number of personal successes: Head Boy, Patrol Leader of the Otters, captain of cricket and Rugby football, winner of cups for boxing and tennis, and a prize for History. Wellington The choice of Wellington as a public school was evidently the boys' own. Giles has revealed that he and Esmond had been entered for Eton College at an early age, and were expected to go there. However, when the time came Giles pleaded to be allowed to go to Wellington instead: "[It] was associated with soldiers and we were both very military". Their wishes were granted; Giles began at Wellington in January 1930, and Esmond followed in September 1931. Reluctant conformist Wellington College had been founded by national subscription as a memorial to the first Duke, who had died in 1852. It had opened in 1859, primarily as a military orphanage for the sons of deceased officers, but by the 1920s had evolved into a public school of a highly reactionary character. T. C. Worsley, who taught there in the early 1930s, described it as "philistine to a degree almost unimaginable in a great school", and "[I]n every possible way ... thirty, forty, fifty years behind the times". Its style was of absolute conformity, based on what Kevin Ingram, Esmond's biographer, calls a "doctrine of suppression"; a tight curriculum that accounted for every moment of the boys' time, and a "dormitory" system that placed boys in small exclusive units that kept them apart from the rest of the school in every activity outside the classroom. Esmond would later write of his "hatred" at seeing "the same faces opposite one every day ... always there was the same monotonous conversation". In her biographical study, Meredith Whitford describes the adolescent Esmond as "conceited, bumptious, argumentative, spoilt, ambitious for authority, a grubby, unhandy child, extroverted and lazy and too intelligent for his surroundings". However, there is little evidence of rebellion on Esmond's part during his first two years at Wellington. In general, he wrote, his politics were of the Daily Express variety. He describes himself since his Newlands days as a romantic Tory, a Jacobite (supporter of the Stuart claim to the British throne), and after meeting Sir Oswald Mosley in October 1931 was briefly attracted to the latter's New Party – he recalls distributing some New Party literature among his fellow-Wellingtonians. Esmond also records a violent quarrel that arose over his decorating