A version of this article first appeared in the PGS organised Portsmouth Festivities programme of 2012 and has been updated.

Alfred Hitchens was born into a stern, non-conformist, working-class Portsmouth family, the son of a dress maker and a Dockyard labourer. His mother worked her fingers to the bone ensuring that Southsea ladies passed muster on the promenade on Sundays. His father helped maintain a fleet that had impressed and no doubt worried the Kaiser when he reviewed it in 1889. Eighty one ships carrying 596 guns and manned by 20,000 bluejackets reaffirmed the justified belief that Britannia ruled the waves.

But while his siblings took up apprenticeships as wheelwright, pawnbroker and needleworker, Alfred was appointed as a teaching assistant at Kent Street School at the age of fourteen, a first step on the path to becoming a certificated teacher. For several years he learned on the job in the turbulent, sink-or-swim waters of various Portsea schools and, by the late 1930s, he had become headmaster of Flying Bull Lane School, one of the oldest former board schools in Portsmouth. By the time of his retirement he had taught thousands of local children, including future Labour MP Ian Mikardo and Prime Minister James Callaghan. Alfred spoke in a gentle Hampshire burr, was a First World War veteran and, despite having absolutely no truck with socialism, was a pioneer and staunch supporter of the National Union of Teachers.Alfred wanted the best for his sons, and sent them to the Portsmouth Grammar School where the curriculum offered a solid grounding in languages and mathematics tailored for pupils with aspirations to join the Royal Navy. By this time the school counted three VC winners amongst its alumni, including Lieutenant Norman Holbrook, the first submariner to receive the highest award for bravery. Another old boy was the popular author Percy F. Westerman whose ripping maritime yarns enthralled several generations of schoolboys.

Alfred’s younger son, Eric, passed the School Certificate with honours in 1926 and joined the Royal Navy as a Paymaster Cadet. Eight years later, as a Pay Lieutenant on HMS Resolution, he wrote home describing in some detail a visit to Damascus, an account that was forwarded to the grammar school and published in The Portmuthian. Eric was, by all accounts, a man of few words but he clearly enjoyed life in the Royal Navy, rising through the ranks and developing “the liver of a hero” along the way. Two of the few pieces of manly advice he later passed on to his eldest son Christopher were that “one ought to beware of women with thin lips” and that “those with widely spaced eyes” should be “sought out and appreciated”. Christopher later commented that this was “excellent advice both times and no doubt dearly bought”.

It was in the Criterion cinema in Gosport where Christopher and his younger brother Peter first began to understand something of their father’s wartime experience. He was Kenneth More in Sink the Bismarck!, Richard Todd in Yangtse Incident, Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea. Eric was known ironically and affectionately as “The Commander” in the Hitchens’ Alverstoke home, “Cedarwood”. The Commander had served in almost every cruel sea from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. On HMS Jamaica he had escorted convoys to Russia and helped sink one of Hitler’s most prized and dangerous warships, the Scharnhorst. But, in common with many men of his generation, he was later to reflect that the war years had been “the only time when I really knew what I was doing”.

In 1945 and in his mid-thirties, the laconic and diffident Eric met a chic and passionate Wren twelve years his junior, and, after a short courtship, they were married. Yvonne came from a broken Jewish home near Penny Lane in Liverpool. In a country that had fought fascism, but where anti-semitism remained deeply ingrained, Yvonne chose to conceal her Jewish origins. 

Christopher Hitchens was born in Portsmouth in 1949 and “skipped the baby-talk stage”, reportedly going straight to speaking in complete sentences such as “Let’s all go and have a drink at the club”. Yvonne wanted Christopher to grow up to be an English gentlemen and persuaded the Commander that, at the age of eight, he should be sent to boarding school. “If there is to be an upper class in this country,” she argued, “then Christopher is going to be in it.” Brother Peter arrived in 1951 and, when the time came, both boys were sent away, though Yvonne was distraught at the separation. It all seemed worthwhile when Christopher was accepted by Balliol College, Oxford in 1966 and Peter took up a place at York.

In the meantime, in peacetime, the Commander commanded little gratitude or respect from the country he had fought for. The Admiralty consigned him to dull duties ashore and then, like so many other beached heroes, he was forcibly retired on a minimal pension. The Times newspaper, at a time when it prided itself on its factual accuracy, recorded, “Commander E.E. Hitchens, retired 1 March 1959 (at own request)”. Yvonne opened a fashionable ladies’ clothes shop in Alverstoke to help with the family finances, but it was not a success. The Commander spent the remainder of his working life as a bookkeeper and latterly as a bursar at an Oxford prep school. In 1973 one of his former shipmates, Warren Tute, who had become a successful writer, revived memories of former glories, portraying him in his best-selling war novel, The Cruiser (as Lieutenant Hale).

In the late 1960s a very different war was being fought on the streets, and Christopher was an enthusiastic recruit. Yvonne got used to reading of his arrests “carrying some insurgent flag”. As a liberal and humanitarian defender of the underdog, she never complained, other than, “I do rather hate it, darling, when my friends ring up and pretend that they are so sorry to see you on TV in that way.” The taciturn, hard Tory Commander merely offered the opinion that his son’s socialism was “built on sand”.

But while Christopher was manning the barricades in solidarity with the workers of the world, his parents’ marriage was falling apart. Yvonne had always thought there was more to life than being a dutiful service wife. She had loved cocktail parties, fashionable clothes, going to the theatre, poetry, witty conversation and London life. “The one unforgivable sin,” she often declared, “is to be boring”. Now, in her fifties with her children grown up, she fell in love with a former Anglican clergyman and together they become followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. One day, in 1973, they were found dead in a Greek hotel, an event that is described with honesty and love but no sentiment by Christopher in his memoir, Hitch 22.

At the time of this tragedy, Christopher was establishing a reputation in journalism at the New Statesman, where he became a friend of Martin Amis, James Fenton and Ian McEwan. “Hitch” was a popular drinking partner with a capacity that far exceeded that of the Commander and of the old Fleet Street journos. His loquacity off and on the soapbox and remarkable ability to write finely honed prose while intoxicated were equally legendary.

After a stint as foreign correspondent at the Daily Express, Hitch returned to the New Statesman before getting married and, in 1981, emigrating to the United States. Notwithstanding its right-wing governments, its crassness, its racism, its cultural imperialism and, in Hitch’s eyes, its murderous foreign policy (and – in the Commander’s words – “the deplorable tardiness” of American entry into the Second World War), he fell in love with the place and its people. “How was it”, he asked, “that the most conservative and commercial society on earth could also be the most revolutionary?” Hitch became an American citizen in 2007. One wonders if, had he lived, he would have remained so in Trump's "Great Again" America. 

Hitch’s first wife was a Greek-Cypriot, Eleni Meleagrou. On the birth of their son, the Commander sent the characteristically terse message, “Glad it’s a boy”. Two daughters followed, one with his second wife, the American writer Carol Blue.

Hitch’s prolific output and fastidiousness as a journalist gained him an increasing following amongst American liberals. He wrote for the liberal weekly, The Nation, became a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and was in demand as a controversial intellectual and speaker. He upset many conservatives and republicans and never, ever, committed that dreaded sin of being boring. He was described as “the greatest living essayist in the English language” by Christopher Buckley and as “a remarkable commentator (who) jousts with fraudulence of every stripe and always wins” by Joseph Heller.

Hitch’s political doubts began when some fellow socialists expressed less than wholehearted support for Salman Rushdie whose Satanic Verses had prompted Ayatollah Khomeini to order the author’s murder. The defining moment came with the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Islamic fundamentalism was fascism, in very real effect, and he was going to do what he could to fight it with words. 

In his memoir, Hitch paid tribute to his father. “Sending a Nazi convoy raider to the bottom is a better day’s work than I have ever done”. But Hitch’s stance over President Bush’s “war on terror” aligned him, temporarily, with some very unsavoury neo-conservatives. However, few people can doubt his sincerity and passion in the defence of free speech and freedom of thought and his blanket opposition to fundamentalism of any description. At this time he famously underwent “waterboarding” to prove that the technique of simulated drowning practiced by the United States was not torture. After he had recovered he reported that, yes indeed, most definitely, it was.

Having written critical books on Henry Kissinger, the Royal Family and Mother Teresa, Hitch took on the Almighty. He viewed religion and the concept of a god, any god, as being a totalitarian belief at direct odds with notions of individual freedom and freedom of expression. His book, god is not great: how religion poisons everything (2007) (God’s lower case `g` was typically provocative) made him a champion of “New Atheism” alongside Richard Dawkins, and was an international best-seller. Brother Peter, by now a devout Christian and outspoken journalist for the Daily Mail, responded with The Rage Against God (2010), reflecting a difficult relationship that had existed, on and off, since their childhood in Alverstoke.

The Commander died in 1987 and is buried on the slopes of Portsdown Hill. When the boys were small and fighting for parental attention he had, in his fair-minded, reasonable and very English way, initiated a peace pact, “The Treaty of Cedarwood”, which was signed by the boys and solemnly framed and mounted on the wall. It did not last.

Hitch’s “celebrity” status, confirmed by the publication of his memoir in 2010, was something which he had difficulty with but did little to discourage, just one of his many contradictions hinted at in the title, Hitch 22. In an interview given shortly before he died, Hitch described the main theme as “the divided self”, and his life is laid bare without sentiment and with great wit and style.

At the height of his fame, while promoting his memoir, Hitch was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. He endured his illness with courage, a quality he had demonstrated in different ways throughout his life. Hitch died on the 15 December 2011. Peter wrote that they got on better in his final few months than they had for fifty years. The spirit of the Commander’s treaty had finally been embraced.

The Hitchen's brothers' associations with PGS did not start with their OP father. Two of their maternal great uncles were also Old Portmuthians. In the late 19th century. Surgeon Commander Henry R Gardner R.N and Captain Frank Somers-Gardner RAMC had  attended the Victorian school under Headmaster Alfred Jerrard. 

Peter continues to write a column for The Mail on Sunday and has been described as "a forceful, tenacious, eloquent and brave journalist". His published books include The Abolition of Britain (1999) and A Revolution Betrayed - how egalitarians wrecked the British education system" (2023).

Petter attended the PGS-organised Portsmouth Festivities in 2017, taking part in a lively debate in which he argued for Brexit. Two years later he was invited to the school after being cancelled by Portsmouth University just days before a planned talk there.  His reminiscences and observations on Russia, drawing on his time in Moscow as a correspondent, was well-received by pupils. Peter also looked at archive material related to his family's connections to the school. In 2021 he name-checked PGS in an article titled The Golden Age of the Grammar School published in the Spectator. 

References:

Hitch 22 – a memoir by Christopher Hitchens

The Portmuthian (Portsmouth Grammar School magazine)

Godless in Tumourville, The Daily Telegraph 25 March 2011

The house I grew up in: Peter Hitchens; BBC Radio 4, 19 July 2010

Don’t call me a snob. I’m lower upper middle class, Peter Hitchens, Daily Mail 20 Jan 2009

In memoriam, my courageous brother Christopher, 1949-2011, Peter Hitchens, Daily Mail 16 Dec 2011

Census returns (ancestry.co.uk)

Kelly’s Directories of Portsmouth