Tom Arbuthnott, our Deputy Head (Partnerships) cycled from Eton to Dudley this summer to prepare the way for an Eton-Middlesbrough cycle ride in due course. Here are his recollections.
Eric Blair’s grave in Sutton Courtenay takes a lot of finding. It’s an unassuming stone in a large churchyard – only when you get closer can you see the water-faded volumes and wilted flowers that George Orwell’s continuing admirers have left to mark the spot.
I am tired as I look for it, and likely to get more so: with a lamentable lack of foresight, I have allowed the battery on my ebike to go flat, with the result that I am going to have to cycle the final ten miles to Oxford down the towpath through human power alone – and, as anyone who has ever pedalled an extremely heavy ebike by themselves will tell you, this is a foolish thing to do on any number of levels. Not least because people think it serves you right for investing in an ebike anyway.
I am on the first day of a three day cycle ride from Eton to Dudley – which, in time, will extend itself to take in Oldham and Middlesbrough too. The whole thing is to draw attention to – and give the Eton community an opportunity to get involved in – our project to open transformational educational institutions in all three of those towns – and to emphasise the thread that connects them all to us, via two historical figures who are so important to Eton’s genesis and purpose in George Orwell and King Henry VI.
Did you know, for example, that Orwell’s road to Wigan Pier started in Dudley with a visit to Stourbridge? Or that Henry VI, having lost the Battle of Hexham, escaped incognito from his Yorkist persecutors, finally being arrested on the edge of Blackburn (where Star Academies are based) at Waddington Hall in 1464?
I have conceived this cycle ride to be full of resonances for Eton as well as for me, setting off on a July day from Windsor (where Henry is buried in St George’s Chapel) along the Jubilee River towards Henley-on-Thames (Orwell’s birthplace) past cow parsley-haunted cycleways. Apart from a car crunch in Maidenhead (not involving me), the passage is smooth – though my routefinding app has an extraordinary ability to direct me down overgrown bridleways that neither horses nor cycles should really be attempting. As I go over a Chiltern hill, the back tyre thuds flat. In a fit of organisation, I have packed a puncture repair kit but without going to the trouble of learning how to use it – fortunately, the friends I am meeting for lunch know an expert who used to run a cycle repair shop, and I am back on my way to Sutton Courtenay by 4pm.
On the second day, I work my way from Oxford to Stratford, taking in the famous stone circle at Rollright and the brewery at Hook Norton – two different historic elements of Englishness. The weather sets in as I work my way through the final section, up an old canal into the centre of Stratford. ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ is advertised at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre – I could have seen Falstaff bedecked as Herne the Hunter in Windsor Great Park. When Abraham Slender is sent off to Eton in the false hope of getting married to Anne Page, I wonder whether he is the only Old Etonian in Shakespeare: surely no one else would have the right?
The third day takes me from Stratford, skirting the south side of Birmingham through quiet Warwickshire roads. As we come to Hanbury, I see a beautiful church on top of the hill, proclaiming what Orwell calls the ‘spiritual comeliness’ of the Church of England: which drew him to be buried in a country churchyard, notwithstanding his historic atheism. As I pass Hagley Hall and come into the Birmingham conurbation, the route gets more residential – though there is a cycle path past some of the ‘dark satanic mills’ of the Black Country and along the cycle path. I arrive on Dudley High Street and remind myself of the site for the new Eton Star school, which we hope to open in due course.
I aim to continue from Dudley to Oldham at half term, and then from Oldham to Middlesbrough at Easter, keeping Orwell in my left wing-mirror and Henry in my right wing-mirror.
Looking ahead, I’m organising cycle rides for the Eton community through the Chilterns, through Oxford and Stratford to Dudley – then via Cannock Chase and Cheshire to Oldham before traversing Saddleworth Moor and the Great North Moors to Middlesbrough. I’d love to give our boys, teachers and parents the opportunity to engage in person with our extraordinary project to open new Eton Star schools.
