Out of Bounds: The Education of Giles Romilly and Esmond Romilly

(Umbria Press, £12.99)

THIS partial memoir by public school boys who fought in the war in Spain against fascism, and Churchill’s nephews, was first published in 1935. 

The reprint adds photographs, a foreword by Giles’s son Edmund and an afterword by military writer Patrick Mileham. 

Giles Romilly writes the first half, a critique of Newlands School in Seaford and Wellington College, where he was followed by Esmond and Mileham 20 years later. 

Democrats’ denunciations of public schools raised a scandal in the past and were considered traitorous by some. 

But today Giles’s words feel unexceptional.

An individual emotional response rather than a critique of a system, his account reads like case-study material for a modern psycho-historian.Esmond Romilly, aka Mr Jessica Mitford, writes the livelier second half.

It careers approximately through his hot-headed part-time “communist” activities, from around 1930 to 1934. 

These include briefly editing a journal for left-wing public schoolboys, Out of Bounds, in 1934 — Eton took 1,200 of the first edition — occasionally selling the Daily Worker and arguing the socialist case. 

Even so, a meeting with comrades left him feeling that: “Communism became... less like an adventure story.”

He liked the excitement of rebelling. 

No-one has given this book the necessary footnotes or created an index and there are unnecessary errors — Brendan Bracken is referred to as Brendon-Bracken and while we learn that Esmond frequents a very significant “communist bookshop” in Bloomsbury, owned by David Bowman, no details are given. 

Indeed, facts don’t feel quite certain. Yet clarity matters, because future historians will find sleuthing harder.

It’s rather puzzling that this work has been reprinted.

Better and fuller versions of Esmond’s brief life exist — Kevin Ingram’s springs to mind — and it’s Giles’s post-1935 story that deserves a publication.

Review by Jo Stanley