Editor's Introduction

Summary

Music and the English Public School was the last of Bernarr Rainbow's many books and is, in some ways, his most curious. I was educated in the independent system, taught in it for thirty-two years, and worked in secondary modern, grammar and comprehensive schools before that. Rainbow's book suggests to me that the world of Public Schools, now called Independent Schools, was a strange one to him. He clearly recognised that these institutions had an interesting and important musical story to tell and that the ancient schools, such as Winchester and Eton, were particularly fascinating, as they had choir schools attached. In many ways, these and several other schools were part of the musical history of England since many of their pupils became leading musicians of their day. However, there seems to be a feeling, in Rainbow's book, of curiosity about what was to him a strange system involving an educational setting which he considered a playground of the rich and the privileged classes. The picture on the jacket shows the Harrow football team in the 1860s, in their pyjama-like costumes and hats with tassels, in front of a Latin song by John Farmer. The inside title page includes a definition of public schools taken from the Penguin English Dictionary of 1965, when Music and the English Public School was published in 1990:

Public School (England) expensive fee-paying school mainly taking upper class pupils; (Scots and US) state-controlled school generally without fees.