The five boys who came to illustrate the class divide of pre-war Britain, 1937.

“Toffs and Toughs”is a 1937 photograph of five boys: two dressed in the Harrow School uniform including waistcoat, top hat, boutonnière, and cane; and three nearby wearing the plainclothes of pre-war working-class youths.

The picture was taken by Jimmy Sime on 9 July 1937 outside the Grace Gates at Lord’s Cricket Ground during the Eton vs Harrow cricket match. It has been reproduced frequently as an illustration of the British class system.

The Harrovians were Peter Wagner and Thomas “Tim” Dyson, who had arranged to be at Grace Gates at 2 pm, where Wagner’s father would pick them up and drive them to Russ Hill, the Wagners’ country home in Surrey, for the weekend.

The other three boys were George Salmon, Jack Catlin, and George Young, 13-year-old pupils at the local Church of England primary school.

All three had been to the dentist that morning and then decided to skip school and hang around instead outside Lord’s, where the Eton-Harrow match offered money-making opportunities to any boy willing to open taxi doors and carry bags, or to return seat cushions to their hirers and claim the threepenny deposit.

The News Chronicle published the picture the next day on the front page, under the headline “Every picture tells a story”. A one-line caption identified only the event and location.
According to Peter Wagner’s sister, when the Wagner family first saw it, “we probably laughed because they [the boys] both looked so fed up”. But in the years that followed, her amusement faded. Later she declared that the picture was known “for all the wrong reasons”.

Tim Dyson(the rich boy staring toward the camera) has the saddest story of them. A year after Sime took his picture, his parents arranged for their son to join them for his summer holidays at their army quarters in Trimulgherry, India. Dyson began to feel very ill while traveling and was diagnosed with diphtheria.

Tim died in Trimulgherry on 26 August 1938, aged 16. His father was captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore and died in a Korean prison camp on 22 November 1942, four years after he buried his only child.
Peter Wagnerentered the family stockbroking firm, married, and had three daughters; he became mentally unstable in the 1970s and died in Hellingly Hospital in 1984, aged 60.
George YoungandGeorge Salmonwere each married when interviewed for the Daily Mail in 1998. Young started a window-cleaning business and set up his four sons in the same trade. Salmon, who still lived in Marylebone, died in 2000.

Jack Catlin‘s family moved to Rickmansworth soon after 1937; he was widowed, remarried, and lived in Weymouth. He died in January of 2011 at the age of 85, survived by his wife Shelia, his son, daughter, and grandchildren.
In striking contrast to Wagner and Dyson, all three men had reached old age and a plateau of contentment. But Catlin hadn’t maintained contact with Salmon and Young.

His wife said that when a newspaper (perhaps the Daily Mail) had asked the three men to get together to reconstruct the picture at Lord’s, or at least their part in it, Jack had refused.

Probably to be stereotyped as a poor London boy – a tough even – may have irritated a man who had made good and probably felt no nostalgia for the pre-war streets of his childhood.

Toffis a British slang meaning a wealthy, upper-class person. Its origin is perhaps a variant of tuft, a nickname for a titled student at Oxford University, wearing a cap with a gold tassel.

The Eton vs Harrow cricket match is one of the longest-running annual sporting fixtures in the world. The match declined as a social occasion in the years after the war.

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.

With regard to Eton College one of my favourite quotes is that attributed to William Lamb, the Second Viscount Melbourne:

"I wish I knew as much about one thing as old Etonians claim to know about everything".

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

Lol. My relatives definitely far to the right in that pic 😂😂