Flannelled Fool
autobiographical work by T. C. Worsley
Flannelled Fool: A Slice of a Life in the Thirties is an autobiography by T. C. Worsley, published in 1967. It takes its title from a phrase in "The Islanders", a poem by Rudyard Kipling.
Though Flannelled Fool is subtitled A Slice of a Life in the Thirties, much of it treats the author's childhood and education at Marlborough College before he began a schoolmastering career at Wellington College in 1929.
Publication
The frank accounts of many of its personages, only thinly disguised by false names, led, according to Alan Ross, the book's eventual publisher, to several rejections:
At least three leading publishers turned it down on legal advice, and Cuthbert Worsley himself admitted that he had been warned it was folly to expect publication. Re-reading it now I feel there were good reasons for anxiety, but at the time, with little to lose, it seemed worth the risk. Worsley had assured me that all the 'college' [Wellington] masters likely to cause trouble were dead, and Kurt Hahn, whose possible reaction had done most to scare off the others, was, safely, we hoped, back in Germany.
In the event, nothing happened. Far from bankrupting us or putting Cuthbert and me in gaol, the book both sold well and received a wonderful press.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Flannelled Fool” as autobiographical work by T. C. Worsley. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as autobiographical work by T. C. Worsley. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5457428. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1967 and 1929.
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This entry incorporates text from “Flannelled Fool” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.