FAGGING AT ETON

Evening Star, Issue 23525, 14 March 1940, Page 18

FAGGING AT ETON

PLEASURABLE RECOLLECTION Writing of Eton as it was 60 or 70 years ago, Mr Buckland said: “The idea of fagging or being fagged is a sort Of bugbear with some modern philosophers. I look back to it with pleasure. It taught us to obey. before .we began to command. We had no unpleasant services to perforin, such as the blacking of boots or the cleaning of lamps. But we learnt to brew tea and coffee and chocolate, and to make toast, and to butter muffins, and to boil eggs, none of which arts we should ever have.been taught otherwise; and the knowledge thus acquired has been of lifelong use. Nor was this all. We used to have Dutch ovens and small gridirons at which we cooked at our own fires sausages and chops and tiny beefsteaks and poached eggs. I hear that cooking utensils are not allowed now in a boy’s room. More’s the pity 1 For this slight knowledge of cookery has often helped me and my comrades in ‘ foreign parts.’ “ There was occasionally a silly arbitrary exercise of fagging power, when a little fellow was told to go ‘ up town ’ to some shop to buy sixpennyworth of straight hooks or a pint •of pigeon’s milk, which latter commission usually caused dire offence to the damsel at the shop where the pigeon’s milk was demanded. There were two kinds of fagging which young oppidans disliked. The big collegers used to have private rooms over the shops in the Eton street, on and beyond Barnes’s Pool bridge. From their window they would hail a lower boy and fag him to go into college to fetch a book or one of their greasy black gowns, which we all detested. Bub it was worst of all to be fagged to fill basins for the collegers, in Long Chambers. “ There were, I think, about 60 boys in college who were locked up at night in the Long Chamber, where they all slept. About the middle of the chamber there was a Jong and strong table on which there were some 20 large white basins for the collegers to wash in by turns. The basins could be replenished only from the pump, out of doors, and the little collegers,, who were themselves fags, used to try to catch small oppidans to help them empty and fill the basins. There was another kind of fagging in Long Chambers which was not so bad. A little before Election Saturday it was the custom to clean and polish the oak floor of Long Chamber. For this purpose oppidans fags were caught. Whilst one of them was seated on a horse rug or coarse blanket taken from a colleger’s bed, the others dragged him up and down the floor, so that the weight of the little person polished the boards. Collegers were always called ‘ Tugs ’ in my time. ‘ Tug ’ was supposed to be short for ‘ tug-mutton,’ as they were then allowed by the college statutes to have no meat but mutton.”