The reason why I had slipped... the alleged reason why I had slipped from fourth place on the roll of marks to 11th was because this mysterious thing called 'weight for age' allowed the manipulation of the roll in whatever way seemed good to the people who were determining who was going to get in and who wasn't. I have to say that when I have repeated this story in front of Wykhamists or to Wykhamist readers, they have all denied absolutely that anything of that kind was conceivably possible, and the French answer to that is et ta soeur. The fact of the matter is, that although the Holocaust was not well known, to put it mildly, in 1945, so far from the British, gallant supposedly as they had been in coming to the rescue of the Jews, were actually horrified at the prospect of Jews coming to England and even of being in England still. Anti-Semitism was very strong. The reaction of two great public schools to the end of the war and the possible influx of Jewish refugees from the continent to join families or others in England was, in the case of St Paul's, which had always had a very large Jewish intake – they introduced a numerus clausus and limited for the first time the number of Jews that entered the school – until, Isaiah Berlin, not the most courageous person in the world but in this case outspoken, objected strongly, and so did Eton make the stipulation overtly that the number of Jews would be limited to X percent. And in that case Freddie Ayer, who was then a professor of Oxford and a famous and quite pugnacious English sort of Jew – he was descended from the Citroëns who had made cars in France and Belgium, I think. Anyway, he objected to that and in both cases Berlin and Freddie Ayer, who were friends in philosophy, managed to get the schools at least to deny that they were going to introduce a numerus clausus which didn't, I'm sure, prevent them from doing it. Anyway, that's how that all that happened. In other words, the Winchester roll, after all the things that one had been through in taking all the papers, was actually rigged and nobody is ever going to persuade me otherwise.
