THE LIFE OF FAGS

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 4327, 17 August 1937, Page 6

THE LIFE OF FAGS

PRACTICES IN ENGLAND The announcement by the head master of a secondary school of new rules and regulations on the subject of fagging may savor of a “soft age” in the minds of some of the older generation, says the ‘Manchester Guardian.’ Apparently the trouble in this case arose from the action of a boy who, while taking a bath,, used to make his fag read to him, but that was certainly much less heavy a task than those laid on fags in former days. A. C. Plowden, for instance, thought that much of the fagging at Westminster was “arduous enough, but perhaps the most irksome service of all was having to get up in the small hours of the morning, sometimes as early as 3 o’clock, and not only lay but light the huge fires in the two sittingrooms.” “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” supplies plenty of information about Rugby fagging. At Eton a certain culinary skill was (and presumably is) demanded of fags, but in the old days there were other services. Here is Montagu Williams (in “Leaves of a Life”) on one of them: On one occasion a fag was ordered by a popular sixth-form boy to go and fetch half-a-dozen bottles of beer, secreting them in his gown pockets; but he was caught in the act, and the next morning he was told that unless he confessed who sent him on the errand he would have to go before the headmaster for execution. Nevertheless, like a young Spartan, he maintained a dogged silence and, when it came to the point, took his punishment like a man. That night he was asked to supper at Sixth Form table. Herman Merivals said of his smallboy days at Harrow that he and others were treated “like so many extra footballs,” and no doubt there have always been periods in all schools when fagging would have seemed intolerable but for the happy thought that the fag would some day be an Olympian himself.