From the brainiacs to the bluffers: a guide to public school stereotypes

A Wykehamist, an Old Etonian and an Old Harrovian are in a bar. A woman walks in. The Old Etonian says: ‘Fetch her a chair!’ The Wykehamist gets it. The Old Harrovian sits in it.

It’s the oldest public-school joke in the world — and it still has the ring of truth. (Though you might add these days: ‘And then the Old Etonian becomes prime minister.’) But what about the other public schools? Here are the classic characteristics of our most famous schoolboys — and schoolgirls.

Charterhouse

Artistic, literary, louche, political and on the make… the received wisdom about Old Carthusians was set in stone in the Alms for Oblivion sequence by Simon Raven (1927-2001), who was at the school in the 1940s. At his own admission, Raven was a pleasure-loving libertine. His Charterhouse contemporaries were thinly disguised in the novels: William Rees-Mogg, Jacob’s father, later editor of the Times, is the ambitious Catholic opportunist Somerset Lloyd-James. James Prior, a cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher, is Peter Morrison, the MP who sails along in life, unsullied by his dodgier moments.

Eton

The most famous school in the world is a prime minister-producing factory. It’s manufactured 20 PMs, from the first, Robert Walpole, to the current, Boris Johnson. The Old Etonian is renowned for lethal charm, intelligence lightly worn and a complete lack of surprise that he should end up striding along the corridors of power. Even the ones that slip up, like Jonathan Aitken, OE and jailbird, have the chutzpah to keep their chin up and rise again, phoenix-like — in his case as a Church of England vicar.

Harrow

Old Harrovians are the bounders at the party: the confident, sporty type, untroubled by self-doubt or intellectual agonies. They know all the rules about the right sort of clothes and manners, and then cheerfully break them. In fact, they are playing the ultimate public-school bluff — pretending to be dimmer than they really are. The most famous old boy, Winston Churchill, was a master at this bluff — pretending to be terrible at Latin at school, not bothering with university, but still doing rather well in later life.

Millfield

Exams aren’t everything at Britain’s biggest co-educational boarding school. Millfield alumni and alumnae are renowned for their sporting prowess. So they should be, with their Olympic-sized swimming pool, riding arena and golf course. OK, Millfield doesn’t produce prime ministers, but it creates Olympians by the bucketful. A Millfield has appeared at every Olympics since 1956.

Rugby

Ever since William Webb Ellis, according to legend, picked up a football and ran with it at a school game in 1823, the Old Rugbeian has been associated with the game the school gave its name to: rough, tough and keener on sport than lessons. The idée became even more fixe with George MacDonald Fraser’s inspired 1969 reincarnation of Flashman, the Rugby bully in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Ever since, the Platonic ideal of the school bully has been associated with Rugby. In fact, the school is really a rather intellectual, bookish place. Old boys include Rupert Brooke, A.N. Wilson and Salman Rushdie.

St Paul’s Boys

The school for planet-brained London day boys. Old Paulines include Sir Isaiah Berlin, and the most famous old boy in recent times is George Osborne. No, he wasn’t nicknamed ‘Oik’ in his days in the Bullingdon Club at Oxford. But the media commentators who conferred the nickname on him, long after he’d left university, reveal the snobbery inflicted on London day schools.

St Paul’s Girls

‘Plain Jane Superbrain’ was the ubergeek in the Australian soap Neighbours. Well, Old Paulinas are Babe Jane Superbrains, combining looks with grey matter. They include Emily Mortimer, Imogen Stubbs, Rachel Weisz and Celia Johnson. As the most academic girls’ school in London, it has a huge catchment area, encompassing the capital’s brightest and richest parents. No wonder their offspring have more than a batsqueak of ambition, combined with urban street-smart.

Shrewsbury

Old Salopians have forever been moulded by the magical writers’ and artists’ generation of the 1950s that went on to found Private Eye: Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton, Paul Foot and Christopher Booker. An old boy of a later generation, Giles Wood, husband of The Spectator’s Dear Mary — as in Giles and Mary of Gogglebox — says Salopians ‘at least until the 1980s had a reputation for producing a deeply cynical product like the Private Eye team, distrustful of authority’. An allied by-product is self-deprecation, exemplified by the politest of all Old Salopians, Michael Palin.

Westminster School

Brainy, cynical and, in my day, keen on pharmaceuticals. According to legend, prospective parents touring the school asked one Westminster boy: ‘Is there a drug problem at the school?’ ‘No,’ said the boy cheerily. ‘You can get anything you want.’ Those days are gone, thanks to the huge rise in school fees, an influx of more ambitious parents and the increased trickiness of getting into Oxbridge and the job market. If the Westminster boy is now a bright-eyed careerist, the Westminster girl is a heat-seeking missile, aimed at Planet Success. Because girls are only taken in the sixth form, usually from another competitive school, they’ve been double-filtered for extra brains: once at 11 for their first school, and again at 16 to get into Westminster. Watch out, world, these girls are going to eat you for breakfast!

Wycombe Abbey

Rural brainiacs. Clever London girls go to St Paul’s; clever country girls to Wycombe Abbey. Wyc Chicks combine lashings of little grey cells with a sprinkling of jolly hockey sticks. The naughty ones — increasingly in short supply, thanks to exam pressure and zooming school fees — have all the charm of Ronald Searle’s Belles of St Trinian’s: indifferent to authority, wild and raffish.