The American Mr. Chips

Sherrard Billings, one of the three founders of Groton School—and the American Mr. Chips—did his part to develop good and wise habits among the “Grotties.” Through his own life of suffering, he taught them to how to live, pursue the truth, love the good, and pass on wisdom.

The Groton School

The New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad added special cars to accommodate mourners headed to Groton School for Sherrard Billings’ funeral in May 1933. Nine hundred people comprising family, faculty, and alumni crammed into the school chapel to honor him and “Everyone sang and the thunder of that singing was perhaps the most impressive the Chapel every knew,” one attendee recalled. Students were there too, among them Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., who served as a pallbearer for his father’s former teacher. “Beebs,” as he was often called, was laid to rest in Groton cemetery next to his wife and daughter, who preceded him in death decades previous.[1]

A year later, the writer James Hilton published the small novella called Goodbye, Mr. Chips (a slender 127 pages) narrating the life of a British public-school teacher named Charles Edward Chipping. Hilton based the book loosely on a real-life headmaster who taught for many years at the Leys School in Cambridge, England. Stuffy and awkward in the classroom and among fellow faculty, Chipping mellows after marriage and becomes a beloved and popular teacher. At the height of their happiness, his wife dies in childbirth as does the child. The despairing teacher throws himself at his work and remains at the fictional all-boys Brookfield School for decades, ultimately becoming synonymous with its history and traditions. On his deathbed, while school officials speak in whispered asides that Chipping had no children, he weakly interjects, “But I have, you know … I have … Thousands of ‘em … thousands of ’em … and all boys.” Five years later, Goodbye, Mr. Chips appeared as a popular film starring Robert Donat and Greer Garson, now regarded as one of the greatest films of the 1930s.[2]

Billings was the American Mr. Chips. He was one of the three founders of Groton School, along with the headmaster Endicott Peabody and William Amory Gardner, and taught there for almost fifty years. Through his classroom passed generations of American leadership, including the sons of both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, and his similarities with Mr. Chipping are almost eerie – the elite school, the death of wife and child, and the appreciation of students. His philosophy of education was thoroughly Tory in orientation, honoring loyalty to person and place, preferring family and community over self, living a disciplined life of moral restraint over “doing as one likes,” and pursuing the good, the true, and the beautiful. “The education of the soul is gained by expression through the body, by action,” he counseled students. “Man’s whole duty then lies in high action, noble endeavor.”[3]

Though Sherrard Billings later walked with Boston Brahmins, his origins lay in humbler ground. The Billings family came to Mass Bay Colony in 1635 and by his father’s generation became prosperous landowners in Quincy, Massachusetts, hometown of the Adams dynasty. He was born on April 21, 1859 and attended the recently opened Adams Academy, funded by money set aside by President John Adams for a community school. The Academy attracted students from across New England, almost all of whom prepared for entrance to Harvard College. Billings graduated with the Harvard class of 1880 and remained close friends with one classmate who led a noteworthy life, Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt would later entrust his sons to Billings’ care, both at Groton School and in World War One France.[4]

After graduation and a short stint teaching classics at De Veaux College in Niagara Falls (an Episcopal Church prep school), Billings returned to Massachusetts to enter the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge. One of his fellow students was a tall bundle of energy, ideas, and intent named Endicott Peabody, who used part of his seminary years to establish an Episcopal church in frontier Tombstone, Arizona. Now back east and ordained he intended on founding a new prep school modeled on the English boarding schools he experienced as a child growing up in Britain. The new school would be located in Groton, Massachusetts, a small town thirty miles northwest of Boston, and with its rigorous methods prepare generations for lives in ministry, government, business, and the professions. Peabody turned to two Harvard colleagues to join him as faculty: the young aesthete scholar William Amory Gardner and the newly ordained Sherrard Billings. Billings doubted his abilities as a teacher and believed his future lay in parish ministry and took the post with reluctance.[5]

Groton School under the leadership of Peabody, Gardner, and Billings became highly treasured training grounds for the American elite. Admission was difficult and no amount of wealth or connections could move Peabody from his choices. “There was never any question that [Peabody] was right,” Time magazine reported, “What worried him most from the very outset was not having too few students but too many. Later he would be ruthless about slamming the door in the faces of parents, regardless of their wealth or station, who failed to register their unfortunate sons at birth.” The curriculum was classical and the atmosphere austere and demanding. Students lived in “dismal little cubicles” and took cold showers. Order was maintained by the headmaster in league with school prefects who monitored students’ respect for school and authority, and scofflaws faced corporal punishment. Equally if not more important than studies were athletics, particularly contact sports like football where students could prove their toughness with blood and bruises on the gridiron. In the early years, Peabody and the school masters even played on teams themselves.[6]

Billings served as a popular Greek and Latin teacher at Groton and second-in-command to the headmaster. Former student Frank Ashburn recalled:

There is not much doubt that the Rector was closer to Sherrard Billings in his daily dealings than to any other man … He had a sensitiveness which the Rector lacked and also a sensitivity. Quick to take offense, he, like the Rector made much of small things … He was a stickler for good manners, good form. Full of mannerisms, he was one of the best raconteurs ever heard and loved to talk.

Although quick-tempered, he was a sympathetic listener of last resort for students wilting under Peabody’s strictness. They came to him for comfort and advice as one of the “exceptions to the prevailing order.” He regaled students with ghost stories in “his quaint and delectable manner” and at Christmas time invited them to his campus residence for music and conversation. Students loved to chat with him. Another former student Thomas Boylston Adams remembered, “I never cared much for Groton School, but there was one great teacher there, and as great uncle Henry [Adams] once remarked, ‘The teacher affects eternity. He never can tell where his influence stops.’” In and out of the classroom, his manners and speech were perfect, a model for students to emulate, particularly his patrician Trans-Atlantic accent. “Sherrard Billings, who grew up in our hometown of Quincy, he had the most perfect accent I have ever heard,” noted Adams.[7]

Peabody recognized Billings as both a more effective teacher and preacher than himself, and when the headmaster went on trips or sabbaticals, Billings took over the school. On one such trip, Billings directed the school’s Prize Day and gently chastised parents. With Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and the New York social reformer Jacob Riis at his side, he declared “it would go a long way toward bettering the scholarship of the school if parents themselves would take the same keen interest in their boy’s studies that they do in his athletics.” Lodge concurred, adding that students should learn more history. “Things go on so well under Billings that I feel as if I were not much needed,” Peabody once quipped.[8]

Despite his urging for more attention to the students’ studies, Billings joined in all the sports. He captained the football team, engaged in “Fives” (a British form of handball), and umpired baseball games. He always led recitation of the school’s traditional “Blue Bottle Song” (still sung to this day) and students affectionately called him “Mr. B,” and “the Little Man.” Standing only five foot four inches, his height became a staple for school jokes, which he took in good humor. Fellow master Mr. Gardner, famous for his satiric verse at Christmas parties and school anniversary celebrations, wrote of Billings in 1899:

But now we return to my Vicar,
The Reverend Billings, I mean,
He’s tired of sitting at table
On a chair where he cannot be seen.
So he got him a carpenter busy
Who made him a high-chair straightway
And now from this altitude dizzy,
He leads the Blue Bottle affray.

Billings never sat still and constantly traveled. Groton graduates often requested he officiate their weddings across the country, and he recruited new students traveling East and West. When the school needed money Billings took on the role of fundraiser and managed to persuade even the most intransigent. When he visited the parents of one student who had been “severely disciplined” by the school, “Mr. B not only convinced the gentlemen of the propriety with which the case was handled, but came back with an anonymous check for $90,000 to pay off the school debt.”[9]

He also crossed the region on mission trips giving sermons at Episcopal parishes, often joined by students. One of his most dedicated assistants was a young student named Franklin D. Roosevelt. When not held down by school duties, Groton’s “Little Man” frequently traveled the world, making an estimated thirty-four trips across the Atlantic in his lifetime, including at least two round-the-world cruises on a friend’s private yacht. Indeed, the Grotonian listed his wanderings: Italy and Russia in 1903-04, back to Europe in 1909, Scotland in 1910, and London in the winter of 1914.[10]

The urge for parish work never left him, however. In 1903, a Brooklyn church asked he serve as their rector, but he declined and the school paper noted students’ relief and “deep feeling of gratitude.” Two years later, however, the call came and he left Groton for St. Paul’s Church in Boston. His Boston sojourn altered his life in two ways. First, Billings fell in love. He courted the twenty-six-year-old Eleanor Stockton, daughter of the Civil War veteran and wealthy businessman Howard Stockton, and Endicott Peabody married them on July 3, 1906. Eleanor Billings was a whirlwind of energy and intelligence with “the high heart of a boy,” the Grotonian later noted. “He is a happy man,” reported Peabody. “His wife is a strong vigorous hopeful right minded attractive girl who ought to be a great help to him. She has an objective way about her which will counterbalance [his] tendency to introspection and occasional despondency.” The athletic Eleanor was also an accomplished tennis player and once defeated future US women’s champion Evelyn Sears in a marathon five set match at Longwood Cricket Club.[11]

Second, Billings could not stay away from his old school. He wrote Peabody from Boston, “I have a suspicion that never in Boston will my life count for as much as perhaps it has counted at Groton. I am sure you will be known and remembered for what you have done while sitting tight in the saddle at School. And I daresay it is the same with me.” He missed Groton and its community and announced he and his wife would return. By all accounts, his return to school was a happy one. In January 1907, he and Eleanor attended a White House levee as guests of President Roosevelt and by spring were expecting their first child.[12]

The joy was short-lived. Eleanor gave birth to a daughter on July 26, 1907 and died from a blood clot the next day. They celebrated their first anniversary only three weeks earlier and Billings was “inconsolable” with grief. “The summer holidays were shadowed by a great sorrow,” the Grotonian reported. “[Eleanor’s] sweet, sane goodness, her perfect unselfishness, her clear intelligence and insight, and her wonderful health and enthusiasm were gifts which she poured forth in gracious blessing on the School, and we can well realize what she would have been to us in the coming years.” The funeral took place on “a perfect day of midsummer” as she was buried in the village cemetery and Groton Chapel later installed a rosette window in her honor. Despite the tragedy, the school paper hoped his young daughter Mary “will help him to bear the years of patient work and waiting that are before him.” That hope did not last. Mary Stockton Billings, only two and half years old, died on January 4, 1910 and was buried beside her mother. Yet “Mr. B” always believed the division between heaven and earth was a thin one and when friends offered condolences, he replied “Yes, yes, but Eleanor could train the little one so much better than I.” Duty called even in sadness and the day after Mary died, he officiated a Groton wedding in New York City.[13]

The remaining years of Billings’ life were dedicated to school and country. When the United States entered World War One in 1917, he sailed for France to serve as a Red Cross Chaplain, first at hospitals in Paris, then at the front in Toul and Neuilly. He served the needs of wounded American soldiers – including Archie Roosevelt – and wrote condolence letters to parents back home about their fallen sons. At Groton, he continued to teach through the 1920s until his health finally broke and, after a short convalescence in Florida, died on May 9, 1933. He was buried beside his wife and daughter at Groton Cemetery.[14]

In response to requests from admirers, Billings published a collection of his sermons called Talks to Boys in the Chapel of Groton School in 1928. His audience was no ordinary collection of boys. These sermons detail Billings’ philosophy of education and his attempts to impress upon students their collective duties as the coming American republican elite. The theme was achieving the properly balanced life and the sensibility thoroughly Tory: living a life of virtuous action, preserving and transmitting the hard work of your ancestors, maintaining a just proportion between faith and reason, avoiding grubby materialism, embracing sympathy as a political virtue, and weighing the social costs of liberty.

Groton students must prepare for a life of action, not contemplation. Students must recognize “the highest joy of all – that of being of use,” he counseled them. “The pleasure of knowing that you have helped, that some people are grateful to you, offsets much effort, changes the whole look of life to you.” Action and “noble endeavor” were duties, Billings told them, sounding like his Harvard classmate Theodore Roosevelt. They must not live a life of activity for its own sake, but instead pursue virtuous action that improves character and builds the soul:

The virtue of any act is never the brilliancy of it, not the reputation it wins for the doer of the act; but rather the effect on the one who does it, the something that goes out of the act into the character of man. The higher the act, the stronger and more effective that something is … I suspect we shall see at the end, as we review the past just before we die, that our circumstances amounted to nothing, that all externals were of little account, that the real essence of life is what has come out of them and affected the immortal man within.

Taking a shot at Woodrow Wilson and the dreams of Versailles, Billings observed, “[i]t is a term of reproach to be called visionary.” To be merely visionary is un-American because Americans are practical men of action. In fact, visionaries often fear action or see themselves too insignificant to impact the world. There is melancholy in this, Billings believed: “The most common reason why men make little out of their lives is that they fail to realize their own importance.”[15]

Virtuous action takes its toll on the doer. It leads inevitably to suffering, the cost of being human. The greater the effort, the greater potential for pain. “The law, the great law of our present condition, is that if we do anything, it costs, costs effort, struggle, pain, costs in proportion to its worth,” Billings wrote. “What is best costs most.” But everything we enjoy today, from the mundane to the extraordinary, came from past actions, the effort of ancestors to build institutions, customs, and traditions that frame our lives. Echoing Burke, he told students “What each age inherits from the preceding one is the earnest work done by men, work that has meant hard, self-sacrificing effort.” Only selfish ingratitude would fail to preserve and build upon those achievements. Therein lies the duty of action: improve our character and honor the past.[16]

The quality of our actions is determined by the quality of our interior life, and the health of that interior life reveals itself in moments of crisis. Humans pursue happiness by nature and the proper definition of happiness and the means to achieve it are governed by reason. Reason grasps human ends, that which is appropriate and proportional to our capabilities, and defines action. We can by human reason understand happiness, but the “question is not of happiness in general, but of the kind of happiness that you believe in.” Reason used poorly misidentifies happiness and pleasure, and loses sight of human ends, propriety, and proportion. That which begins badly ends badly. “It is not awful that an animal did wrong, because the animal is not a reasoning being,” Billings explained. “It is awful for man, a being endowed with reason, to do what is unreasoning, to content himself with pleasures that are irrational, unworthy.” Poor decisions then follow one upon another and character rots. “[O]ne kind of pleasure drives out another, a higher drives out a lower, a lower a higher.” Men embrace childish pursuits and labor as adults with teenage minds:

You boys remember, I am sure, what President [Theodore] Roosevelt was fond of saying – that in college it is normal and good for a boy to play on his university eleven; but it is an awful pity, if at the age of forty the man’s chief title to fame is that once he played on his football eleven. So it is an awful pity, if at the age of forty a man’s idea of pleasure is what it was at the age of fifteen. Twenty, thirty years, and no growth at all in the science of happiness.

Too often passions replace reason as the compass of decision-making and Billings saw this in evangelical preachers of the 1920s, what he called “emotional reformers.” He leaned into the Billy Sundays of the world: “Such people, of course, are never really good, for it is a poor sort of goodness that would consecrate to the service of the Lord everything but the intelligence.” They were all heat and no light.[17]

A life without reason led to Christianity’s greatest nemesis – indifference. Indifference comes from two sources. First, men balk at what Christianity requires, the “high tension” of faith. Belief is arduous.

[T]he trouble is that it is beginning to dawn on the man that a great deal is required of him by his religion, that Christianity set a high standard, and that while it does speak of inspiration and joy, it does not make life easy … It means that the wider a man’s interests are, the tenderer his sympathies, the more of a Christian he becomes, proportionately his life grows complicated and his power of suffering great.

Expectations of ease are misplaced and in a dangerous complex world, who among us believes that Christianity offers the easy path, Billings asked. “Indeed, the opposite is true; effort is the normal thing, and a man seldom lives at this best without making a conscious effort.”[18]

Second, the material rewards of this world increase tenfold every generation but the comforts they offer dull the spiritual senses into indifference. After all, Billings published this book in 1928 and the roar of the “Roaring Twenties” was partially that of material plenty. But there can be no balanced inward life of faith and reason with a solitary focus on the “attractiveness of the world.”

It is pitiful to see men, as sometimes you do, working with might and main at things, every one of which they will have to leave behind at the grave, and apparently getting out of life nothing that will stand the shock of death and come out still strong on the other side … The earth has become a wonderfully fair place; its heathenism is very civilized; theology new find good everywhere; earthly things come nearer to satisfying the immortal soul to-day than they ever did before. There is so much of interest to do that one can go through life almost without a thought of Church or Bible or Christ or God.

Billings did not believe the earth evil or its beauties (and the appreciation of them) fool’s gold to avoid. God created earth, after all. Anyone who takes two round-the-world trips on a private yacht is no Episcopalian Gnostic. An appropriate balance between the material and temporal must be struck, a via media between earth and heaven. In 1920s America, however, material progress outstripped moral progress. “Things loom big out of all proportion,” he warned students. “A man forgets others, forgets his better life, believes that the temporary advantage that he is after is the most important thing in the world.” The times were roaring but out of joint.[19]

Sherrard Billings counseled Groton students to maintain the properly balanced life by living a public life in the arena. Don’t be like your Pilgrim and Puritan ancestors, he told them. Honorable though their intentions may have been and heroic their deeds, they preferred to live a life separated from the rest of humanity. They were idealists with a penchant to run away. “There was little that was universal in their scheme … Puritan means separate; if not anti-social, at least anti-universal.” They lacked sympathy with humanity and today that impulse remains in elite snobbery (“a grotesque thing in America,” he declared) and the existence of class distinctions. We lock ourselves away from each other and mock each other’s lives.[20]

But the common bond of humanity and suffering links us all, and to those whom much is given much is expected. “[A] man is answerable for his opportunities,” Billings told them. Echoing John Winthrop, he continued:

The greatest danger to our republic is in the rise of classes who do not understand each other and cannot sympathize … [M]oney segregates, and taste segregates, and refinement segregates, and any privilege that a man segregates, if the man lets it. But we are not to become uniform, we are not to give up our individual possibilities, the privileges of different sorts that we all have; but we are to take them and use them for the good of the whole, to make them broaden our sympathies instead of narrowing them. We Americans have not yet proved that a republic on so large a scale as ours can be a permanent thing. Again I say, that the question of its permanence is a moral question; that if we the citizens, learn to sympathize with each other on the ground not of special privilege, but of a common citizenship and a common humanity, we shall make the republic permanent, we shall have a holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven.

This was one of the clearest statements of Billings’ Toryism – the poison of class tensions to a healthy society. There should instead be an organic relationship between classes and an awareness of mutual dependence. As future financiers and statesmen, students must develop the virtue of sympathy, for “in a republic, sympathy is a peculiar duty.”[21]

Finally, Billings urged his students to understand “liberty” correctly. He illustrated this with an interesting observation on the words “wickedness” and “foolishness.” In the aforementioned days of Puritan New England, bad behavior and poor decisions were labeled as wicked and everyone in the community suffered for one’s evil-doings. “There was something virile about that,” Billings observed. “God was a reality, very strict and ready to punish, when people were wicked – interested in men, but never indulgent.” In the years since, we seldom condemn people for their wickedness but instead opt for “foolish.” We say “Wilson made a foolish decision,” rather than “Wilson made a wicked decision.” The implication of “foolish” is decidedly lighter, implying a mistake rather than genuine evil intent. It was a sign of rising individualism and the concern for “rights,” and declining concern for communities and the common good. Wickedness carried stigma, foolishness less so. This change in language carried significant social cost: “[W]e do not realize that in this world no one has a right to be a fool; that folly means a waste, and waste involves other people… “[A] one-man happiness is a contradiction in terms … Others have rights to your life, the world is social.” Liberty poorly understood was “doing as one likes” and foolishness the price to pay. Rightly understood, however, foolishness was wickedness, a narcissism that subjected community to the exercise of a thoughtless liberty. Don’t be foolish, Billings told the boys, because “others have rights in [this] life.” Foolishness was the sin of free nations.[22]

The meaning and values of Toryism have been discussed previously here. Toryism is not a particular political creed or “an ideology to be measured with exactitude,” but is instead an inclination, “a mold of thought,” “a cluster of intuitions,” and “an instinctive attitude of mind.” Toryism reflects certain joyful habits, traditions, and customs developed over a lifetime, an awareness of human limitations and the social nature and organic interdependence of man. These habits of mind are taught in the “little platoons” of family, community, and school. One Groton graduate said, after all the founders were dead

[W]hat men such as Sherrard Billings and William Amory Gardner taught were not courses, but rather a way of life … [they] were that rarest of all things, thoroughly good and wise men, and for nearly fifty years they emitted goodness and wisdom unceasingly, though, stuffed Indians that we were, we frequently failed to realize it. For me, almost the only ray of sadness that falls across this evening is that those two souls, who wrought so much of this, are not here to let us tell them that we dimly understood.

Sherrard Billings, the American Mr. Chips, did his part to develop these habits among the “Grotties.” Through his own life of suffering, he taught them to how to live, pursue the truth, love the good, and pass on wisdom.[23]

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Notes:

[1] New York Times, 12 May 1933; Frank D. Ashburn, Peabody of Groton: A Portrait (New York, 1944) 330-331.

[2] James Hilton, Goodbye, Mr. Chips (New York, 1962) 139.

[3] Sherrard Billings, Talks to Boys in the Chapel of Groton School (Boston, 1928) 35.

[4] New York Times, 10 May 1933.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Frank Kindrea, “’Old Peabo’ and the School,” American Heritage, October/November 1980.

[7] Ashburn, 151-152; Richard Norton Smith, The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick (Chicago, 2003) 55; William Amory Gardner, Groton School Verses, 1886-1903 (Boston, 1904) 4; Grotonian Vol. 20-21 (October 1903-June 1905); “Two Boston Brahmins”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXjU60a8dmI&t=756s

[8] Grotonian, Vol. 18-19 (October 1901-June 1903); Ashburn, 113.

[9] Grotonian, Vol. 16-17 (October 1899-June 1901); Gardner, 255; Ashburn, 303.

[10] New York Times, 10 May 1933; Billings’ many travels are listed in various issues of the Grotonian between 1900 and 1914.

[11] Grotonian, Vols. 20-21, 22-23 (October 1907-June 1909), 24-25 (October 1909-June 1911); Ashburn, 209; https://www.tennisforum.com/threads/biographies-of-female-tennis-players.497314/page-174

[12] Ashburn, 155; Grotonian, Vol. 22-23; Washington Star, 4 January 1907.

[13] Boston Evening Transcript, 29 July 1907; Grotonian, Vol. 24-25, 26-27 (October 1909-June 1911); New York Times, 10 January 1910; Ashburn, 330-331; New York Sun, 6 January 1910.

[14] Ashburn, 330-331; for an example of Billings’ letters to the families of US soldiers, see the Connecticut Western News, 5 December 1918.

[15] Billings, 32, 41, 43, 82.

[16] Ibid, 72-73.

[17] Ibid, 23, 27, 29-30, 62.

[18] Ibid, 87-89.

[19] Ibid, 90-91, 113-114.

[20] Ibid, 55-58.

[21] Ibid, 58-61, 76.

[22] Ibid, 96, 98-101.

[23] Ashburn, 356.

The featured image, uploaded by Jplayforth, is a photograph of the Groton School, as viewed from the top of the chapel. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.