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his friends and contemporaries from Marlborough, that their abiding memories of Nick Drake were, without exception, of a shy but happy and convivial friend.
    â€˜My memories are that he was tall, very gentle, a guy who smiled a lot; a guy who seemed to be enjoying himself.’ (Simon Crocker)
    â€˜Nick was reserved. Quiet… Thinking back, how you remember people, when I remember Nick, I remember him with a great big smile on his face.’ (David Wright)
    â€˜I remember Nick very clearly. He was a popular guy, quiet and understated. We were in C1 House together. He had flashes of being very, very funny, clever and charming. Not a swanker. A very respected guy.’ (F.A.R. Packard)
    Michael Maclaran, another friend of Nick’s from Marlborough, gave perhaps the most vivid first-hand impression of his teenage friend: ‘Nick was tall and stooped forward, holding his head quite low in his shoulders, as if there was always a cold wind blowing. He had a friendly smiling face and a Beatle haircut … He was always pushing the school clothing and appearance regulations to the limit, with raised seams on his grey flannels, trouser bottoms that were too tight or too flared, did or didn’t have turn-ups and so on. However,he didn’t do this in an extrovert way, and got away with more than some “rebel” types, to the quiet admiration of his peers.’
    Nick’s housemaster at Marlborough was D.R.W. Silk. Although he went on to become Warden of Radley College and President of the MCC, like James Hilton’s immortal Mr Chips, Dennis Silk still has clear and fond memories of the hundreds of Marlburians who passed through C1 House. Thirty years after last seeing him, his face lit up at the mention of the teenage Nick Drake: ‘My abiding memory is the degree to which everybody liked Nick. One can honestly say that he had not an enemy in the place. I suspect he had one face for the staff, and another for his chums, who found him very amusing. It was not what you would call a sparkling sense of humour, but a rather dry, ironic sense of humour.
    â€˜He was reasonably industrious, but his heart was not really in anything academic except English. A very dreamy pupil. Very. “Wake up, Drake.” “Oh sorry, sir.” Always very polite … But deep down, there was something we never got near to. And there was a whole way of life there that I can’t claim … to have penetrated, although we always got on well.’
    Marlborough College was founded in 1843 for the purpose of educating impoverished clergymen’s sons. The school was housed in a Queen Anne-style mansion which, according to Marlborough archivist Dr T.E. Rogers, had been ‘an aristocratic home until about 1751, when it became a very fashionable coaching inn on the London to Bath route. The coaching inn went bankrupt when the railways killed off the coach trade.’
    The portents for Marlborough were ominous. Some of the school’s early buildings were designed by the architect who went on to build Wormwood Scrubs prison. Like many of its predecessors, and successors, Marlborough was founded on a system which bordered on the brutal. Flogging and birching were commonplace, conditions spartan and ascetic; it was all part of the high-Victorian belief that mortification of the flesh helped enlighten the soul and elevate the moral spirit.
    Hopes of a benign beginning for the school were almost immediately dashed by ‘The Great Marlborough Rebellion’ of 1851. In his definitive history
The Public School Phenomenon
Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy wrote: ‘By 1851, Marlborough was like France in 1789 … Years of savage, unjust, but also inefficient tyranny were about to be overthrown.’ Over a period of five days Marlborough pupilsrebelled against the vicious regime of near-starvation and brutality. It was the most violent upset in the history of Britain’s public-school system. Order was