I have recently been reading VS Naipaul’s Letters Between a Father and Son, edited by his agent Gillon Aitken.
The correspondence covers mainly the years Naipaul spent as a student at Oxford, & I could not help but make comparisons with Bernard Donoughue’s memoir, The Heat of the Kitchen, which I also read quite recently.
Born just two years (but over 4,000 miles) apart, both boys overcame what, in today’s terms most certainly, would be called a disadvantage background to win a scholarship to Oxford, something which happens all too rarely today, in the eyes of politicians at least.
So how did they do it?
Donoughue grew up in rural Northampton, the son of an Irish catholic father. His parents never married, since his father had not divorced his first wife, & family life was turbulent. But the village provided a good primary school & a social mixture, so young Donoughue was able to observe other role models &, with his obviously charming & outgoing nature, was a welcome visitor in more ordered family homes. A near disastrous move to a very insalubrious part of Northampton with his mother was ended when he returned to live with his father & got a scholarship to the Grammar School whose inspirational headmaster was determined to get his brightest pupils to Oxford, regardless of their family background.
Naipaul was born into a family whose forbears moved to Trinidad as indenture labourers – a system widely used throughout the Empire, & particularly in the West Indies to provide labour for the sugar estates after the Emancipation of the slaves. Naipaul senior had been able to benefit from the sound (though Anglo-centric) system of colonial education & was both well read & able to earn a precarious living in journalism while having to put his ambition to be a writer of novels on hold while he supported his growing family.
Studying for a scholarship to secondary school was more than an individual effort, it was a family enterprise & young Vidia won a scholarship to Queen’s Royal College which in turn led to the triumph of winning a place at Oxford, financed by a Trinidad Scholarship administered by the Colonial Office.
Eric Williams, himself a distinguished earlier product of the system, wrote, "If there was a difference between the English public school and its Trinidadian imitation, it was this, that the Trinidad school provided a more thorough preparation for the university than the average English school, partly … because it was not even the cream of the crop, but the top individual from Trinidad who found himself competing with a large number of English students of varying ability."
These are but two examples of what is anyway pretty clear from other sources – in order to get on you need a good mentor (preferably or especially a parent), access to a good education, hard work & determination to exploit all the connections you can make. Talent helps too.
But, as became especially clear as I was looking into how many Victorians made their way in the world without benefit of wealth or an aristocratic background, a burgeoning economy and, especially, a public sector, helps. The Victorians were inventing many of the institutions in the form which still exists today – schools for all, colleges of further & higher education, police, local authorities & hospitals, public libraries. There were few recognised qualifications or routes to recruitment & advancement & so many jobs were open to young men with a flair for organisation.
