Bloods

Chapter 7 gets away from the school side of things to the boys’ and girls’ side. Bloods’ is an old word for a certain kind of aristocratic young man taken up by the public schools to mean a leading man of fashion, or a captain of sport, or both. It never applied to girls but it is quite clear that there were sporty girls who could take the daring part and all girls’ schools, like all boys’ schools, were periodically rocked over what to wear and the best way to wear it. Sport was the main inspiration for fashion, and sporting fashion was the key to the true standing of a ‘Blood’. In all these things, schools had to negotiate with their pupils. The extent to which they were able to do so determined the sort of school it was and the boys and girls side of things led, first in the 1920s and again in the 1960s, to the creation of the modern university as a place where students enjoyed boarding-house life and the liberty to play and have fun. Chapter 7 also describes the crisis in elite masculinity in the 1850s, a crisis over military failure but also to do with perceived failings in the character and personality of elite young men. Sport was never far away from this crisis, both as the cause and the solution.