Robert Best and his younger brother Frank were born into privileged
middle-class Birmingham in the 1890s, where their father owned one
of the UK's most successful lighting factories, supplying
fashionable fittings to offices, hotels, restaurants and opera
houses all over the word. Sent to the most enlightened new school
of its day - Bedales - the boys not early enjoyed the freedom to
explore their own interests but also absorbed the inspirational
moral thinking of the school's founder and headmaster, J.H. Badley.
"From Bedales to the Boche" charts their history at the school
during its early years, and shows what Badley's idea of a
progressive education consisted of. It also shows how the boys
honed their ambitions to become music-hall entertainers, writing
and performing their own material at home and at school, and
eventually showing it to London impresarios. Their plans for the
stage were interrupted, however, by their father's insistence that
they study design at another progressive institution, the art
school in Duesseldorf headed until 1907 by Peter Behrens. Best's
account of his year there, and of Frank's the following year,
provides an amusing interlude ahead of the First World War. When
war broke out, the brothers enlisted at once into the Army Service
Corps (ASC), which took them to the battlefields of northern France
and to Dublin in 1916 to help quell the Easter Rising. Their
passion, however, going back to their experiments with flight while
at Bedales, was for the newly formed Royal Flying Corps, which they
entered in late 1916, joining the Corps' new school and embarking
on a training programme that Best describes in fascinating detail.
After six months of training, the brothers were sent to France
where the life expectancy of a pilot was about 4 months. Frank
lasted five weeks; his plane was shot down, his body never found.
In respect of his death, "From Bedales to the Boche" is rich in
pathos. Best ends by showing how he and his parents responded to
Frank's loss, and how he tried to rediscover and make sense of
Germany after the war was over.
General
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