Eton College is a boys’ boarding school on the Thames opposite Windsor Castle, founded by Henry VI in 1440. It has around 1,350 pupils, all of whom board, and fees of roughly £50,000 a year. It is the most famous school in the world and the most politically significant institution of its kind anywhere.
The twenty prime ministers
The number that dominates any discussion of Eton. Old Etonians who became prime minister include Walpole, Pitt the Elder, Gladstone, Salisbury, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, David Cameron and Boris Johnson.
Two of the last four prime ministers before 2022 went there. Around 7% of British children are privately educated, and Eton alone accounts for a share of the political class that no statistical account can make look accidental.
Beyond politics it has produced Shelley, Orwell, Huxley, Ian Fleming, John Maynard Keynes, Eddie Redmayne, Damian Lewis, Hugh Laurie, Bear Grylls, and Princes William and Harry.
The uniform
Boys wear black tailcoats, waistcoats, pinstriped trousers and a white collar, every day. The dress is genuinely Victorian in origin and has been retained without irony. Senior boys and prize-winners wear variations signalling their status.
The effect on visitors is considerable — a town full of teenage boys dressed as undertakers, cycling to lessons — and it is one of the reasons Eton is such a gift to satirists.
The language
Eton has its own vocabulary, which does nothing to reduce its reputation. Teachers are beaks, terms are halves, homework is EW, and a house tutor is a dame. The school plays two games invented there and played almost nowhere else: the Wall Game, an almost scoreless scrum along a brick wall, and the Field Game.
George Orwell
Eton produced its own most effective critic. Orwell — Eric Blair, a scholarship boy — wrote at length about the English class system and the assumptions of the ruling class, and his account of the confidence conferred by such a schooling remains the sharpest thing written about it.
The argument
Eton sits at the centre of Britain’s longest-running argument about fairness. Defenders point to genuine academic excellence, an enormous bursary programme — around a fifth of pupils receive help with fees, and some pay nothing — and outreach work with state schools.
Critics point out that a school charging more per year than the median household income cannot be a meritocratic institution regardless of its bursaries, and that its output at the top of British public life is evidence of a closed system rather than of teaching quality.
Successive Labour governments have considered removing the charitable status and VAT exemptions of private schools; the current government has done so. Whether it changes anything about Eton specifically is doubted by most observers, given the fees involved.
Visiting
The school runs guided tours of the historic buildings, including the fifteenth-century chapel and the oldest classroom in Britain, still in use. It is a short walk across the bridge from Windsor and worth an hour.