For three hundred years, the officers and senior administrators of the British Empire sent their sons back home to boarding schools for education as gentlemen. This was often for long uninterrupted periods of a year or more. The 19th-century public school ethos promoted ideas of service to Crown and Empire, familiar sentiments such as "it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game" and "the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton".