Lift Up Your Hearts

Today (Sunday 15th) is kept in the Church of England as the Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary - what someone accustomed to the richer provision of Marian devotion found in other parts of the universal church once described to me rather disparagingly as "your all purpose General Synod Mary Day." In Medieval times the feast of Our Lady in the Harvest was  celebrated in mid August as a day off reaping and gathering (the reason for the long vacation was, of course to release the children to help in the fields at the point in the year when all hands are needed). A year or so ago the Haileybury chapel was beautified with an image of Our Lady. As Vice Chairman of the Anglican Society of Mary I heartily approve of that!

Image of Madonna & Child, Haileybury Chapel

Some of you may know Hilaire Belloc's poem.

Ballade of Illegal Ornaments

"...the controversy was ended by His Lordship, who wrote to the Incumbent ordering him to remove from the Church all Illegal Ornaments at once, and especially a Female Figure with a Child"

When that the Eternal deigned to look
on us poor folk to make us free
he chose a Maiden, whom He took
from Nazareth in Galilee;
since when the Islands of the Sea,
the Field, the City, and the Wild
proclaim aloud triumphantly

A Female Figure with a Child.

These Mysteries profoundly shook
the Reverend Doctor Leigh, D.D.,
who therefore stuck into a Nook
(or Niche) of his Incumbency
an Image filled with majesty
to represent the Undefiled,
the Universal Mother— She—

A Female Figure with a Child.

His Bishop, having read a book
which proved as plain as plain could be
that all the Mutts had been mistook
who talked about a Trinity
Wrote off at once to Doctor Leigh
in manner very far from mild,
and said: “Remove them instantly!

A Female Figure with a Child!”

Envoi

Prince Jesus, in mine Agony,
permit me, broken and defiled,
through blurred and glazing eyes to see
A Female Figure with a Child.

Take it away Ernie!

Does anyone else remember the school museum? It was in one of the rooms now used by the music department under the Bradby. By and large it was a tedious collection of Roman Pottery, but I remember being shown what I thought then were fascinating exhibits, and now with more adult sensibilities and after thirty years of increasing political correctness, find rather horrifying: two 'shrunken heads.' They may well have been fakes - apparently many if not most are / were; but I wonder what happened to them. Maybe they are in some vault somewhere under the Quad…

There is at least a case of (more interesting than I remember) Greek and Roman artifacts outside the Classics Form Rooms. No shrunken heads though. Here's one.

I am not a number!

School Number 208

What was yours? Mine was 430, but I did not use it much. The main thing was to put on chits so that the invoice went to the right school bill. There were still coat hooks on the corridor outside the upstairs form rooms with school numbers on them, but nobody used them. Older books had them written in the fly leaf Does anyone know the basis on which they were allocated? At Marlborough the entrants to the school are numbered consecutively and the number appears in the Register and identifies you for life in respect of school things. As far as I know Haileybury school numbers never had any such individuality and were presumably reused in other generations.  When my own boys entered Haileybury I thought that school numbers would be a relic of a dead past. But no! They have been given a number which is more important to the modern Haileyburian than our numbers ever were to us. They are all four figures which together with their initials make up their school e-mail address.

Pegs outside chapel. No numbers here

Upstairs Corridor in the Form Room Block - where the pegs with school numbers used to be

Railways

In the current edition of The Haileyburian there is an article about the Schools Class locomotive Haileybury  No 924. You can read it on the school website here.

If you are a railway modeler Hornby now have a Schools Class locomotive, and more than that, if you can't find one which is named for Haileybury there are places you can buy the name plates of your choice for it. 

Sons of the Morning

I had a note from Simon Watson (Staff 1977 - 1986) telling me that he has published the latest in his sequence Sons of the Morning. The novels follow Johnny Clarke through the adventure of schooling. Volume 1, A Storm of Cherries (published 2006) is set in prep school, Volume 2, Dancing Days, (published 2007) is set in public school; Volume 3, The Last Enchantments (published 2008) is set in Oxford, and Volume 4, A Touch of the Sun (published 2008) is set in India where Johnny’s teaching career begins. Newly published Bring Me My Bow is the fifth book in the sequence. Simon noted that "Haileybury's the next volume." His website, from which the books can be bought, notes that the stories are not autobiographical but draw on his experiences. Simon taught English at Haileybury and was the House Master of Russell Dore when it was a dedicated day boys' House. He left Haileybury to be Head Master of Hurstpierpoint. He also published a children's book, The Partisan in 1975.