Repton Resartus

U. S. and British cinemagoers are still being moved to smiles & tears by the smile-&-tear jerker, Goodbye, Mr. Chips. The school pictured in the film is Repton, a famed public school in Britain's Derbyshire. Repton's boys (200 of whom played in the film) are shown in their uniforms of black tailcoats or jackets, striped trousers, starched turnover collars and black ties. Last fortnight, having thus made his school's dress almost as familiar to the public as the Eton jacket, Repton's 40-year-old headmaster, Harold George Michael Clarke, made a surprise announcement: his 382-year-old school's uniform is to be junked. Repton's boys, said he, are to be soundly and sensibly reclothed.

Headmaster Clarke said he had made up his mind to this revolutionary step several years ago, when he learned that Repton boys, to escape townee snickers when they left the school grounds, enveloped themselves in mackintoshes even on the hottest days. Repton's new uniform, still to be designed, will be "made up so as to allow greater freedom and less to divide the Reptonian from his fellow countrymen."

This revolutionary announcement brought many a "Hear! Hear!" from Reptonians (who said a fellow looked a bit of a chump walking over the Derbyshire moors in black-and-stripes), but startled Britain's other public schools. When a reporter for London's Daily Mail visited Eton to break the news, he found Etonians horrified at the suggestion that they change their traditional garb.

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