his bed with a tartan rug as an ostentatious display of his Jacobitism, but such incidents were rare. In the main he had, according to Whitworth, succumbed to conformity, "abandon[ing] the romantic calls of the past for the strident demands of the present". At the end of his first year, he was awarded a prize – "Middle School Recitation, Third Block" – which he received on Speech Day from the hands of the Duke of Connaught. Rebel When, in the summer of 1932, Giles announced his conversion to Bolshevism, Esmond records his family's shocked reaction (and "Uncle Winston"'s considerable amusement), but at the time, he took no specific steps to embrace communism as a personal creed. That followed some nine months later, during the 1933 Easter holidays spent as usual in Dieppe. Before leaving for France, Esmond had acquired a copy of the Daily Worker, and had arranged for further copies to be delivered to Dieppe. Through this clandestine reading, Esmond made contact with groups of communists in London, and arranged to meet them on his return to England. The meetings duly took place, and Esmond was impressed by them, although his ideas were far from clearly formed: "When I went back to Wellington for the summer term, I took with me an odd collection of ideas". Among other things, like others at the time he tended to confuse communism with pacifism. However, he was determined to convert "at least 20 Wellingtonians" to the new creed. During the following months Esmond engaged in various acts of somewhat incoherent rebellion. He joined a "peace correspondence" group, until it was clear that his young, female correspondent was more interested in a sexual than a political relationship. His first concrete act against the Wellington establishment came on his 15th birthday, 10 June 1933, when he refused to sign up for the Officers Training Corps, an action which to his disappointment incurred only mild disapproval and which, after consultation with his parents was allowed to stand. He had written a fiery letter to a left-wing student magazine, the Student Vanguard, in which he asserted that "Every boy is compelled to join the Corps at the age of fifteen and must stay there until he leaves", a patently untrue statement for which he was required to provide a written apology. Towards the end of the 1933 summer term, Esmond took advantage of a school holiday