ublished at the moment and reviewers welcomed it. J.C.
Squire, Gerald Gould, Ralph Straus, C.K. Scott-Moncrieff, E.B. Osborn,
all made it their book of the week. Nor was it noticed only in the book
sections. Richards had suggested that Thomas Seccombe who was then
history professor at Sandhurst and had introduced the book to him,
should write a preface. That preface discussed the Public School system
in the light of contemporary events. The system, Seccombe wrote, "has
fairly helped, you may say, to get us out of the mess of August 1914.
Yes, but it contributed heavily to get us into it." The preface
encouraged and helped a journalist to use the book as the text for a
general article. Within a month it had received twenty-four columns of
reviews and was in its third impression. Grant Richards told my father
that with any luck he would sell five thousand copies.

That was at the end of the August. Three weeks later the schools went
back and half the housemasters in the country found their desks littered
with letters from anxious parents demanding an assurance that their
Bobbie was not subject to the temptations described in this alarming
book. In self-defence the schoolmasters hit back and by mid-November the
book had become the centre of violent controversy. In many schools the
book was banned and several boys were caned for reading it. Canon Edward
Lyttleton, the ex-headmaster of Eton, wrote a ten-page article in _The
Contemporary_--then an influential monthly--explaining how biased and
partial a picture the school gave. _The Spectator_ ran for ten weeks and
_The Nation_ for six a correspondence filling three or four pages an
issue in which schoolmaster after schoolmaster asserted that whatever
might be true of "Fernhurst", at his school it was all very different.
Grant Richards adeptly fanned the conflagration. He had initiated that
summer an original style of advertising. He inserted each week in the
_Times Literary Supplement_ a half column of gossip about his books and
authors. It was set in small heavy black type, and caught the eye.
Richards was a good writer and it was very readable. He was, I think,
the first publisher to exploit the publicity value of unfavourable
comment. Richard Hughes, at that time in the sixth form at Charterhouse,
wrote, as his weekly essay, an attack on _The Loom of Youth_. His form
master, Dames Longworth, a fine old Tory, sent it up to _The Spectator_,
as a counterblast to such "pernici