John le Carré, 80 in October

John le Carré (nom de plume of David John Moore Cornwell) will be 80 on October 19th, 2011.

I hope that Dorset has plans to celebrate his 80th birthday and the 50th anniversary of the publication of his first novel, "Call for the Dead" (1961).

He was born in Poole (where his grandfather had become Lord Mayor) and went to school in Sherborne. Perhaps Sherborne School will not be celebrating, given the author's foreword to "A Murder of Quality" (1991 edition of the novel and screenplay). He tells us how much he hated English boarding schools, which he still finds monstrous. His school career ended when he was 16, "when I flatly refused to return to Westcott House, Sherborne".

He told Olga Craig (Daily Telegraph interview, 31 August, 2010):

"I was at public school and I hated it. My father never paid the fees. I wasn't a proper gentleman. I just didn't fit".

Outraged by the system, he had this to say about the school- as it seemed to him then:

"Sherborne in my day had been rustic, colonialist, chauvinist, militarist, religious, patriotic and repressive. Boys beat other boys, housemasters beat boys, and even the headmaster turned his hand to beating boys...To this day, I can find no forgiveness for their terrible abuse of the charges entrusted to them."

After reading Cecil Day-Lewis's description of life at the school, in "The Buried Day" (1960), or Alec Waugh's "The Loom of Youth" (1917), it seems hardly surprising that many public schools have become co-educational, even if only for economic reasons.

The author lives in Penzance. Maybe it will be Cornwall, not Dorset, that will make the most of Cornwell?

He recently donated his entire literary archive to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University (his "spiritual home").

He sent his own boys to Hazlegrove House, Somerset.

In the 1960s he lived on various Greek islands.