Biography of T H White (born 1906) by Sylvia Townsend Warner

T H White is best remembered as the author of 'The Once and Future King', inspiration for the musical 'Camelot'

Cheltenham, the earliest of the Victorian public schools, with its traditional Anglo-Indian connection, was a natural choice for the boy. It had a military side which trained prospective army entrants; White was placed in it. But the six years of growing straight and rampaging and being protected had not been enough to fit the boy for the school's thwack-about regime - a regime based on the theory that education must be harassing and the harassing systematically applied.

The housemaster could put a boy on a thing called 'Satis'. This meant that he carried a card which had to be signed by
all his teachers each week. Unsatisfactory work or conduct earned a 'Non Satis' grading, and for three signatures of 'Non Satis' he suffered a caning - and even for one he was compelled to waste time writing a large number of lines. A boy on 'Satis' was continually forced to do extra work and this diminished his already greatly restricted freedom.

To make life worse, prefects in positions of authority in the school corps could impose a punishment called 'Defaulters' upon cadets. This obliged a boy to prepare his uniform and equipment to Guards' Regiment standards before each parade and effectively cut down his spare time to nothing. On top of these sorrows, there were a hundred pettifogging exactions of time. A prefect would call out 'Orderly', and junior boys had to run to do whatever shopping, etc., he wanted.

T H White later recalled: "My housemaster was a sadistic middle-aged bachelor with a gloomy suffused face. His prefects were lither and brighter copies of himself. He used to walk up the long corridor, trailing his cane behind him...

"The prefects used to beat us after evening prayers. I would pray madly every night (or it seemed like every night): 'please God, don't let me be beaten tonight.' . You had to go down a long passage to the gymnasium, where you took off your trousers and put on thin white rugger shorts. Then the prefects came down, rattling their canes. All this was done with a kind of deaf-ear turned, a kind of surreptitiousness. It had the effect - unless something earlier had that effect - of turning myself into a flagellant."

From a later poem by T H White

Send your bright dreaming angel then to Dr Prisonface
So that he may be taught his 'beastly' loins to rule,
So that he may be learned what is and isn't cricket,
So that he may be a product of the good old school.

Stuff him in Etons quick, and send him packing
To Dr Prisonface, his breezy school,
That old rheumatic man with threats and whacking
Will justly bring his body to the rule.