Top Kek

I attended Royal Shrewsbury School in the late 1980s. My father mentioned a teacher Frank McEachran, known as Kek to that generation. The school was AngloWelsh if anything; McEachran, a grammar-school boy from Wolverhampton, was probably a Scot by ancestry. Kek semi-retired in 1960 but continued to teach and to live near the school, until he passed in 1975.

One "Moonraker" (not me) typed up the Frank McEachran Wiki page in 2012 and, somehow, convinced Wikipedia that the man mattered. Some of McEachran's students went commie - and traitor. I concede that counts as mattering.

Notwithstanding, my dad loved McEachran. So did several of Kek's colleagues at the school, still teaching there in my day: Charlesworth, Holgate, LeQuesne. Those colleagues re-edited McEachran's books of "spells" and published a new version in 1992ish, which my dad duly bought.

McEachran - arrogantly - had published a work on The Civilized Man when he was in his late 20s; then, in 1932, The Destiny of Europe. (He was born in 1900 so converting age to year, and back again, is easy.) Those books made precisely the impact they deserved to make: the man was no Hilaire Belloc (UPDATE 10/19 - who was himself an economic crank). Not in 1930...

...and not in 1970. McEachran in the mid-1930s was a disciple of one Henry George. George was one of those thinkers who crop up now and again, not Socialist, but also against free-trade and the Machine. The Italians had their fascists; certain AngloCatholics came up with "Distributism". Georgism looks like Distributism for nonobservant Anglicans.

On The Site, as a teacher, McEachran was a Dead Poets Society figure. Kek was tolerated in Salopia where he might not be so tolerated in other schools. Among McEachran's chosen pericopae - he called them "Spells" - was Auden's jaundiced look at examinamania. And yes, Shrewsbury did screen DPS at us soon after it came out.

We did not have Kek when we were there, nor a teacher like Kek; but the school honoured his memory. Even the Tory teachers like Charlesworth honoured him.

So: let's talk about the legacy of McEachran. Let's decide if Kek is worth the honour.

That McEachran promoted a Third Way economics, Georgism, hints at an idealism coupled with deep naïveté. Third Way theories in a society tend to fascism or socialism. Kek's classroom even provides a laboratory for how Third Way theories work on a young brain.

What teenagers hear, from Dead Poets Society type teachers, is Question Authority; and - in a "Royal" school - they associate Authority with the Throne and the Altar. The problem is the problem of Chaotic Good: it doesn't exist. The kids just gravitate to the most-coherent alternative authority. It might be some Christian cult, or a hippie commune, or a Right militia. But, against our Modern World, the most-coherent alternative authority is Marxism. At least, so it was in the 1940s; over 1995-2015 the alternative was arguably Islam, but I suspect Marxism is back again, or worse than Marxism.

Kek wasn't a Marxist but he induced many students toward Marxism. He gave his students the metaphysical HIV which opened them up to the Marxist disease.

Kek was a Bad Thing.

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