Education: Victorian Headmaster

One of the few things which Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Chicago Tribune’s Colonel Robert R. McCormick have in common is their headmaster. As prep-school boys both stood—and perhaps still stand, a little—in awe of the most famed U.S. headmaster of his generation: the founder of small, ultra-swank Groton School. Endicott Peabody, a living legend at 87, retired from Groton’s headmastership in 1940—to a new house just off the campus. Last week he received his first full-length biography, Peabody of Groton (Coward McCann; $5), based in large part on his persistent and prodigious correspondence with his rich and famous alumni, their parents and friends.* The author, himself an old “Grottie,” is Headmaster Frank Ashburn of Brooks School (North Andover, Mass.).

Days with Punch, Endicott Peabody was born in Salem, Mass, in 1857. His family tree was one of the oldest in the Commonwealth. One of his ancestors was Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Endicott, who hanged Nonconformist Quakers, but was the friend of Nonconformist Roger Williams. Another was Joseph Peabody, owner of one of Salem’s finest East India fleets. When “Cotty” was 13, his father became a London banking partner of Junius Spencer Morgan, father of J.P. the First. From 14 to 19, Cotty attended Cheltenham College, preparatory school, where he became “tall, strong as a horse, graceful.” From there he went to Cambridge, where he read Punch, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson and the law—and not much else. “There is a striking similarity between the Rector’s humor and that of Punch in the days when he was in Britain,” observes Ashburn. When Endicott graduated, he knew only that he wanted to be useful.

“What About the Ministry?” When he returned to the U.S., a cousin recalls, he was “a wonderful specimen of stalwart youth, tall, broad-shouldered, fair-haired, blue-eyed, with an irresistible capacity for laughter. … Of course a young man like that landing in the midst of Boston society played havoc with the fair sex. They fell before him like ninepins.” Handsome Cotty entered Lee, Higginson & Co., brokers, as a runner and clerk. Life among the trust funds soon bored him. He visited the famed, silver-tongued rector of Boston’s fashionable Trinity Episcopal Church, Phillips Brooks. Their conversation:

P: Mr. Brooks, I am Endicott Peabody. My brother is going to be married by you.

B: Oh, yes. Come in.

P: What do you think of brokerage?

B: It doesn’t lead to anything, and has little in it except a fortune, if that.

P: What about the ministry?

B: If it appeals to you as the most interesting and desirable thing in the world to tell people about Christ, you had better come in.

Baseball in Tombstone. After settling accounts with his family’s cool Unitarianism, Anglophile Peabody entered the mild warmth of the Episcopal Church. Thereafter “he was . . . first of all a priest.” With his brimming fund of faith, Peabody at Cambridge’s Episcopal Theological School was “just not interested in details of the Higher Criticism or lower skepticism.”

In 1882, after several months’ study, he accepted a call to wild & woolly Tombstone, Ariz. Observed the Tombstone Epitaph: “Well, we’ve got a parson who doesn’t flirt with the girls, who doesn’t drink beer behind the door, and when it comes to baseball, he’s a daisy.”

Peabody soon returned East to re-enter the theological school, to marry his first cousin Fanny Peabody, and, with funds supplied by rich patrons, to found his school at Groton, Mass.

Incomprehensible Groton. In October, 1884, Brooks House, newly built in a fenceless hilltop meadow that looked northwest to the blue New Hampshire hills, was ready for its first students. The 27 boys who arrived for the first term faced a faculty of four. Two of the teachers (William Amory Gardner and Sherrard Billings, who with Peabody formed Groton’s cherished, long-lived triumvirate) had about as much experience of the world and of the classroom as their eldest students.

Many years later Teacher “Billy Wag” Gardner wrote: “Groton School is per fectly incomprehensible to those who have not belonged to it; only partly comprehensible to those who have. …” One reason was that Groton, unlike such colonial growths as William Penn Charter School or such 18th-Century endowments as Phillips Academy, was as much a Vic torian import as the Prince Albert coat.

Like the Prince Albert, it was tailored to the observance of a precise and ponderous ritual: a daily round of 6:45 bell, heavy breakfast, intense (almost neurotic) concentration on studies and sports; an annual round from First Day to Prize Day, with faculty teas and other protocol be tween, as fixed and formal as an Old Testament year.

In letter and in spirit, the pervasive influence in all this was the Rector’s. He was not an outstandingly original teacher. But he was able to concentrate an empire-builder’s vitality and single-mindedness on every detail of the school’s daily round and yearly growth. During the term he lived for the school, from his muscularly Christian plunge at about 6 a.m. until he had observed the changeless ceremony of saying goodnight to each little, hair-brushed, white-collared, patent-leather shod Grottie. Gracious, friendly, athletic Mrs. Peabody, who defrosted her hus band’s high-collar sociability with never-failing warmth and humor, was always with him as he sent the younger boys off to bed.

Religion, Scholarship, Soap. The Spartan ended as he began, with emphasis on the fundamentals: religion, scholarship, soap & water (cold, in tin basins), sports. On the fives court, he was a strong player of this English version of handball. He never hurried, never sauntered. “Move along, boy,” was one of his favorite phrases. Once a young English teacher proposed to allow the boys to read Rabelais and Candide (Stalky & Co. had once been on the forbidden list). Said the Rector: “I prefer … to keep away from dirtiness — keep away from mess . . . and I suggest that we will be better teachers and better men if we learn to keep our rifle and ourself just so.” Returning from Bermuda in recent years he saw an old Grottie, ten years out, climb an ocean liner’s davit to wave goodbyes. “Come down off that davit, F……..,” said the Rector. “Yes, sir,” said the alumnus, scrambling down.

* Some famed “Grotties”: Diplomats SumnerWelles, ’10, and Joseph C. Grew, ’98; New York Daily News Publisher Captain Joseph M. Patterson, ’96; Artist George Biddle, ’04; Attorney General Francis Biddle, ’05.