By 1937 Eton and Harrow had been playing each other at cricket for 132 years. Their annual match was, and remains, probably the oldest regular fixture in a game that has the richest and longest traditions of any team sport played with a ball. It lasted two days and attracted big crowds – over 30,000 during its Edwardian heyday. To use a violent modern image, a bomb dropped on this crowd would have obliterated many of the most powerful people in England.
Male spectators wore toppers and tails, and women their summer hats and frocks. The Harrovians and Etonians themselves came in their most formal outfits – "Sunday dress" as Harrow called it – which only a very able student of the English social system could differentiate. The pupils at both schools wore, with minor variations in style, the clothes that at some point in the 19th century had become the uniform of the well-dressed English gentleman: a top hat, a tail coat, a silk waistcoat, a cane.
On the morning of Friday 9 July 1937, Peter Wagner and Thomas Dyson stood dressed in this way outside Lord's. They were Harrow pupils, aged 14 and 15, and this was the opening day of the match. The event had lost some of its social eminence in the years since the great war, but the crowd strolling into the ground that morning was still large and smart. Local boys, porters for the day, unloaded wicker hampers from spectators' cars and carried them into the stands. There were quite a few photographers about. But where in this melee was the Wagner family: Peter's father, mother and older sister?
The Wagners had made an arrangement. Peter and his friend Dyson (known as Timmy or Tim) would come down from Harrow with their cases packed so that, after the day's play was over, they could go straight to the Wagners' Surrey house for the weekend. A little before the match started at 11am, the two boys would meet the Wagner party at the Grace Gates. There could be no mistaking the rendezvous: the Grace Gates were easily the most splendid entrance to Lord's, remodelled in the previous decade to honour the memory of the legendary Victorian cricketer. This was also the first entrance that the Wagners, motoring east up St John's Wood Road, would see.
The two boys waited, the minutes ticked away. No sign of the car. Peter had started at Harrow barely three months before, at the beginning of the summer term; Tim had arrived the previous year. They were in different forms and different houses – Peter at The Park and Tim at West Acre. Peter was the smaller and the younger and also, perhaps, the cleverer boy, because he had won a scholarship and Tim had not. They knew each other through their parents, who had met on a cruise. We can speculate that waiting gave Peter more anxiety. Now the burden of responsibility (his parents, their lateness) made him turn his back on Tim and stare westwards down the likely route his parents' car would take.
Tim, meanwhile, had other distractions. Three local boys were staring at him, and a man stood on the edge of the pavement pointing a camera in his direction.
Some things will never be known. We can't know if the man with the camera asked the local boys to take up their position or if they just happened to be there; or if they jeered or sniggered at Dyson and Wagner; or if the photographer instructed Dyson to look slightly away from his lens; or if the moment made Dyson and Wagner acutely conscious of their appearance – their top hats, waistcoats, floral button-holes and canes. The photographer took pictures from at least two positions. At one point, according to later evidence, he asked the local boys to "stand a bit closer". Dyson gripped the top of a stone bollard; Wagner continued to look away. The camera caught a stance that suggested majestic indifference to the poorer boys at their side, as though these boys were subjects as well as spectators.
The News Chronicle published the picture the next day on the front page, under the headline "Every picture tells a story". A one-line caption identified only the event and location. According to Peter Wagner's sister, when the Wagner family first saw it, "we probably laughed because they [the boys] both looked so fed up". But in the years that followed, her amusement faded. Late last year she told me that the picture was known "for all the wrong reasons". Like several others connected to it, she referred to it quite tetchily as "that photograph"; which is what happens when a loved one is transformed over seven decades – in newspapers, in magazines, on book jackets – into an anonymous symbol of arrogant privilege.
There are three popular misconceptions about the Lord's photograph: that it shows Etonians; that it was taken by the celebrated documentary photographers Bert Hardy; and that the other boys in the picture are "scruffs", "toughs" or "urchins".
The Eton mistake crept in early; in August 1937 Life magazine in New York published a slightly different version of the same scene that identified the top-hatted boys as Etonians – a forgivable American ignorance of the small differences in dress code between the two schools. Neither the News Chronicle nor Life named the photographer, but he almost certainly took both shots. His name was Jimmy Sime and his career with London's Central Press agency ran from 1914 to the middle 1960s. By 1937 he had covered all kinds of news events – Emmeline Pankhurst's arrest, strikes, ship launches, statesmen at their desks. The Eton-Harrow match must have seemed a routine and unpromising assignment, but it yielded what became by far his most famous picture.
It surfaced again in Picture Post in 1941 – the year that Bert Hardy joined the magazine, which may help explain the idea that Hardy took it. This time it prefaced a piece calling for a reform of English education by AD (later Lord) Lindsay, then master of Balliol.
According to Lindsay's opening sentence, the thing "most obviously wrong" with English schools was that one kind catered for the poor and another for the rich. None of the five boys or their schools was identified; the caption addressed the author's argument rather than the picture's subjects, stating: "Between the two groups is a barrier deliberately created by our system of education. Our task is to remove the barrier – to bring the public schools into the general scheme." The News Chronicle's headline, "Every picture tells a story", had merely been suggestive. From Picture Post onwards, nobody could be in any doubt of the story being told. England was still hopelessly divided by class.
It seemed in the 30 or 40 years after the war that this was a problem on its way to being solved. Some of Picture Post's vision of the post-war future had been realised: sharp class boundaries began to soften, social elites felt threatened, state schools sent increasing numbers of students to expanding universities. In the 70s, wealth was more equally distributed in Britain than ever before or since.
But then, neo-liberal economics intervened in the transformative epoch begun by Thatcher and continued by Blair, and the consequent disparities revived the old concerns. When the publisher Routledge wanted a cover image in 1993 for Michael Argyle's The Psychology of Social Class, Sime's picture, now getting on for 60 years old, was the image it chose. Five years later, Yale University Press did the same for David Cannadine's Class in Britain, and by cropping poor Wagner out of the frame, made Dyson look singularly haughty.
Newspapers, needing to humanise feature articles about class division, turned to it eagerly. In 2008 and 2009, to pick two random years, Sime's picture accompanied a Guardian feature on modern educational inequalities, a Sunday Telegraph column headlined "That old class system is still manufacturing bourgeois guilt", and a piece in the Daily Telegraph arguing for wider access to Eton, mistaking Wagner and Dyson once again for Etonians.
Digital archives and electronic transmission made old photographs far easier to find and deliver. Blogs that touched on the subject of class could rarely resist reproducing Sime. In 2004 it was even published as a jigsaw puzzle – and by now it had a title. "Toffs and toughs" appeared on the jigsaw's box and in the online catalogue of the Getty picture archive.
As a way of summarising England's complicated cross-currents of money and manners, it was remarkably binary; as simple a division of English society as that between Lord Snooty and his enemies, the Gasworks Gang, in the Beano's weekly comic strip (which started – was there something in the air? – in the year after Sime's picture was first published). As a way of describing the boys themselves – their circumstances and position in the hierarchy – it was also remarkably untrue.
In 1998, the journalist Geoffrey Levy published an informative piece in the Daily Mail that for the first time named all five. The "toughs" in the picture turned out to be George Salmon, Jack Catlin and George Young, three 13-year-olds who lived close to Lord's and were in the same class at a Church of England school, St Paul's Bentinck, a few minutes' walk away in Rossmore Road. According to Levy's account, all three had been to the dentist that morning and then decided to skip school and hang around instead outside Lord's, where the Eton-Harrow match offered money-making opportunities to any boy willing to open taxi doors and carry bags, or to return seat cushions to their hirers and claim the threepenny deposit.
"We did OK that day," Young told Levy. "I think we made about two shillings each. We didn't really think about the way the toffs were dressed – we just assumed they were rich. And suddenly there was a photographer saying: 'Just stand a bit closer together while I take your picture.'"
Young was the eldest of six children who shared a two-bedroom flat with their mother and father. Salmon was one of nine children who shared a four-bedroom flat with their parents and grandfather. Catlin had a sister and three half-brothers from his mother's previous marriage; how many bedrooms they occupied isn't known. Young's father was an asphalter, spreading tar on roads. Salmon's was a foreman in a butter-blending factory. Catlin's worked as a clerk in the Post Office. All of them lived in the hinterland of Marylebone railway terminus, in the typically straitened circumstances of the old London working class.
In the picture, the biggest boy, Catlin, may be wearing a suit jacket handed down from his father, while Young's trousers need some growing into. But toughs? They have open-necked white shirts and what could be tennis shoes. This is the way many if not most boys looked from Land's End to John O' Groats in the 30s. "Toffs and toughs" is a false opposition; the real contrast is between the costume and bearing of an elite public school and everyday, ordinary England.
When Levy met Young and Salmon in 1998, they were contented men. Both had left school at 14, both had served during the war in the Royal Navy, and both had been married for 53 years. After the war, Salmon became a foreman for Imperial Metal Industries and helped the firm establish a network of warehouses across Europe. Young started a window-cleaning business and set up his four sons in the same trade. Salmon had a flat near Lord's and Young lived in the Barbican. Between them, the two men had accumulated a great number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. "We've always been jolly happy," Young told Levy, "just as we were when I was a kid. You don't need to be rich. We've had a very rich life."
Twelve years later, in the London locations mentioned by Levy, I couldn't find a trace of either man. The third "tough", Jack Catlin, rose through the ranks of the civil service and moved to a senior job in a government agency in Weymouth, where he still lives, but when I called him there his wife said he was too unwell to come to the phone. In any case, she said, he was never happy to talk about "that photograph".
His family had "made good" and moved to Rickmansworth shortly after it was taken. She said that when a newspaper had asked the three men to get together to reconstruct the picture at Lord's, Jack had refused. I could see why: which of us would want to be remembered as a stereotype, especially in a class war where we're given no choice of sides?
Neither of the Harrovians in Sime's picture came from families that in 1937 would have been considered the English elite. Wagner's father was a stockbroker who dabbled in electronics, descended from Germans who reached Hampstead (via South Africa) around 1900. Tim Dyson's father was a professional soldier from Huddersfield, an officer in the Royal Field Artillery who in 1937 had been posted to India.
Today Peter's sister, Penelope Waley, lives in a bungalow in Surrey and when I went to see her there, she told me what had become of her little brother. After Harrow, he read natural sciences at Peterhouse, Cambridge, until he was called up to the Royal Corps of Signals in 1943. Things then began to go wrong. He had some kind of breakdown and never saw active service. Waley said: "He got very ill in the army – then he went a bit sort of bonkers." In the end, she said, he was "ga-ga – I never knew how badly".
Peter's wife, now married again as Pauline Barker, has a different version of earlier events – Peter worked successfully as a broker in his father's firm for three decades after the war – but the ending is the same. Barker said that, by 1979, it was clear he was definitely unbalanced: "He'd be unreasonable and irascible and we had to do things like hide the car keys from him." She said it was important to be honest about what happened next.
"I had three young daughters and I had to protect them. We couldn't go on living as we were." First he was sent "to an establishment in Hastings which looked after people who were irrational", but then the police in Lewes found him wandering around one night and telephoned her, so that she might bring him home. She had to deny him. "I said no, he belongs in Hastings." After that he was moved to the East Sussex asylum at Hellingly, where he spent two-and-a-half years in a locked ward. He died there on Friday 13 April 1984, aged 60.
A well-known quality of old photographs is their poignancy. All kinds of fates await the people in them; endings that we know and they don't. As to Tim Dyson, his is the saddest story. A year after Sime took his picture, his parents arranged for their son to join them for his summer holidays at their army quarters in Trimulgherry near Secunderabad. Tim sailed by to Bombay at the end of term, and then took the train across the Deccan plateau.
It was August, towards the end of the monsoon; a foetid, sluggish season in India, well known for its fevers. Dyson began to feel very ill. Doctors came to the bungalow. Diptheria was diagnosed. Tim died in Trimulgherry on 26 August 1938, aged 16. His father was captured by the Japanese at the fall of ingapore and died in a Korean prison camp on 22 November 1942, four years after he buried his only child.
The Eton-Harrow match declined as a social occasion in the years after the war. Hardly anyone goes now apart from the pupils, some very reluctantly, and the dress code is "smart casual": if a photographer wanted to re-create Sime's picture, he might be faced with five boys dressed much the same, in jeans and brand names. Giving a superficial impression of equality, the picture would be even more of a lie than before.
Everything changes and nothing changes. At school outfitting shops on Harrow hill you can still buy tailcoats, waistcoats, top hats and canes for those special school occasions. A tailcoat costs £155, a top hat £95, a cane £32 – mere trimmings on top of fees of £28,500 a year. And what do you get for your money? A good education, a place at a good university, social connection, confidence, and all the other things largely confined to one small section of society that make Britain among the most unequal countries in the developed world.
As I was writing this piece, the government's National Equality Panel suggested that Britain's widening divide between the rich and the poor "may imply that it is impossible to create a cohesive society". Parents of privately educated sons could expect their children to be paid 8% more by their mid-20s than boys from state schools; more than half the children at private schools went on to study at leading universities; in Europe only Italy, Greece and Spain had greater rates of poverty. And so on.
Nearly 70 years have passed since Picture Post protested at exactly this state of affairs. What picture accompanied the Daily Telegraph's report in January 2010? Sime's, of course; the same as Picture Post had published in January 1941. There they were again: Wagner, Dyson, Salmon, Catlin and Young, doomed for ever to represent our continuing social tragedy.
This is an extract from Ian Jack's article in the spring issue of Intelligent Life magazine, on sale now (moreintelligentlife.com). © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2010. 
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