Two subsequent floods have been almost, if not quite, as serious--one in 1852, the year that the Duke of Wellington died, and one in 1894, when all the boys had to be sent home. Many of the Masters, however, remained behind, and spent their time in rescuing people in the surrounding country and supplying them with food.
Though in 1829, owing to the adoption of stern measures, the “Private Tutors” under whose auspices many a boy had shot his first moor-hen and laid his first eel-pot were expelled from the College precincts, the “sock cads” continued to haunt the “wall” for many years later. The most celebrated of these, of course, was the famous Spankie, who flourished about half a century ago. Spankie never failed to appear in the playing fields during summer, whilst in winter he was more or less of a fixture at the wall. Of him was written, one summer’s day when the cricket was getting slow in Upper Club, the line, “Totaque tartiferis Spancheia fervet ahenis.” A ridiculous and unfounded school tradition declared that he was a son of a General le Marchant, and he was often playfully apostrophised by that name.
The principal characteristics of this worthy, besides a rubicund countenance, a long blue frock coat, and an old top hat (invariably worn on one side of his head), were extreme oiliness of manner, combined with an unlimited amount of cheek. His wares, chiefly tartlets of all sorts, were contained in a sort of huge tin can supported on legs. At the proper season he also sold pots of flowers.
Spankie was imbued with a tremendous veneration for the aristocracy, and prided himself upon his acquaintance with the history of every noble family in England. Rumour, indeed, declared that most of his time out of sock-selling hours was devoted to studying the _Peerage_ and the _Landed Gentry_, both of which works he was supposed to know pretty well by heart. This, no doubt, was a schoolboy exaggeration, but certain it was that Spankie had a curious and not inaccurate knowledge of the noble houses whose youthful scions furnished him with a comfortable income. It was a way of his to address the sons of distinguished people by their fathers’ names, whilst, it should be added, often fleecing them in a merciless manner, for, sad to tell, his methods were not above suspicion. A favourite trick was carefully to array a few very fine strawberries or cherries at the top of a pottle after filling up the lower portion with very inferior fruit; as, however, he made a practice of giving liberal tick, little was ever said about this. He made quite a comfortable fortune out of the Eton boys, as was realised when it became known that he had contributed no less than £50 to the fund for building a new parish church in the High Street.