Cub reporters

School magazines trained writers – from Philip Larkin to Harold Pinter – since 1786 but they’re now in decline, says Arnold Harvey

- Arnold Harvey

Robert Graves, Kingsley Amis and Ted Hughes all had their first poems printed in their school magazines.

Philip Larkin wrote comic sketches, in the manner of Tony Hancock’s soliloquies, for the magazine of King Henry VIII’s School, Coventry.

The Review, the magazine of Hackney Downs School, tells us that the 20 runs achieved by Harold Pinter, Vice-Captain of Cricket, against Recent Departures was the third-best score of the 1948 season. A couple of years previously, the Review had printed an essay by Pinter on James Joyce: ‘As a very sensitive young man, James Joyce experienced seething discontent with his life in Dublin. All his work was about Dublin – a great Irish Catholic shadow that forever lay over him.’

Politicians often make their debut in school magazines. In January 1981, Boris Johnson contributed to the Eton College Chronicle a short story about an Old Etonian having a heart attack while dreaming he has scored (illegally) in the Wall Game: ‘Exposed, his chest contrasted with the sheets like a toad on marble. “No use arguing with the Umpire,” he murmured as his heart gave away [sic].’

The first school magazine was the Microcosm, which appeared weekly at Eton between November 1786 and July 1787, and so predates the first undergraduate magazines such as the Loiterer (1789-90), published at Oxford by Jane Austen’s brothers, James and Henry, while they were undergraduates. Each issue of the