[BITList] The pluck of ten battalions

[John Feltham]

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Keate,  John  (1773-1852), headmaster, was born at Wells, Somerset, on 30 March 1773. William Keate  (1739-1795) , his father, was educated as a scholar at Eton College and then entered King's College, Cambridge, where he held a fellowship from 1762 to 1768 and proceeded MA in 1767. He became master of Stamford grammar school, and was rector of Laverton, Somerset, from 1768 to 1795. In 1769 he married Anne, daughter of John Burland of Wells. He became a canon of Wells Cathedral in 1773, before dying at Chelsea Hospital, London, on 14 March 1795.

John Keate, who was the elder brother of Robert Keate and nephew of Thomas Keate, was placed on the foundation at Eton in 1784, and proceeded to King's College, Cambridge, in 1791. He was a brilliant writer of Latin verse, and throughout his life remained a fine classical scholar. He graduated BA in 1796, MA in 1799, and DD in 1810, and was elected a fellow of his college in 1795. About 1797 he became an assistant master at Eton, and took orders. In 1802 he became lower master and married in the following year Frances, daughter of Charles Brown MD; they had a son and six daughters. In 1809 he was elected headmaster. There were only seven assistants for some 500 boys, and Keate had to control about 170 boys in one room. Discipline was extremely bad; Keate himself was subjected to such indignities as the smashing of his desk. From the first he set himself to repress such turbulence and disorder, and by rough methods he gained the upper hand. Innumerable stories are told of his apparent ferocity, for instance of one occasion (30 June 1832) when he flogged more than eighty boys at night to suppress what appeared to be threatened rebellion. Undoubtedly he flogged too often, but he did so to support inadequate assistants; he seldom used the punishment on his own account. Nor were individual punishments excessive. Keate was not unduly harsh by the standards of the times-indeed boys often treated his punishments with levity, and he should have realized they were largely ineffective. Other criticisms are justified. The school rules were restrictive but had no force: for example, boating was tolerated and common, though the river was out of bounds. The pretence of observance was all that was required, and boys came to think that lying about misdemeanours was almost expected of them. Religious and moral instruction was very limited. The provost controlled chapel, where the services had little merit, but on Sundays Keate would take the whole upper school for a supposedly edifying hour of 'prayers'; yet this, known to the boys as 'prose', was in practice deplorable. His nickname, 'the Baffin', derived from his awkward cough.

Occasionally, Keate would speak to the boys with real eloquence and effect, notably after the death of Anthony Ashley-Cooper in a fight. Too often he preferred a line of ill-tempered condemnation, which may have been something of a charade. The greatest neglected need was to increase the staff, to provide better supervision of the boys and smaller classes. But the fewer the masters, the more income each received. The curriculum was also culpably narrow; only Latin and Greek were taught, from a limited range of authors, with much time spent on learning by heart and composing verses. Other subjects such as French were offered as voluntary extra studies, but boys who chose to be idle could readily pass easy, dissolute lives. There was scope for those who were motivated-Keate permitted debating and acting, and literary publications. The group of boys around W. E. Gladstone were the most impressive of those who came out of Keate's Eton. His own skill as a teacher is proved by the success of his pupils at Oxford and Cambridge, and he took some measures to improve the competence of his weakest assistants. That he could not achieve more reform was partly because of the restraints imposed by Provost Goodall, a Bourbon even in that conservative office.

Kinglake describes Keate thus:

He was little more (if more at all) than five feet in height, and was not very great in girth, but in this space was concentrated the pluck of ten battalions. He had a really noble voice, and this he could moderate with great skill, but he had also the power of quacking like an angry duck, and he almost always adopted this mode of communication in order to inspire respect. (A. W. Kinglake, Eothen, 1859, 250)
His courage and real kindness of heart made him popular; the boys cheered him after the great flogging, and subscribed a large sum as a leaving present.

When Keate retired from the headmastership in 1834, Thomas Arnold had been seven years at Rugby, and an altogether more earnest conception of education was taking hold; the liberal anarchy of Keate's Eton was appearing increasingly outdated. Yet there is much in Sir Francis Doyle's judgement, that Keate knew, as Arnold did not, 'that there should exist for a certain time, between childhood and manhood, the natural production known as a boy'  (F. Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions, 1886, 48). Keate was not anxious to be provost when Goodall died in 1840. In 1820 he had been appointed canon of Windsor, and in the same year accepted the living of Nether Stowey, Somerset, which he exchanged in 1824 for the rectory of Hartley Westpall, Hampshire. There he lived after his resignation until his death on 5 March 1852 and there he was buried. His son, John Charles, succeeded him in his rectory. His sister-in-law, who often resided with the Keates, kept a diary which presents a gentler picture of Dr Keate than the caricature that has gained general acceptance.

W. A. J. Archbold 

Tim Card 

Sources  H. C. Maxwell Lyte, A history of Eton College, 1440-1910, 4th edn (1911) + Venn, Alum. Cant. + M. Brown, diary, Eton, SR/22 + [W. H. Tucker], Eton of old, or, Eighty years since 1811-1822 (1892) + C. A. Wilkinson, Reminiscences of Eton (1888) + Etoniana of various sorts, Eton + J. Chandos, Boys together: English public schools, 1800-1864 (1984) + D. Newsome, Godliness and good learning (1961) + GM, 1st ser., 73 (1803), 788
Archives Eton
Likenesses  R. Dighton, caricature, etching, c.1815-1816, BM, NPG [see illus.] · A. Edouart, silhouette, 1828, NPG · cartoons, Eton




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