When I left Eton College, aged 17 in 1975, the headmaster Michael McCrum, a remote figure who had had very little impact on our lives over the past five years, presented each of us with a signed copy of the poems of Thomas Gray. At the time it seemed one of the most meaningless of the many arcane rituals and traditions that gave the school its peculiar flavour (the wearing of Victorian undertakers’ dress, the playing of bizarre games involving walls and mud, the private language).
Gray, author of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, wasn’t even the best old Etonian poet. But unfortunately Percy Bysshe Shelley was a rebel, an atheist and a proto-socialist advocate of free love – not the sort of man whose poems you hand out to teenagers.
But Gray did write “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”, the poem that distils nostalgia for a carefree adolescence spent rowing and playing cricket near those “distant spires” and “antique towers which crown the watery glade”. The ode ends with the famous lines, “Where ignorance is bliss/ ’Tis folly to be wise,” which seem an unlikely advertising slogan for an expensive and exclusive seat of learning.