McCreery, which led to no opportunity for us to develop our research in those or any other areas, nor to any career advancement that could lead to opportunity now or in the future.

I was also disgusted to learn of the existence of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, a department within the University of Oxford, while we continue to be prevented from producing constructive work in several areas which should come under that heading.

From a very early stage in my holding of the Perrott-Warrick Studentship, organisations began to be set up in Oxford, none of which had been heard of before, but which succeeded in the objective of ostensibly mirroring any work which I might propose doing, so that financial support, media attention (which we needed, to get supporters) and potential associates were diverted from my incipient organisation.

A rule that the Perrott-Warrick Studentship could not be held by the same person twice was instituted while I was in contact with the Society for Psychical Research. I supposed that this was in order to prevent me from holding the Studentship for a second time, a supposition based on the consistency with which possible other sources of funding were cut off.

Even if it is the case that such a rule still applies, so that Dr McCreery and myself could not hold it for a second time, there are people here now, and have been other people in the past, who would be able to carry on our research in these areas, and who have, like us, no present sources of income.

Dame Janet Vaughan, the ‘old dragon’ of Somerville

There follows an extract from a review in the Daily Mail by Quentin Letts of the book The Real Iron Lady: Working With Mrs Thatcher by Gillian Shephard.

Janet Vaughan, principal of Mrs T’s Oxford college [Somerville], is several times unveiled as a frightful Lefty snoot – she thought young Margaret Roberts no more than ‘a perfectly adequate chemist’ – but can we not have some description of the old dragon? Did Mrs T ever mention her? Did Vaughan’s dismissiveness fuel the great journey from Grantham to Downing Street? (22 March 2013)

Margaret Thatcher was at Somerville about a decade before I was, so Dame Janet was in situ at the time of the onset of the Welfare State. This shows how well worked out the egalitarian ideology of the Welfare State already was, although at that time seldom made explicit. For example, I do not think that anyone at that time would have said explicitly that there was no such thing as innate ability, or no such thing as genetically determined individual differences.

The appointment of Janet Vaughan as Principal of Somerville sheds a strange light on the underlying intentions of the establishment.

They could hardly have regarded such an appointment as unimportant, or been unaware of what Janet Vaughan’s attitudes were likely to be. Somerville was one of a small number of developing women’s colleges which could be expected to attract the cleverest and most ambitious young women from all over the world, a number of whom would return to their native country to become influential in its government. Dame Janet was strongly communistic in outlook, and communism is opposed to precocious ability. Furthermore, there is every reason to think that Dame Janet herself had an IQ which was well below that of the majority of the undergraduates in her college. It is therefore not surprising that she blocked the way of many of them.

State education might have been expected to provide opportunity for exceptional ability, whatever its original circumstances, but in fact egalitarianism was to mean that there was no such thing as an exceptional individual.

When undergraduates at Somerville encountered difficulties, Dame Janet would deny them permission to take the exams for which they were working and also tell them that they should content themselves with less exalted careers.

I knew of one undergraduate who went regularly to a college of further education in the centre of Oxford to work for an external Honours degree in physics from London University, having been told by Dame Janet that at Oxford she would only be allowed to sit the examination for a Pass degree (a degree without Honours).

Margaret Thatcher was told by Dame Janet that she was nothing more than ‘a perfectly adequate chemist’. I was told by her that I was ‘a competent mathematician, and wasn’t that enough for me?’ I wonder how many others, with IQs far above that of Janet Vaughan herself, were told similar things.

And, denying support for a research scholarship to a Somerville graduate I knew who had a high IQ and was really keen to do research, Dame Janet said – perhaps with the implication that the graduate should not mind about it – that ‘research is dull’. The so-called research which she (Dame Janet) did herself certainly was.