It was like a ghastly parody of courtship, more to do with adolescent yearning than lust. It wasn't a culture of gang rape it was boys getting crushes on other boys. Sex was part of the culture of the school, but it was all pretty ingenuous. As far as I can see, the point was to produce people to run the British empire: if you could survive five years at public school, there was nothing the Kalahari desert or Antarctica could throw at you. There were cold baths every morning and the food was awful. I was at Oundle in the mid-40s and it was tough.
