Will Baker on the things that unite and separate Eton College and Oxford

Since the age of four, I have lived in Oxford, and I now live in Wolvercote. I was at school here until the age of 13, at which point I began my time as a pupil at Eton College.

The connection between these two educational entities has always interested me, and, given the background of our current Prime Minister, is as topical as it has ever been.

In many ways, my experiences of these two places have been very similar.

Both are rich in bizarre and seemingly inexplicable traditions. The post-exam ‘drenchings’ that take place across Oxford perplex tourists in the same way that ‘The Wall Game’ (a sport in which the ball is almost entirely out of sight, buried beneath a pile of mud and bodies) comes across as a bemusing spectacle to those looking in on Eton every St Andrew’s Day.

Equally, peculiar clothing is donned in both places. The subfusc (which is the formal academic dress for students) seen across Oxford at the time of graduation seems to me almost ordinary in the light of the Eton tailcoats, described, by one out-of-school friend of mine, as “penguin suits” — they’ve always polarised opinion.

One thing we seem completely incapable of doing at Eton is calling things by their actual names.

While Oxonians feel compelled to call the Thames the Isis, Etonians take it to a whole new level of lingo-mania, where teachers are beaks, lessons are divs, homework is EW, a mid-morning snack is chambers, and a mid-afternoon one is messing.

What really unites Eton and Oxford, though, is what they aim to do: educate.

The desire to produce intellectually inquisitive, well-rounded, and open-minded individuals who are well-versed in the arts of analysis and discrimination is what fuels these two organisations.

Eton and Oxford both bring with them preconceptions, some potentially hampering and negative, but some just plain funny.

I sometimes forget just how wacky people’s ideas of Eton are, however one encounter last year helpfully reminded me.

When talking with some students of my age from schools local to the Eton area as part of a scheme in which we worked together to approach learning in a new way, I was asked by one boy whether ‘I knew any swear words’. As he was not convinced by my ‘yes’, I then had to utter every swear word I knew to prove to him that I was not lying.

Education is not in itself a snobbish or exclusive idea, and as both institutions look to offer more scholarships, more bursaries (such as the one that I am on), and to become more needs-blind, I hope people will no longer see them in the negative light in which they have previously been viewed.

Undeniably, the steep fees remain the largest obstacle to an entirely meritocratic Eton and, to a lesser extent, Oxford, but I believe that they are on the right track.