"First Major Casualty"

In the war's first six months, Great Britain's "first major casualty" was her national school system. So said Lord Addison to the House of Lords last month. Only half of Britain's city children had been evacuated to the country in the first place. Of those who went last September, nearly half have drifted back.

Because city schoolhouses were closed or pre-empted by war agencies, city school children enjoyed a long holiday. Lord De La Warr, president of Britain's Board of Education, estimated that at least 400,000 city children got "no schooling or care at all," ran wild in the streets. Said a worried London welfare officer: "Some children in the East End are going to bed at midnight and rising at noon. One magistrate has commented to me that we are encouraging a generation of Artful Dodgers." By last week the Board of Education agreed to reopen city schools as fast as bomb shelters could be built for them.

By April 1, the board announced, every British child will again be required to go to school, at least half time.

Last week prospects of a second major casualty shocked breakfasting Britons.

One day the morning papers announced that Sir Cyril Norwood, ex-head of Har row (now president of St. John's College, Oxford), had predicted that the war would wipe out Great Britain's public (English for private) schools.

"The public schools," said Sir Cyril in a speech to Royal Air Force officers in France, "have done their job, and produced their leaders, but after the war it will be found that their day is done." Reason: war taxes will be so heavy that few parents will be able to pay $800 a year for a boy's education. Only way to save such schools as Eton and Harrow, said Sir Cyril, will be for the Government to fill them with scholarship students.

Next day there was a great waving and yanking of the old school tie in the House of Commons. Up rose Sir Annesley Somerville, ex-Eton master, to ask what would become of Britain without the public-school spirit. Cried Laborite H. B. Lees-Smith: "Life in a boarding school is a crowd life, a herd life. . . . This unnatural system has resulted in virtually two nations. The masses, educated in State-controlled day schools, never come into contact with the sheltered lads of Harrow and Eton."

Meanwhile, wartime hardships piled up on Eton's "sheltered lads." Latest: Eton footballers were reduced to wearing hand-me-down shirts. Old Etonians who had won their House colors were persuaded to give back their prized shirts.

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