Gladstone: A Biography Read Online Free Page B

age in the pre-railway years; he had travelled to London, Cambridge, Bristol, Edinburgh and Dingwall. His 1821
journey (to deduce backwards from his diaries, which he began just under four years later) involved departure from Seaforth in the early afternoon, leaving Liverpool by the Birmingham coach at 3.30
p.m. and getting to that Midland town at about 5.30 the next morning, making an interchange and proceeding onwards by a coach sometimes called the ‘Hibernian’, which presumably came
from Holyhead, and allowed its passengers to breakfast at Leamington and dine at Benson (between Oxford andHenley) before depositing them at Slough in time to get to Eton at
7.00 p.m. 6 Tom’s presence may have given some reassurance, particularly as William was to be in the same house and also to do his fagging under
him. But it must also have been something of a wet blanket, for Tom can hardly have fired him with Eton enthusiasm.
    However, William took to Eton like the proverbial duck to water. Despite his later tendency self-consciously to defer to rank, there is no suggestion that he ever felt or suffered from any sense
of inferiority because of his northern trading origin. Magnus thought that he was ‘never a popular boy’ because of his lack of interest in games, but this is implausible. Gladstone was
at school well before the mania for the football field and the cricket pitch spread from Thomas Arnold’s Rugby into the new ‘imperial’ public schools and reached its apogee in
Henry Newbolt’s end-of-the-century Clifton-inspired ‘bumping pitch and a blinding light’. Regency England, which was only a year over when Gladstone got to Eton, thought more of
gaming than of games. He was also there before that new wave of schools imposed on their pupils the standard accent of the southern upper middle classes.
    The old schools never did this. Addington, Winchester’s one Prime Minister, nicknamed ‘the Doctor’, spoke like the mixture of Reading apothecary and Hampshire yeoman which was
his provenance. Peel, who went to Harrow from a rich but parvenu northern background very similar to that from which Gladstone came twenty years later, always spoke with a distinct Lancashire
accent. And Curzon, who was a notable Etonian half a century after Gladstone, was famous for his short Derbyshire
a
s, as in bräss and gläss (when complaining that the Foreign
Secretary’s inkstand was that rather than silver and crystal).
    In Gladstone’s case, as opposed to Addington’s or Peel’s, there are faint and scratchy wax cylinder recordings which give some indication of the authority, but not of the depth
or melodiousness, of his voice late in life. The accent is faintly northern. Seventy years earlier Gladstone must, if anything, have spoken with more and not less of a Liverpool accent, but this
was neither unusual nor inhibiting to him at Eton. He was an early and central member of the Eton Society (Pop as it later came to be called, or the Literati, giving it a rather different
connotation, as it was known at the time) and at its meetings first showed his unusual command over an oratory which was classical in structure and illustration, yet infused with a fervour and
expounded with a profligacy of words which made it hardly Roman. The stylized nature of the framework, even if not always of the contents, of the debates wasaccentuated by the
strange convention, an exaggerated inversion of the ‘fourteen-day rule’ in the early years of political television, that no issue which had arisen in the past fifty years could be
debated. It at least gave the participants a need for historical knowledge and a taste for argument by analogy.
    Gladstone’s mind meshed well with Eton teaching. He later claimed that ‘we knew very little indeed, but we knew it accurately’. 7 This was perhaps true so far as the limited and severely classical curriculum was concerned. Gladstone liked conventional learning, and was good if not