Lift up your Hearts

Send forth your light and your truth

let them guide me

let them bring me to your holy mountain

to the place where you dwell.

Then will I go to the altar of God

to God my joy and my delight

I will praise you with the harp

O God, my God.

Why are you downcast my soul?

Why so disturbed within me?

Put your hope in God,

for I will yet praise Him

my saviour and my God. 

from Psalm 43

Singing

Music has been an exceptional strength of Haileybury for many years. I have just got back from a three day parish pilgrimage to Walsingham. We had an afternoon out at Wells-next-the-Sea and I found in the second hand bookshop there a small volume published in 1889 called Songs Sung at Haileybury. The content is interesting, more on that another time; but the use is presumably that described in Random Recollections of Haileybury: 'Another use of Big School which has lapsed (1953) was "Upper School Singing" on Saturday nights, when the School collected with the old Haileybury Song Book to let off steam with community singing. To this sophisticated age such an entertainment may well savour of "Eric or Little by Little." But then, the cacophonous jazz records one now hears from study windows had not yet vitiated the standard of taste or or enjoyment.'

Hugo Bagnall-Oakeley (Ha 51.1-55.2) wrote today to remark on another musical entry in Random Recollections in which Ashcroft referred to "the exceptionally high standard of the 1954 house unison singing competition. I only realised later that this was the year Hailey won the competition and I was the director and conductor. The regulations provided that the entire house must take part—i.e. not just the good singers--- but I instructed those who couldn’t sing in tune to mime the words without making a sound. Incidentally our housemaster Killer Cook was distinctly unimpressed as he regarded musicians as long haired, limp wrested nancy boys but I managed to convince him that this was, after all, a team event so he grudgingly agreed to have the cup in Hailey, although he would much rather have won cock house rugger!"

What would Mr Cook have thought of Haileybury winning the BBC Choir of the year competition in 2005?


(PS you can buy one of the CDs by clicking here or on the picture of the Haileybury Coat of Arms at the bottom of the blog home page.)

oips revisited

The post on oips has excited a number of memories. Hugo Bagnall-Oakeley (Ha 51.1-55.2) e-mailed to say 'when I was at school oips referred to a game of rugger/cricket which took place on Wednesdays when the rest of the school were marching about, stripping brens etc in the CCF. You had to be 14 before you could join the Corps so most boys would only have been eligible for oips for their first one or two terms. Thereafter it was obligatory to join the CCF. The blog suggests that oips meant everyone who wasn’t in the XV or XXX but this certainly wasn’t the case in the 1950s.'


This is corroborated by Will Harte (C 80 - 85) who posted a comment to say oips were Wednesday afternoon activities for Removes before they joined the CCF. By the time Will and I arrived CCF was not compulsory for Middles and Vths as it was in the generation above, but there were other activities including Duke of Edinburgh on Wednesdays for those who chose not to join. I have a feeling the lack of compulsion may have been quite a new thing.

Meanwhile George Staple (M 54.2 - 57.3), the current President of the Haileybury Society, confirms that 'hoips was (is) definitely pronounced oips, or it was when I was there. But it was cool to drop your 'h's in the 1950's. In fact the more of a toff you were, the more you dropped them.'

The Register

Increased printing costs and the advent of computers may well have killed off the School Register. Many schools produced them, lists of former pupils listing their achievements at school together with their achievements in later life. For the collector of ephemera the older editions can be a fascinating read. Haileybury's latest register goes up to 1994 but even then concerns of cost cut out most of the interesting details of the older generations and the lengthy historical introduction - the first of which, by LS Milford, is an outstanding history of the first forty years of the life of the school. As a result the Eleventh Haileybury and ISC Register, put together with indefatigable energy by Bill Tyrwhitt-Drake (BF 1940), though full of interest for later generations, is a relatively dry volume for the older entries.

FW Bourdillion (E 1865) was a writer and poet who came from a significant Haileybury family. He wrote a poem on Registers in a volume called Sursum Corda published in 1893. You can read the whole book online here, but this is the poem.

 A Public School Register

As birds of passage on some mid-sea isle,

From diverse lands and bound on diverse ways,

In company assembled for a while,

Then lose each other in the ocean haze:

So are we parted when are done the days

Of our brief brotherhood within this pile;

The world grows wider then; new hopes beguile;

And from new lips we look for blame or praise.

No lifeless page is this that bears enrolled

Names once familiar, and bids reappear

Forgotten faces. One has climbed to fame

In law or letters; one proved greatly bold

In battle; one—it may be the most dear—

Just does his life's work well and is the same.

By the way, if you want a copy of the register - you know you need it - you can get one from the Society by clicking here.

What's in a Name?

One of the lines that has to appear in the Policies that every school now has to have is the statement 'every child has the right to be called by the name he or she chooses.' Many of my contemporaries called me Norman at school because a bloke in the Vth thought that I looked like Norman Wisdom. it was quite a decision when after five years of answering to 'Luke' at home and 'Miller' (at least before entering the LVIth) to adults at school, I had to decide what I wanted new friends at University to call me. Most of my contemporaries seem to have done what I did and drop their school nicknames on leaving.

There were two Millers (we are not related) in Hailey in my year and so I had the privilege - as I thought it - of having initials after my name: Miller LJ. My spies in Lower School tell me that despite the universal use of Christian names, and even of nicknames (provided chosen by the child and not imposed) some of the young (at least the males of the species) still call one another by their Surnames. This raises for brothers the age old problem of having the same name. Nicknames and epithets come into play, but they sometimes resort to Mega and Minor (mixing Greek and Latin in a way that would once have attracted considerable opprobrium).

At first 'Major' and 'Minor' was the official way of distinguishing between brothers at Haileybury. One was Miller MA or Miller MI. The business of having initials came in around 1928 with the advent of two sets of brothers named Serjeant to Thomason (FRM 1923.3 and J 1924.3) and a pair named Minor to Trevelyan (R 1925.1 and B 1927.1). It was felt Sergeant Major and Minor Minor was just all too much to manage.

The younger Minor in fact became a Major, so in the end he was Major Minor. Sadly he was killed in action in the Middle East in 1942.

Wistaria

The Modern Foreign Languages Centre has such huge windows that one might almost say it has glass walls. I hope that in the sunny weather it has not been too hot. From the West side one can see into the Hailey garden, a hidden corner of the grounds now made much more visible.

In Haileybury Since Roman Times Molly Matthews says that the first Wistaria to grow in England was brought in the days of the East India College and grew against Hailey House. She says that at the time of writing it had 'recently' been rooted up. This print may show the Wistaria, growing against the south wall of the House.

But there is a bit of a mystery here since Wistaria (or Wisteria - both spellings are licit) is native to the United States, Korea, Japan and China - ie not India - and  Wikipedia at least suggests that it was brought to England by American traders who seem to have had no link with Haileybury. The Fuller's Brewery in Chiswick claims the oldest Wistaria in the UK today. Was Hailey's older, or is this a Haileybury Legend?

Here is a picture of the Chiswick plant, but it does not have any bloom so for the sake of a bit of colour on this post here is a picture of a Wistaria growing along the wall of Sidney Sussex College Cambridge.

C'mon England!