Robert Best and his younger brother Frank were born into privileged
middle-class Birmingham in the 1890s, where their father owned one of
the UK's most successful lighting factories, supplying fashionable
fittings to offices, hotels, restaurants and opera houses all over the
word. Sent to the most enlightened new school of its day - Bedales - the
boys not early enjoyed the freedom to explore their own interests but
also absorbed the inspirational moral thinking of the school's founder
and headmaster, J.H. Badley. "From Bedales to the Boche" charts their
history at the school during its early years, and shows what Badley's
idea of a progressive education consisted of. It also shows how the boys
honed their ambitions to become music-hall entertainers, writing and
performing their own material at home and at school, and eventually
showing it to London impresarios. Their plans for the stage were
interrupted, however, by their father's insistence that they study
design at another progressive institution, the art school in Duesseldorf
headed until 1907 by Peter Behrens. Best's account of his year there,
and of Frank's the following year, provides an amusing interlude ahead
of the First World War. When war broke out, the brothers enlisted at
once into the Army Service Corps (ASC), which took them to the
battlefields of northern France and to Dublin in 1916 to help quell the
Easter Rising. Their passion, however, going back to their experiments
with flight while at Bedales, was for the newly formed Royal Flying
Corps, which they entered in late 1916, joining the Corps' new school
and embarking on a training programme that Best describes in fascinating
detail. After six months of training, the brothers were sent to France
where the life expectancy of a pilot was about 4 months. Frank lasted
five weeks; his plane was shot down, his body never found. In respect of
his death, "From Bedales to the Boche" is rich in pathos. Best ends by
showing how he and his parents responded to Frank's loss, and how he
tried to rediscover and make sense of Germany after the war was over.
