The five boys were doomed for ever to represent a continuing social tragedy, as Ian Jack, who died this weekend, revealed in this article from the 1843 magazine archive
invention, photography has had the habit of turning people into symbols by accident.
On the morning of Friday July 9th 1937, Peter Wagner and Thomas Dyson stood dressed in this way outside Lord’s. They were Harrow pupils, aged 14 and 15. It was the opening day of the match. The event had lost some of its social eminence in the years since the Great War, but the crowd strolling into the ground that morning was still large and smart.
The moment passed, the morning moved on. The photographer and the local boys disappeared and the Wagner car at last rolled up. The match began. Harrow, who hadn’t won the contest since 1908, went into bat first and were soon out cheaply for 118 runs. Heavy showers interrupted play that day and the next, and slippery patches of mud made bowling harder than batting. For that reason, Harrow had a much better second innings—“Wisden” records that R.A.A.
It seemed in the 30 or 40 years after the war that this was a problem on its way to being solved. Some of’s vision of the post-war future was realised: sharp class boundaries began to soften, social elites felt threatened, universities expanded and state schools sent them more students. In the 1970s wealth was more equally distributed in Britain than ever before or since.
In 1998, when Young and Salmon were in their 70s, Levy asked them if they’d resented the boys in the top hats. “Nah,” Young replied. “We had our lives, they had theirs.” Salmon said, “In those days you accepted what you were and what they were, and got on with it.” The Wagners, pronounced with a W not a V, had reached England from Germany via a long detour to South Africa in the late 19th century. “It just means wheelwright,” Mrs Waley said. “In England we’d have been known as the Wrights.” Her father, Richard Harry Wagner, had been sent to Harrow on a scholarship in 1907, perhaps because it was more welcoming than other public schools to new migrants and new money; a school where Anglicanism, titles and land counted for less.
“It’s very difficult to know when mental illness starts,” Mrs Barker said, “but by 1978 it was clear that something was wrong and by 1979 he was definitely unbalanced—he’d be unreasonable and irascible and we had to do things like hide the car keys from him.” She said it was important to be honest about what happened next. “I had three young daughters and I had to protect them. We couldn’t go on living as we were.
It is. But then, when it seemed that nothing else could be known, I had a letter from Margaret Baynham. Some years ago, Mrs Baynham had written to Roy Seymour, an old Harrovian and keen student of the school’s history, after a letter of Seymour’s about Sime’s photograph had been published in the. Seymour gave me her ten-year-old address and I wrote to her in Whitchurch, Hampshire, hoping she still lived there—hoping she were still alive.
Belgique Dernières Nouvelles, Belgique Actualités
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