Wimseyfic: Common Entrance

A brief word on the genesis. Peter Wimsey was born in 1890 - goodness knows when, Sayers never actually seems to say and I can't work it out, though I think it must be late in the year. In 1909 he went up to Balliol, and it seems probable that he had some sort of scholarship, not, of course, that he needed the money. It was suggested to me at a DLS Convention this weekend that he might have held the Brackenbury Scholarship, the history scholarship at the college, and which the college naturally held to be the best history scholarship in the University, presumably on the same principle by which the classmates of Jeremy Wolfenden considered him to be the 'cleverest boy in England' because he was the cleverest boy at Eton.

*pauses briefly to string someone from a lamppost*

In any case, had he gone for the Brackenbury Scholarship for entrance in 1909, Wimsey would have had to answer three questions: an unexciting English church history one I can't find my record of, some translation from and into French (the latter from a bit of Carlyle), and the English composition question that inspired this fic. These were teenage boys; what on earth were the Fellows thinking?

(NB. I don't know any Eton slang, and haven't time to look it up. But I have at least got the identity of head master right. He would be sacked a few years later for saying unpopular things during the war.)

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