Goodbye, Mr Chips, by James Hilton, 1934

I knew ‘Goodbye, Mr Chips‘ from the faithful-to-the-book and gentle 1939 film version of the story, featuring Robert Donat. (A later film version, a musical no less, starring Peter O’Toole bears very little relation to Hilton’s story). It is a charmingly nostalgic portrait of a retired schoolmaster looking back over his life, but has some unexpected depths to its discussion of imperialism and jingoism.

Mr Chipping is a classics teacher (Latin and Greek) at Brookfield, ‘a good school of the second rank‘. Brookfield is a public (that is, fee-paying) boarding school set in the English countryside:

Across the road behind a rampart of ancient elms lay Brookfield, russet under its autumn mantle of creeper. A group of eighteenth-century buildings centred upon a quadrangle, and there were acres of playing fields beyond; then came the small dependent village and the open fen country.

Told in retrospect from his retirement and old age, Goodbye Mr Chips is his recollection of the years spent teaching generations of young boys. Cleverly it is also a commentary on the changing times that Mr Chips lives through, from the mid-nineteenth century to the early nineteen-thirties. A recurring feature is that many of his students go on to die in various imperial wars:

Dear me, I remember Collingwood very well. I once thrashed him—umph—for climbing on to the gymnasium roof—to get a ball out of the gutter. Might have—umph—broken his neck, the young fool. Do you remember him, Mrs. Wickett? He must have been in your time.” Mrs. Wickett, before she saved money, had been in charge of the linen room at the School. “Yes, I knew ‘im, sir. Cheeky, ‘e was to me, gener’ly. But we never ‘ad no bad words between us. Just cheeky-like. ‘E never meant no harm. That kind never does, sir. Wasn’t it ‘im that got the medal, sir?” “Yes, a D.S.O.” “Will you be wanting anything else, sir?” “Nothing more now—umph—till chapel time. He was killed —in Egypt, I think….”

At another time, reminiscing with his housekeeper, Chips remembers two other students:

“And that affair about the rat that Dunster put in the organ loft while old Ogilvie was taking choir practice. Ogilvie was dead and Dunster drowned at Jutland”

There is also a tragic scene where a student is worried his father has been lost on the Titanic – look at the sad final line. Chips chastises a child because his work that day is not up to scratch:

“Grayson, I don’t want to be—umph—severe, because you are generally pretty good—umph—in your work, but to-day— you don’t seem—umph—to have been trying at all. Is anything the matter?” “N-no, sir.” “Well—umph—we’ll say no more about it, but—umph —I shall expect better things next time.” Next morning it was noised around the School that Grayson’s father had sailed on the Titanic, and that no news had yet come through as to his fate. Grayson was excused lessons; for a whole day the School centred emotionally upon his anxieties. Then came news that his father had been among those rescued. Chips shook hands with the boy. “Well, umph—I’m delighted, Grayson. A happy ending. You must be feeling pretty pleased with life.” “Y-yes, sir.” A quiet, nervous boy. And it was Grayson Senior, not Junior, with whom Chips was destined later to condole.

Chips is a conservative man, resistant to change, and feels threatened by the phenomenon of women exploring increasing freedoms as the century comes to a close:

He did not, he would have said, care for women; he never felt at home or at ease with them; and that monstrous creature beginning to be talked about, the New Woman of the nineties, filled him with horror.

But he then meets a young woman who manages to change his mind and his life:

Her name was Katherine Bridges; she was twenty-five—young enough to be Chips’s daughter.

Chips is 48 at the time. The relationship is described largely from Chips’s perspective and he is untroubled by the age gap. There’s a suggestion that Katherine is aware that it is a little creepier than that – she explicitly compares their relationship to that of teacher and pupil:

On the night before the wedding, when Chips left the house to return to his hotel, she said, with mock gravity: “This is an occasion, you know— this last farewell of ours. I feel rather like a new boy beginning his first term with you. Not scared, mind you—but just, for once, in a thoroughly respectful mood. Shall I call you ‘sir’—or would ‘Mr. Chips’ be the right thing?

Sadly we see far too little of this bright and entertaining character, because Hilton has her die in childbirth soon after their wedding. This is a pity because Katherine brings new life to Chips and indeed to Brookfield itself and challenges many of his preconceptions and prejudices. An example of this is when an exchange visit in planned between Brookfield and a state school in the East End of London. The idea of the exchange is unpopular with the school authorities and underlying their objections is some fairly obvious class prejudice, but she argues passionately for the visit to go ahead, claiming:

“Chips,” she said, “they’re wrong, you know, and I’m right. I’m looking ahead to the future, they and you are looking back to the past. England isn’t always going to be divided into officers and ‘other ranks.’ And those Poplar boys are just as important—to England—as Brookfield is.

His brief relationship with Katherine, cut brutally short, makes Chips re-evaluate many of his ideas. He becomes something of a radical or free-thinker. During the Boer war he challenges the populist anti-Boer sentiment:

It was typical of him that he did not share the general jingo bitterness against the Boers. Not that he was a pro-Boer—he was far too traditional for that, and he disliked the kind of people who WERE pro-Boers; but still, it did cross his mind at times that the Boers were engaged in a struggle that had a curious similarity to those of certain English history-book heroes—Hereward the Wake, for instance, or Caractacus. He once tried to shock his fifth form by suggesting this, but they only thought it was one of his little jokes.

Although he is not an entirely reformed character and is caught making what we can infer is an Anti-Semitic jokes about one of his students:

Once Chips had got into trouble because of some joke he had made about the name and ancestry of a boy named Isaacstein.

Later he outrages the school by expressing sadness at the news of the death of the school’s former German master on the Western Front, despite the fact that he is killed fighting for ‘the enemy’. Expressing sympathy for the loss of a former teacher who fought for his homeland was one step away from treachery, but by this time Chips is virtually irreplaceable at the school, the majority of masters of fighting age having joined up, so the indiscretion is overlooked. Hilton gives Chips a nobility that comes from old-age and having lived through tragedy. Slowly Chips becomes a sage-like observer of the breadth of English history, including the end of the Victorian era and the birth of a new century:

He had been left a vision that grew clearer with each year—of an England for which days of ease were nearly over, of a nation steering into channels where a hair’s breadth of error might be catastrophic. He remembered the Diamond Jubilee; there had been a whole holiday at Brookfield, and he had taken Kathie to London to see the procession. That old and legendary lady, sitting in her carriage like some crumbling wooden doll, had symbolized impressively so many things that, like herself, were nearing an end. Was it only the century, or was it an epoch?

After his retirement, Chips’ career has one last flourish. He returns to the school, never having really left, to return to teaching and eventually become acting Headmaster when the current head and most of the teaching staff volunteer or are conscripted for the Front. The years and the major historical events begin to speed past:

1915. Armies clenched in deadlock from the sea to Switzerland. The Dardanelles. Gallipoli. Military camps springing up quite near Brookfield; soldiers using the playing fields for sports and training; swift developments of Brookfield O.T.C. Most of the younger masters gone or in uniform. Every Sunday night, in the Chapel after evening service, Chatteris read out the names of old boys killed, together with short biographies. Very moving; but Chips, in the black pew under the gallery, thought: They are only names to him; he doesn’t see their faces as I do…1916… The Somme Battle. Twenty-three names read out one Sunday evening.

Goodbye Mr Chips is an enchanting portrait of that special brand of teacher that leaves a lasting impression on their students. It is warmly nostalgic for the pre-War years that are only hinted at in the story’s closing paragraphs – even in 1934 the storm clouds massing over Germany were hard to ignore. And while the story is nostalgic it is honest about cost of the first world and earlier wars and about the challenges the new century brought to many people.

Goodbye, Mr Chips, by James Hilton, 1934