Lift up Your Hearts

Lots of things happen at Haileybury when the school is on holiday. This is grace before breakfast at European Youth Summer Music which is the Federation of Festivals' summer course.

Heretic!

Despite all the well publicised ructions in Anglicanism it is rare for there to be a formal charge of heresy. One of the few to have been brought was against Bishop John Jameson Willis (M 1887.1) about whom I blogged last week. Frank Weston, the saintly and determined bishop of Zanzibar, was outraged when Willis, together with the Bishop of Mombassa (William Peel) convened a conference of Christian missionaries at Kikuyu in Kenya. 

The Bible in Kikuyu

The meeting, to which Weston was not invited, sought to develop a scheme which would allow African converts to ignore denominational differences if they moved between districts. It was a vision of a pan Protestant church, but it was based on fudging doctrine and lowering the standard of ecclesial discipline to a bare minimum. At the end of the meeting Holy Communion was celebrated by the Anglican Bishops Willis and Peel and all the delegates except those from the Society of Friends were communicated. This was long before any idea of intercommunion was accepted, and Bishop Weston protested to the Archbishop of Canterbury in the strongest terms. He sent an Open Letter to the Bishop of St. Alban’s and when he came home in February 1914 there was a national ferment in ecclesiastical circles. Archbishop Randall Davidson was forced to intervene and the scheme was dropped.

Kikuyu tribes women in traditional dress

The dispute is largely forgotten now. The following year there was another conference at Kikuyu at which Weston was present, and the movement fizzled out as it became apparent that such a watered down form of Christianity was not anyway attractive in the mission field. 


Bishop Weston was a member of the Society of the Holy Cross, a priests' society of which I am also a member. I researched this incident for a History of the Society a few years ago, but never realised that Willis was a Haileyburian. 

Most Successful PM

Over the last couple of days there has been a media flurry about a survey of academic historians rating the success of Prime Ministers since 1945. Clement Attllee (L 1896.2) was rated as 'most successful.' It seems the criterion was an assessment of how much of a mark the various PMs left on British society and politics, and how much of their programme they managed to impliment. The establishment of the welfare state is viewed as defining the modern political landscape. This is the second time the survey has been undertaken by Professor Kenneth Theakston of the University of Leeds and Mark Gill of Woodnewton Associates, and on the  previous occasion as well Attlee came out top.

The survey was done for the Financial Times, but as they have a paywall you may prefer to follow the story on free sites here, here and here

If anyone has had time to read Niklaus Thomas-Symonds' new biography of Attlee, Attlee - A Life in Politics do post a comment. Philip Zeigler reviews it in the Spectator here and says that it is a useful corrective to what he views as the over sympathetic work of Kenneth Harris but that Thomas-Symonds fails to bring in any new material beyond some things about his time at Haileybury. Zeigler remarks that this is covered in less than a page. There may be some room for more there in that Attlee was such a supporter of the school and of Haileyburians. I seem to remember being told that Attlee remarked once that "all other things being equal I would rather have a Haileyburian with me than another man." One assumes that he actually meant "all other things being equal" at face value!

Over the next couple of days I shall try and dig out a link to a recording of Attlee giving an interview to Sir Robin Day. It shows how much things have changed as the by then former PM gives basically monosyllabic answers. 

Model United Nations

Haileybury has pioneered MUN. It is impressive stuff.


HAILEYBURY - MODEL UNITED NATIONS

Streets Called Haileybury 2

Haileybury Road, Liverpool L25, links with Charterhouse Road, and Stonyhurst Road. Rodean Close and Denstone Close are turnings off.

Nantucket Shenanigans

Jack Thomas (Staff 1954) - Writes to tell me about his latest venture.

I have just published a book which I hope might interest you and which you might feel inclined to buy. It is called Nantucket Shenanigans.  14 chapters and 204 pages long, it tells the story of two teenagers who have never been abroad before but have the holiday of a lifetime on the magic island of Nantucket, off the coast of Massachusetts.  

Their American aunt Pamela watches in horror as Tom and Annie get into all sorts of scrapes.  Their adventures include a clash with the police, getting themselves shipwrecked, learning about the mysteries of baseball, becoming stranded all night on a remote part of the island and discovering the beauty of the island and its history as well as just having fun with their aunt and her dog, Boone.

But in the last two chapters everything that that has gone before pales into insignificance as Tom and Annie face bravely up to a terrifying ordeal.

But this novel is not just a teenage romantic adventure story, although I feel confident that teenagers would enjoy it.  Adults would assuredly find this book fascinating as it explores the cultural, linguistic and historical differences between the U.S.A. and the U.K. You would also get a guided tour of the beauty, history and glory of Nantucket Island.

To buy my book all you have to do is go onto the internet, type lulu.com; when it comes up, go to Books, type in the word Nantucket.  Choose the copy with a picture of a girl on the beach and press Buy!

The book costs £10 plus £2.99  postage making a grand total for a jolly good read of £12.99.

Jack also says that you can review the book having read it on the same website. 

Battle of Britain 2

On July 26 1930 JWC More (Th 24) passed out of Cranwell with, among others, Douglas Bader.  He died in 1944 as a Japanese Prisoner of War on a transport and is commemorated on column 431 of the Singapore Memorial. Fighting in France in 1940 he shared in shooting down a Heinkel 111. During the Battle of Britain he was in Leigh Mallory's 12 Group, Commanding 73 Squadron engaged in night fighting.

In Random Recollections RL Ashcroft states that More made the "pioneer deck landing (on the Courageous)." This cannot mean the first ever landing by an aircraft onto a ship. It may mean that More was involved in the trials in 1939 in which Spitfires without arrestor hooks were landed on HMS Courageous. This proved that it would be possible for the Fleet Air Arm to be equipped with better aircraft. The narrow undercarriage of the Spitfire made landing and take off especially difficult unless perfectly executed (operationally there were problems as they could not be lowered to the hangars of many of the carriers because of the wingspan). Nevertheless the experiments led to the development of the Seafire, the naval variant of the Spitfire.

The courage involved in landing a Spitfire with its narrow undercarriage and with no arrestor hook onto a moving ship is not to be underestimated.