Lift up your Hearts!

A Saturday evening thought to take into Sunday.

When Lord Allenby (left) entered Jerusalem on 11th December 1917 he did so on foot. He and the other commanders accompanying him dismounted at the Jaffa Gate and walked to the Citadel. He would not ride a horse into the city his Lord had entered on a donkey.

Haileybury Almaty

The new Haileybury in Kazakhstan is building a significant reputation. Here is a clip from You Tube




If you can lip read you will see that at 1.05 the Vivat is being sung

Living Stones

Over on the right of the page there is a link to The Haileybury Youth Trust (HYT). This deserves to be widely known. It is an initiative in Uganda which makes bricks. The Trust website explains:

HYT uses a simple brick that could transform Africa

Working alongside our Uganda partners, we…

• build water tanks in rural areas
• construct classrooms and dormitories in schools that are bursting with impoverished but eager children
• build affordable houses for their dedicated teachers who have nowhere to live
• train teachers, students, their families and whole communities in the benefits of appropriate technologies
• provide income generating opportunities for families and businesses

HYT does all this in a sustainable, environmentally-friendly way.

The trust was set up when the work of the Stepney Boys' Club was separated from Haileybury a couple of years ago. Each year a couple of leavers go to Uganda, just as in the past they went to Stepney.  Just like that older work, the results will not simply be seen in bricks and mortar, but in the transformation of lives. It's all part of the ethos of Christian service which lies at the heart of Haileybury's life, and links the generations. "You are living stones being built into a spiritual house." (1 Peter 2:5)

You can support the trust by going to their site. Later in the year I hope we can work with the trust to have a benefit concert on the newly restored Hill organ in my church. 

Ugly?

Many of you may know Wilfrid Blunt's marvelous little book The Haileybury Buildings. It is now long out of print but Amazon may throw up a copy.

He describes the Chapel as follows, suggesting that the best word to use would be "Romanesque."

"It is usually referred to as Byzantine; this is, however, wrong. The exterior comes nearer to the Romanesque than to any other known style, and in particular to the north Italian or Lombardic Romanesque. The general external form of the building appears to be a Lombardic version of the church of Santa Maria della Consolazione at Todi, while the dome resembles fairly closely that of Duomo nuovo at Brescia. Into the interior more of the Renaissance had crept; the capitals were Corinthian and composite (though the bases were Ionic), the general decoration was geometrical, the general impression unspeakable." 

That was of course before the redecoration took place!

Blunt's book on the Haileybury Buildings could be updated now if we had someone who combined his precision of description, deep knowledge of architecture and acerbic  wit. He finishes his remarks on Blomfield's chapel by saying: "It is sometimes assumed that architectural ugliness is usually the result of economy. This is fallacious. It generally takes quite a lot of money to make a building really ugly, as the Chapel showed."

I hope he would be kind to the new Modern Languages building, but what he would have said of the Sports Hall and - even more - of the Tennis Academy is probably best left unconsidered!

Getting Started

There is a story of a new young Master arriving to teach at Haileybury sometime in the early part of the last century. He went into breakfast and took his place at the junior end of the vast Common Room table. The man next to him lowered his paper and growled: "Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I say 'Good morning' to you; Tuesdays Thursdays and Saturdays, you say 'Good morning' to me. Sundays, nobody speaks." Haileybury is so different these days: Masters are Teachers; Haileyburians are as likely to be girls as boys; there is even a move, fiercely resisted by the youngest pupils - who nowadays are just 11 - to call the San the "Health Centre."

The Haileybury Society links the generations. Those who like me are old enough to have children at the school are linked with generations who remember all too well the days when Masters had rules about morning greetings and through the Society we are linked with some who have only just arrived in Lower School - and maybe brothers and sisters yet to arrive. It is a great thing to be part of.

When I was asked if I would be willing to become President Elect of the Haileybury Society my ghast was flabbered. I resolved that if I was to take it on I would like to try and bring a couple things to the role. One is this blog. Reunions and events can be reported pretty much immediately. I have also been gathering anecdotes about the school and OHs in the hope that some of them might be of interest to the Haileybury community. Overall it would be splendid to try to link the generations through the thing which unites us all - the shared link with the place a now largely un-sung song calls "The fine old school beneath the dome."