So my experience of Wennington is underpinned by that friction and I perceive my five years of education there entirely within its context. But, they were, by and large, a very positive five years. The conflict, far from being enervating or distracting, was of great educational value. Although I frequently found myself squaring up to both Kenneth and Frances, the lessons learned in pragmatic withdrawal and subsequent reflection were invaluable. I discovered that the sparks that were sometimes struck between my teenage quest for freedom and Kenneth’s demands for order ignited more substantive ideas and values that took root and remain with me now.
This evolving of raw adolescent rebellion into something altogether more considered and structurally sound was due in part to the robustness, even aggression, of the Barnes’ beliefs and practices. Kenneth spoke and wrote with passion and eloquence and his utter sincerity and consistency was unimpeachable. Nor would many of us have quarrelled at that time with his fundamental liberalism and the humanity of his world view. But where his sometimes dogmatic certainty, impatience and even insensitivity rubbed many of us up the wrong way, there were others within the community whose flexibility and capacity for humour and tolerance provided a less abrasive experience. Were it not for Brian Hill’s altogether broader articulation of progressive philosophy and Roger Gerhardt’s cosmopolitan interest in the world beyond our fences and fields, the ideological environment would have been much the poorer. I suspect that Kenneth was well aware of the benefits of the leavening presence of those two men, in spite of the conflicts that I feel sure must have sometimes taken place between himself and them.
Times have changed greatly since the early 1960s. Much of the raw material of rebellion that so excited some of us at that time has now become 21st century protocol – revolt into style, as George Melly so succinctly phrases the phenomenon. Much of the optimistic dynamism that drove so many of us to march to and from Aldermaston has atrophied into the very acquisitive cynicism against which Kenneth spoke as a socially aware Quaker. But at the time that material captured our imaginations and persuaded us of the possibility of new worlds and we marched and sang and leafleted and campaigned.
I remember a mock general election one year in which, amongst the grey predictability of Conservative and Labour, I devised with, I believe, Richard M., a political party that would sweep all before it in a tidal wave of socialist renewal. I called it the New Left Front and I pursued its vague and rhetorical policies with vigour, seeing myself as a combination of George Orwell ( in the photographs of him fighting in the Spanish Civil War ) and those firm-jawed, muscular workers who, in socialist-realist posters, stride towards red suns rising over the wreckage of capitalism. Sadly, my proletarian thunder was stolen entirely by Andrew B. who stood as an anarchist protest candidate. So convincing were his arguments against the varicoloured patchwork – from pale pink to deepest crimson - that constituted the manifesto of the NLF that I ended up voting for him along with everyone else. But for all my chagrin at having my revolution firmly spiked, I absorbed thoroughly certain principles and perceptions then that doggedly persist today. Whilst I no longer throw the curtains back eagerly in the morning to check whether the anarchist uprising has occurred overnight, I still can’t take seriously the promises of politicians; I still rail against an education system that has no interest in children; I still view the manoeuvrings of big business with mistrust and disgust. ( If Andrew B. ever reads this, I would be fascinated to know whether for him the principles and policies that he proposed so long ago still have substance. And I’ll happily buy him a drink for turning my political head at that time).
Because of the nature of those times, many of us were forced to consider carefully the constitution of the larger world within which we were living. The Cuban missile crisis is a vivid memory for all who wondered for twenty-four long hours in boarding schools many miles from home whether they would ever see their families again. Our parents’ tales of the days of the blitz and the buzzbombs and our acute consciousness of the possibility of nuclear holocaust made for a precarious sense of security at a time when it was most needed. So we were a generation with an acutely developed sense of mortality. Small wonder that protest became so dominant a motif for us.
But the broad political dimension manifest in widespread support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Anti Apartheid Movement, for the independence of the old colonial nations was largely legitimised by the school establishment. Kenneth and Frances and several staff were, after all, active Quakers and pacifists and they had campaigned vigorously against war in the ‘20s and ‘30s. So there was little currency for would-be rebels at Wennington in opposition to the establishment through the wearing of CND badges and the dissemination of leaflets publicising marches and demonstrations.
So if one was impelled to oppose that establishment, other outlets had to be sought out. And they were easily found. For me the principal target was green corduroy shorts. I hated them with a passion and saw in them a symbol of repression that married ingeniously physical discomfort and personal humiliation. There was absolutely nothing that one could do with a pair of green corduroy shorts either to dilute their unique lumpy, pre-pubescent unattractiveness or to render them somehow stylish. All the boys at the local secondary school in Wetherby had to do to their terylene long trousers was take the bottoms in from 18 to 15 inches and lose the turnups. Even the sullen youths at the borstal next door had classy bib-and-brace overalls that make them look like convicts on a Mississippi county farm. It was always me that led the small party to the middle of the courtyard on an icy Yorkshire winter morning to take the temperature. If it was below freezing then we could wear longs and so share at least some aspect of day-to-day normality with the outside world. One of Kenneth’s reports grumbled that ‘Richard would rather spend the day standing around in longs than running around in shorts’. Which was true.
There was rich potential in another area for rebellion against tyranny and exploitation by the ruling class. Sex was a subject of such constant and intense scrutiny by the Barnes’ that it lost much of its forbidden glamour for us. ( Which is not to say that it wasn’t investigated comprehensively in both theory and practice - but that is another tale ). Drugs were known only to those of us who listened avidly to jazz and read Jack Kerouac, and – one abortive tealeaf smoking session apart – that knowledge was strictly theoretical. Which left only rock and roll. In the early ‘60s the first wave of testosteronal rock and roll had broken. Presley was in the army; Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were dead; Cliff Richard already had his sights set on Housewife’s Choice and church on Sunday.
But in whatever diluted form it emerged, Kenneth loathed pop music. He viewed it not simply as sentimental tosh that debased the currency of relationships; he imbued it with almost diabolical significance, seeing it as an active force that sapped the vital energies of boys and girls, rendering them torpid and apathetic. And he drew no line between Cliff and The Shads and the jazz and blues beloved of Roger Gerhardt and, via him, of a small, dedicated group of pupils). For this genuinely liberal and enlightened Quaker, it was all the Devil’s Music. During the one or two grudging spins at an end-of-term dance permitted to Billy Fury’s latest, he would glower from the sidelines, focussing balefully on those degenerates who were clearly enjoying themselves the most. And as soon as musical health was restored in the form of Victor Sylvester or Jimmy Shand, he and Louis Jones would sweep onto the floor with girls in their arms to show us all how it should be done.
All of which meant that we aficionados of the jungle beat had to smuggle what passed in those days for portable radios down the woods for Saturday Club and Easybeat and under scratchy blankets at night for Radio Luxembourg and the American top twenty. Rock and roll became our music of resistance. We listened to it with all the avidity and defiance that French households listened to the BBC during the War. Our samizdat journals were Melody Maker and New Musical Express, sneaked in under cover of the morning papers, fetched from Wetherby by one of our couriers on a bike. And from time to time Roger – our man on the inside – would accidentally leave his Ferrograph tape recorder open in the French Room on a weekend. We would relax in the Gallic café ambiance, playing his recordings of cutting edge jazz by Charlie Mingus or Roland Kirk, imagining that we were out there in the ‘Big Bad World’ ( as it was universally and ironically known ).
Wennington was never a progressive school of the Summerhill persuasion and, more conventionally, Kenneth forbade smoking. Naturally a number of us took to it with enormous enthusiasm. Not only was it forbidden and therefore to be indulged as a matter of principle, having a fag hanging out of the corner of your mouth and squinting through the smoke went very well with listening to Saturday Club down Lovers’ Lane. We embraced readily the squalor that Kenneth described in his colourful denunciations of smoking and we would stand beneath dripping rhododendron bushes, ankle deep in mud, practising our smoking styles. We gloried in the degeneracy that Kenneth railed against. We were happy to identify ourselves with those dull-eyed lost souls who were denied the glories of long hikes across the moors with the wind whipping around their bare legs. And the marginal risk of being caught added spice to the vice too. Kenneth always used to announce his rambles through the woods unwittingly by jingling the keys in his pockets and delivering his trademark throat clearing sound. On a couple of occasions when short of a smoke, Geoff D. and I would silently approach the entrance to Lovers’ Lane, he with keys and I with my uncanny facsimile of Kenneth’s cough. A swift rendition of both would cause panic and flight and Geoff and I would slip into the Lane and harvest the bushes of the jettisoned fags.
If these were fairly widely shared experiences of rebellion agin the government, there were other more personal areas of dissent. Geoff and I developed a fanatical antipathy towards PE and games and would go to ingenious lengths to avoid them. At our high point of creativity we were fortunate in the school’s then PE teacher, an uncharacteristically tolerant local man called Frank Leafhead. Week after week he would castigate us for our lateness, our lack of kit, our apparent inability to perform even the most routine of physical manoeuvres. Punishment never worked. It generally took the form of something called circuit training, which comprised simply running around the perimeter of the playing field. This Geoff and I would have to do while Frank carried on with football, cricket or athletics. We developed a kind of arthritic shuffle that, at a glance, might be taken for running but which didn’t actually involve either foot in leaving the ground at the same time. We finally broke Frank’s heart completely one winter’s afternoon when we turned up on time but not wearing the appropriate kit. Geoff wore an outsize brown boiler suit, a pair of army boots and a tin helmet and I wore a camelhair dressing gown, slippers and a trilby. From that crucial point on, we were sentenced in every PE lesson to a punishing run down the entire length of the drive and back. Employing our special circuit shuffle, we would proceed as far as the short cut to Wetherby – a track that cut between fields – and we would conceal ourselves behind an accommodating bush and get out the packet of Anchor.
On reflection, much of my small-scale rebellion was done with Geoff. I think we saw ourselves as a sort of revolutionary cell, dedicated to a war of attrition. Adolescent hubris and insensitivity insulated us against any developing sense of responsibility throughout our time at Wennington and neither of us was ever courted for prefectorial office. This released us from what we saw as numbing orthodoxy and we passed through the school untouched by academic, artistic or sporting success. Instead we explored every single tributary of the main drains in the woods. We built a two-storey den in a bush and attempted ( unsuccessfully ) to seduce a number of girls inside its dark loamy interior. We brewed mead one summer, incubating it in Kenneth and Frances’ airing cupboard. ( Drunk while packing at the end of term, Geoff fell into his trunk and, drunk too, I locked the lid. Much later, sober and horribly hung over, I tore the lid open to find him curled up foetally and fast asleep ).
And then we left Wennington in 1963 in a blaze of bravado, ready for that big, bad world whose allure we had contemplated so wistfully for so long. And we spent two or three rather confused years finding out that, whilst it was certainly very big and not without its excitements, it wasn’t very bad, just puzzling. And we hitched triumphantly back up to Wennington to see those who had remained behind and to tell tales of voracious sexual conquest, massive drug indulgence and, of course, rock and roll – for this was now the era of The Beatles and The Stones and the ‘60s had really begun.
What was not immediately apparent to us, either within our new bright, shiny lives down south or back inside the shabby security of the school was that the world that Kenneth and Frances had tried to conserve at Wennington had already changed. The material prosperity that had eluded that idealistic generation of the inter-war years and that was so long awaited through the ‘50s suddenly arrived. Kids had money; kids had power; kids had kudos. Hair grew; skirts retreated; trousers flared. All those symbols of youthful self-indulgence against which the Barnes’ had set themselves so implacably were adopted wholesale, nationally and across the class barriers. The notion of clean-limbed youths in shorts and sandals, discussing philosophy over cocoa, or clambering cheerily up steep slopes with the rain in their faces seemed locked into a distant past. Wennington was so very much a living embodiment of a vision born in a different era that inevitably many of the accoutrements of those times became anachronistic almost overnight.
In the end, the crowning irony for me was that, having for so long adopted a stance of implacable opposition to the status quo at Wennington, I found myself largely unable to take seriously the alternative culture that grew up around sex and drugs and rock and roll. Although all three phenomena played an active part in my post-school evolution, in the final analysis, the sentimental cant and outright hypocrisy that lay just behind so much of the hippy ethos was simply indigestible. I was surrounded by ex-public and grammar schoolboys and girls all frantically divesting themselves of everything that they had accepted as unquestionable convention a year or two before and none of it rang true.
Bit by bit it became evident that so much of what was being represented as desirable – the small, non-hierarchical community, freedom of thought and speech, non-violence and pacifism as plausible realities – had already entered my consciousness. However constrained by the Barnes’ idiosyncrasies those notions were at Wennington, they were represented as constant and palpable possibilities for the wider world. The synthesis that occurred through the interplay of Kenneth’s muscular, bullish Quakerism, Brian’s altogether more refined libertarianism, Roger’s eccentric and individualistic humanism was a rich and potent influence on us all. And it was further enhanced by the less assertive but by no means less significant presence of the likes of Frank Burgess, John Swift, the Peases and so many others in the school at that time.
I am enormously glad that I was born when I was. I believe that I have lived through five of the most exciting decades of the past five hundred years. I’m gratified that I was able to experience that crucial transition from the 1950s to the ‘60s. I share the not uncommon view that, in many important respects, the 20th century truly came into its cultural own in that brief span of years. And I’m glad most of all that I was given the opportunity to grow early into a powerful sense both of optimism and scepticism. I have witnessed ordinary people, young and adult, organising their affairs efficiently, honestly, responsibly, equably and to their mutual benefit without the need for authoritarian structures and rigid rules. And I have witnessed – and witness still – the insistence on the part of bureaucrats, bosses, teachers and politicians that without authoritarian structures and rigid rules order collapses into anarchy. Wennington was a flawed community in many ways; for some it manifestly failed. But fascinatingly it continues to exist vigorously in phantom form across the world 25 years after its material demise. Which must prove something.