I have seen that photograph in context, properly titled, in a history-book; so can explain it. I cannot say who the individual boys were, are but what they are.

It looks as if taken at a railway-station, the two on the left waiting for a train on their journey back to school perhaps after a holiday.


For the two in formal dress well out-of-date by the 1930s, are pupils of Eton School, which was one of the most exclusive (by is high fees) public schools in Britain.

It still is to a large extent but like most such now, I think it offers bursaries to academically worthwhile candidates of lesser means. It might even have day pupils, and girls as well as boys!

Originally the public schools were boys-only because girls were not expected to go to university and lead professional careers in law, church or politics. They were also boarding-schools if only because they were a long distance from most of the boys' homes, when travel was slow and relatively expensive. Academically though, even in the 1930s, their curriculae were very limited, largely Greek, Latin, Maths, Latin, perhaps French, maybe a bit more. Oh, and Latin, because that was an entry requirement for Oxford and Cambridge Universities the pupils of such schools were expected to progress to.

"Public school" in the British sense, that is, from how they originated. They were, and still are, "public" inthe sense of being commercial or church-owned but open to anyone whose parents could afford the fees. Which were always high.

Eton was among the priciest; and it had a reputation for inculcating an air of superiority in its pupils.... as those three other boys no doubt had spotted!

So those lads' parents, at any rate their fathers, were very rich: business owners, top-level bankers, senior barristers, very senior military officers perhaps. Or owners of inherited estates whose income is from farming and financial investments.

(The last set, the "landed gentry", was under considerable attack at this photograph's time, by taxes and other economic changes, and many of the estates had become unaffordable, were broken up, their "mansions" abandoned or even demolished.)


The trio on the right do not appear to live in absolute poverty but their families are certainly not well off. Their fathers may have been factory workers, dustmen, porters, building labourers and the like: "Working Class", or as I have read, "the labouring classes". Their mothers, just "housewives" or perhaps shop assistants.

Possibly lower "Middle Class": if Dad was the factory or building-site foreman, or administered the refuse collection. The middle boy seems wearing Dad's hand-me-down office jacket.

They would have gone to a regular, local day-school, in the State education system, run by Local Education Authorities and paid for via the tax system rather than invoicing the parents. The boys who left these were destined for a wide range of employment but few would have gone to university as the public-school boys would have expected as normal. The girls' expectations were even lower, with being a secretary or nurse commonly thought the "best" ambition for a school-girl. That was the fault of social norms in trade and industry, not of the State school system which did teach boys and girls more or less equally in academic subjects. Though even in the 1960s some "careers advisors" still held very limited ideas of what counted as suitable work for women.


It's not clear what those poorer boys think of the two "Upper Class" they would regard as "toffs", but it would not have been complimentary, hiding their likely envy of the represented riches.

Nah, those two a 'friends of Dorothy'. My school had a couple of those as well.