Lift up your Hearts

From a sermon by Henry Melvill, Principal of the East India College 1844 - 1858 then Canon of S Paul's Cathedral

Shall it be said of any amongst ourselves that they heard of Heaven, but made no effort to behold it? Is there one who can be indifferent to the announcement of its glories, one who can feel utterly careless whether he ever prove for himself, that there has been no deceit, exaggeration, but that it is indeed a surpassingly fair land which is to be everlastingly the home of of those who believe in the Redeemer? Everlastingly the home - for we must not overlook the concluding words of our text, "God will establish it for ever." The walls of that city shall never decay; the lustures of that city shall never grow dim; the melodies of that city shall never be hushed. and it is of a city such as this that any one of us can be indifferent whether or no he be finally an inhabitant? We will not believe it. The old and the young, the rich and the poor, all must bind themselves by a solemn vow, that they will "seek first the Kingdom of God, and His righteousness." It is not the voice of a solitary and weak fellowman which now tells you of Heaven. God is summoning you. Angels are summoning you. We are surrounded by a "great cloud of witnesses." The battlements of the sky seem thronged with those who have fought the good fight of faith. They bend down from their eminence, and bid us ascend, through the one Mediator, to the same lofty dwelling. They shall not call in vain. 

Cycling

With the summer weather there are definitely more cyclists about. Here is a splendid picture from Imogen Thomas's Haileybury 1806 - 1987. The caption says that it was taken in 1886 by the 'in' gate at the end of Avenue. There are seven Penny-farthings; a more modern looking machine on the left, and a wonderful contraption on the right that looks a bit like a wheel chair. Does it have a special name?

I was intrigued to discover a couple of years ago that my parish had a cycling club at just this period, the late 1880s and that a favourite ride was to Haileybury. The trip meter in my car tells me that it is sixteen miles from the church to the school, but that involves a bit of  a detour from the modern A10 down into Hoddesden and then back on yourself up the road to the Heath. I guess in the old days it would have been possible to get off the London Road and come up Hailey Lane. Maybe those with a better knowledge of the road layout at that time could confirm this?

The goal of the cyclists from Tottenham was tea with The Rev'd WD Fenning, an Old Marlburian who taught at Haileybury from 1875 - 1910; he then became chaplain to the Christ's Hospital girls' school in Hertford. My parish is the Marlborough Mission, so we are to Marlborough what Stepney was to Haileybury, hence the link with Mr Fenning.

I do cycle a bit round the parish and a bit further afield in London, but I am not one of those people who goes to Brighton and back in a day. To get to Haileybury form Tottenham on one of those machines muct have ben no mean feat. It is amazing just how far people cycled before cars became ubiquitous. I have a little book called The Country Round Haileybury which details the geology, biology and history of the whole region round the school. It was designed to be a practical and educative guide for use on field days and at other times when the school would empty and boys would go off on long walks and longer cycle rides. The walks are further than I would cycle and the idea of riding to St Alban's and back on an old bone shaker bicycle without gears is something that fills me with admiration.

Fenning by the way, was a keen photographer and because of him there are two fine photographs of my S. Mary's in the Haileybury archive. I wonder whether he cycled to Tottenham with his equipment to take them?

Hard Times

I promised some more about RL Ashcroft's Random Recollections of Haileybury. It is a collection of articles for the Haileyburian written in the 1950s and designed to be amusing and interesting for the pupils of the day. Some of it is frankly no longer funny, if indeed it ever was, but it remains a mine of information about the school and its community in the second quarter of the twentieth century.

It is sometimes quipped that the regime in the Public Schools of the day was deliberately hard so that the boys would be prepared for life as prisoners of war. Ashcroft, writing in 1954, states with a frighteningly straight face that this was in fact the case:

"Many years ago when I visited the lower Lawrence houseroom (where the West Portico now is) and found all the boys in it absorbed in watching a boy eat a live worm. Before I arrived he had dealt with one already, after passing the hat round and collecting 9d for the feat. The one I interrupted was priced at 1s. 2d. he hadn't even the excuse of Luther who is reported to have said at the Diet of Worms: "Great Heavens, there is no other course!" However you never know what good may come out of anything. The same boy spent about six months in hiding behind the German lines, after having been captured as a parachutist and escaped from captivity: and then he had to live as best he could from what he could get from the fields. "

(h)oips

Greek is now very strong at Haileybury - last year we had something extraordinary like a third of all A Level Greek entries in the country. But how many members of the Haileybury community now remember (h)oips? It's Greek, and I can't work out how to get Blogger to let me type in Greek letters (answers in the comments please)*. It was the name for the junior pitch on XX Acre, now buried somewhere under the Sports Hall I suppose.

I had forgotten the name until I  came across it while leafing through RL Ashcroft's Random Recollections of Haileybury (more about that extraordinary volume another time). It is one of those bits of school slang which used to form a separate kind of language but have now largely passed into desuetude. (Words like groize and terms such as New Guv'nor also seem to have gone now.) I'm not now sure, but I think it was pronounced without the breathing - oips, not hoips.

The derivation of (h)oips was (h)oi polloi - the many -  and so you were not part of the elite, the few, the XV or the XXX, but one of the many, playing on the junior pitch. There is an explanation - which makes reference to the Haileybury usage here.
Strange in a way that in our egalitarian days the first team should still have on Terrace its dedicated pitch with its special name but the poor old (h)oi polloi just play any old where.


Update
Carole Gandon, Head of Classics, writes to correct my hyperbole - to have a third of the entries we would need the whole VI to take Greek but, she says: we do more than keep our end up Greek wise and our numbers would compare favourably with most, other than the Classical powerhouses of the likes of Winchester.

How Time Flies

A lovely warm summer evening tonight for the Lower School end of term chapel service and BBQ. The Lower School choir sang Rutter's The Lord bless you and keep you, and the congregation sang heartily. Afterwards as the young people spread out across Terrace playing all sorts of games and the adults fell on the food we were all saying that it really does not seem a year since the welcome day and the first day of term in September. Of course the thing is that it is not a year - only three quarters of one, term actually has a couple of weeks to go, and the long summer holiday lies ahead. It certainly seems only a short time to me since we were dropping our eldest, now about to leave LS2, for the beginning of his first year.

There were goodbyes as well, to Chris Jones, the Head of Lower School, who is leaving to be Deputy Head at Churcher's College in Hampshire. His contribution to the development in Lower School was warmly acknowledged both in Chapel and afterwards. In addition Richard Charters, one of the LS tutors, is off to Colombia. Good luck to them both.

Parents

It is said that one day in the 1950s a boy arrived late back after a half term exeat. The car had suffered a puncture which had caused the delay. The parents came in with their son to explain to the House Master what the problem had been. This was Hailey and the House Master was the fabled "Killer Cook." Even in the 1980s the stories of his firmness and vigour were still told in the House Room and DC. It is said that the parents were assured all was well, invited to the drawing room and given a glass of sherry. Then Cook left the room for a moment. The boy was summoned to the study, beaten for being late, and sent away, while Cook went back to chat to the parents.

Maybe this explains why I am always edgy when we are late getting the boys back to Highfield on a Sunday evening! The difference in attitude now to parents is enormous. From being rather annoying distractions, parents have become partners with the school.  "The first and best teacher of the child." The  Haileybury Parents' Association is just ten years old. It helps parents to know one another and supports the school with its own events and shared initiatives like the 'welcome day' when new pupils start in their Houses and Lower School.

Pictures

Until I started this blog I had never really explored the fantastic school website. There is a gallery of pictures here which you might enjoy. There is even a separate site called Haileybury Images. Of course if you Google "Haileybury" you get lots of things about Haileybury Ontario and Haileybury in Melbourne. More about them on other days.

We Will Remember Them

The sombre news of the three hundredth death on active service in Afghanistan came today. In my first term at Haileybury ITV televised the Remembrance Sunday School service. During the two minutes' silence the film cut between the six hundred and fifty odd of us standing silent in the chapel, pictures of the horror of the trenches, and the names in the chapel cloisters. During the Great War about 650 Haileyburians were killed - approximately a school full.

The ethos of service remains strong to this day; Richard Palmer (E 92) was killed in Iraq in 2006 and his name now stands at the end of the sorrowfully long list. In the ancient church they spoke of the 'red' martyrdom of those who shed their blood, and also of the 'white martyrdom' of those who offered long lives of selflessness. The examples of both challenge a world which too easily names 'heros' and measures worth in money and success rather than in service and self offering. Generations of Haileyburians have been taught to be true to higher values than gratification and the pursuit of fame and fortune, and many have attempted so to frame their lives, sometimes at great cost.


On 7th May next year we hope to hold an event at the National Memorial Arboretum, whose current CEO is Charles Bagot-Jewitt (Tr 78) to celebrate and reaffirm the ethos of service. John Palmer (E 62) will be with us. Current and former service men and women will be invited and those of whom the Society office knows who have a link to someone commemorated at the Arboretum. There will also be those like me were in the CCF at school but did not pursue a military career, and it is hoped that other OHs and friends of the school will also come. The plan is to take an honour guard from the current CCF and after a service to have a buffet lunch and then allow time for mingling and wandering among the trees and the memorials.