Alaric Jacob - Early Life

Early Life

Jacob was the son of Lieutenant-Colonel Harold Fenton Jacob, Indian Army and at one time Political Agent in Aden. He was born at Edinburgh because his mother Ellen Hoyer, the daughter of a Danish missionary, was brought up in Scotland. As a child he spent time in India and Arabia but was educated in England. He had a childhood friend in Kim Philby in Arabia and in Eastbourne, where they were both educated but at different prep schools. Jacob developed a stammer which he believed came from his association with Philby, and which was cured in time by singing lessons..

Like several other promising children from Anglo-Indian or military families, Jacob was taken at reduced fees at St Cyprian's School. George Orwell had left the school a year previously, and was presented as an inspiration for Jacob to follow. Jacob's first term at St Cyprian's overlapped with Cyril Connolly's last and Connolly visited and gave a lesson in Jacob's last year. For Jacob it was "...an age of friendships, of excitement on the cricket fields and in school plays, of singing to a receptive audience at concerts, of having a sonnet printed in the school magazine, of winning the Townsend Warner History Prize." Jacob however, struggled with classics and therefore did not enter for a scholarship to public school. He went on to The King's School, Canterbury, where he was unimpressed with the standard of teaching and foresaw that he was unlikely to achieve a scholarship to university. Realising he was a skilful writer, he decided to become a journalist. With the encouragement of his father, who had problems paying his school fees, he left school and went to France.