Win a copy of Imperial Dreams (1959-1964) by Richard Perceval Graves
It was back in 1929 that Old Carthusian Poet and Novelist Robert Graves (1895-1985) published Good-Bye to All That. This extremely unreliable memoir is now chiefly of interest for its account of Robert’s military service on the Western Front during the First World War of 1914-1918; but it also includes a substantial section on his time at Charterhouse, then and now one of the leading Public Schools in England.
Robert’s 80-year-old nephew and biographer Richard Perceval Graves, another Old Carthusian, has now followed in his uncle’s footsteps by writing an entire book, Imperial Dreams, about his own time at Charterhouse from the start of Oration Quarter (Autumn Term) 1959 to the end of Long Quarter (Spring Term) 1964. This is the third in a series of memoirs. But Richard tells us that:
“These are not being written under the illusion that I am a person of any importance, but with the aim of giving an accurate picture of what it was like for someone of my particular background being brought up in that very different world of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. They are, in other words, primarily a social history of those days”.
As such, this volume makes fascinating reading. Richard depicts a Charterhouse on the very cusp of modern times, poised between the casual brutalities of former days, largely overlooked by his old-fashioned Housemaster Jock Reith; and the much more enlightened world promoted by his modernising Headmaster, the excellent Brian Young, and by first-class beaks (teachers) such as Dennis Gunning and P.D.R. Gardiner.
Here is a record of what life was like in a mid-twentieth-century single-sex boarding school in which boys are effectively being trained to go out and rule over an Empire that no longer exists, when younger boys are the ‘fags’ or servants of the older boys, and are expected to do regular domestic work. A rigid system of punishments culminating in the caning of boys by other boys remains in place. Richard Graves also tells you of their home lives, the holidays they went on, the books and newspapers they read, and the television, films and plays that they watched.
Here too are such events as the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover; the Cuba Crisis; the assassination of President Kennedy; the Profumo Scandal; Yuri Gagarin becoming the first man in Space; and the author’s first experience of watching someone die.
To win a copy of Imperial Dreams, please answer the following question:
Q: Who published Good-Bye to All That?
Please enter by 28th August 2026.