The Old Boys' Network
...A housemaster reports that a 15 year-old has brought a bottle of valium tablets to the house and given another boy three on a ‘close your eyes and open your mouth’ basis. I do not have time to deal with this as I must attend a press conference at which the annual statistics for independent schools are published... Back to Westminster to see the parents of the valium boy. The father is another of those barristers who addresses me as a jury, inviting me to consider this point and that, but we get nowhere. Harold Wilson comes to dinner and to talk afterwards to some 40 boys and girls in our drawing room. At half past ten and with a brandy and cigar, he is still telling them how Malenkov ordered the murder of Beria, the head of the Soviet Secret Police.
Westminster School is one of England’s oldest institutions, its origins dating back to Henry VIII. In the last century, it became a part of the British establishment, inextricably linked to the government, the church and the ruling elite.
John Rae, charismatic, strategic and unafraid to speak his mind, was headmaster of the school from 1970-1986 and kept a diary for 14 of those 16 years. This period – one in which girls became full members of the school, British nationality and Christian faith were ruled no longer to be a prerequisite for a place there, and, with the institution growing in both size and academic standing – was not without its controversies. Rae, instinctively anti-establishment, none the less used his position to his own, and his pupils’, advantage. His diaries, chronicling everything from dinners with prime ministers, to drugs and sex scandals, and more than a smattering of extraordinary and demanding pupils and parents, make for an often shocking and unputdownable read.
The Old Boys’ Network captures the spirit of the times, and of a man at the very heart of things – with humour, passion and a refreshing honesty.
About the author
John Malcolm Rae was born 20th March 1931 and married Daphne Simpson in 1955, having six children. He was educated at Cambridge University (MA) and th