Last Post

The AGM is over and Chris Darnell (M 1965) has been duly elected as President and the medal handed over. He will be a great President for the school's 150th anniversary and we all wish him well. Meanwhile hearty congratulations are due also to Catherine MacLeod-Smith (Alb & L 1979), who has become the Chairman of the Trustees of the Society, the first woman to hold this office, as she was the first woman President. The President Elect for 2013 is Jane Everard (Alb & L 1976). Joe Davis, the Master, was elected an honorary member of the Society, as was Paul Wilkinson, the Bursar. Both have been great supporters.

This will be the last regular post on the blog now that the Presidency has been handed on. I hope you have enjoyed the miscellany of things. There are some posts which never quite made it, and I still have ideas, but 301 posts (including this one) in sixteen months has been quite busy. Of course the quality has been variable, and sometimes just a picture has had to do. The original idea was to post once a month or so, but I got enthusiastic and it has been much more than that. Sometimes I have had time to post daily, whereas over last summer the rate dropped down to less than once a week for a while.

Readers have come from all the continents except Antarctica, and at the time of writing there have been just under 25,000 page views. The busiest month was February 2011 with 1,645 page views from 1,020 unique visitors. People have stayed on the site too. At any one time according to the tracking software about 15% of my readers stay on the blog for more than 20 minutes, which is a long time for a website.

My family will be pleased that will not be forever taking pictures of Haileybury related things to put up on the blog. I have a set of pictures which did not get used for a series on 'nooks and crannies,' which was rather scorned by a friend who, seeing a photo of the urinal at the back of the pavilion on Lower Pavilion on my phone wondered whether people really want posts on 'places where I urinated when I was a teenager.'

Thank you all for reading. I shall leave the blog on the internet, and you can use the links on the right of the page to read the old posts. I am investigating how to make Haileyburiana available as a book using Print on Demand and will put up a notice if that can be done.

Finally, the Master said in his address to the AGM that in the 150th year he would ask the Director of Music to teach the school the Vivat, which has not, I think been sung at Haileybury for 20 years (the hymn Lift up Your Hearts, having largley taken its place). Here is an attempt at a Sesquicentennial verse:

Now we've been here thrice fifty years

Vivat Haileyburia!

Living out our hopes and fears

Vivat Haileyburia!

Girls have come to join the boys,

In other lands they share our joys,

And still this song our tongue employs

Vivat Haileyburia!

I fear it is not as good as AG Butler's original:

Then close your ranks and lift your song!

Vivat Haileyburia!

That life is short, but love is long;

Vivat Haileyburia!

And all through life, where'er we be

School of our hearts, we'll think of thee

And drink the toast with three times three

Vivat Haileyburia!

Annexed

Many former inhabitants of Albans will remember the Annex, which we blokes always believed to have been the morgue when Albans was the San. A couple of years ago the Council were shown round and I was amazed by the incredibly narrow first floor passageway which linked the two sides of the building.

The middle of the Annex - and the narrow passage - has now been demolished and the whole thing is going to be linked to the main building to provide for a resident House Tutor. As term began it was still a building site.

If you once lived in the Annex you may or may not recognise the place now.

Annexed

First of all, apologies for the long gap in posting. All I can do is plead pressure of other commitments. There is a meeting of the General Committee tomorrow and of the Council on Friday, so I have a Haileybury week, but posting has been light.

On Saturday I went was at school watching number one son and his team being thrashed in a cricket match on Hailey Field. I went up to Highfield to collect number two and took these pictures of the Alban's Annex. Or rather, of where the annex was.

A new boarding block for the Lower School girls is being built on what was the (new) San carpark and the annex is being converted to provide for a House Tutor's flat and to link the building with Alban's.

I gather that the annex was the place to live in the VI in Alban's. Mythology said that it was the morgue of the old San.

Last year as a member of Council we went on a tour to inspect the annex. There was an incredibly narrow corridor along the top floor of the part now demolished in the middle. 

Lift Up Your Hearts

At the Albans Trev and Lawrence dinner last Saturday I was asked to say grace. In these days of self service (which have made the food so much better) formal grace in Hall is a rarity. We were sitting down to a meal served to the tables so grace was said. 

As a CP I remember trying on the first occasion I said grace to inject meaning into the prayer with disastrous results. The duty Master - who was one if the chaplains - told me in future just to get it over with, which I duly did. "All on one breath!" was the rule. 

So last Saturday night I duly said grace all in one breath as of old. Someone asked me if I shouldn't gave given it more meaning...

There is a view in church circles that one should try and reduce ones own influence on a text by striving to remove too much meaning from the reading of a text. But even in a sung liturgy some of the inflexion of the celebrant will come through. While a reading should not be a performance, I don't think reading in a monotone helps understanding. Most churches have a better acoustic and a more forgiving audience than Hall at lunchtime, and since the Holy Spirit allows our voices to carry the Word of the Lord, He also gives grace that it may be heard. Despite our voices - or because of them. 

The Evolution of Dormitories 4

The movement over the last twenty years has been to smaller and smaller dormitories for younger pupils and to bed sits for the more senior. The pattern has been to have a 'dormitory' for Removes and Middles and study bedrooms for Vths and above. When the school became co-educational the new Bartle Frere and Edmonstone were set up in this way. Colvin and Melvill meanwhile were equipped with single rooms throughout. Hailey has a dormitory (the old Upper) but the Lower was divided into rooms for four girls each. This is similar to what was done in Allenby when the conversion was made. That pattern has recently been replicated in Trevelyan and Thomason where the Removes and Middles live and work in rooms of four. (Four is a pastorally good number as it reduces the chances of a two on one division happening in a room.)

Meanwhile the new Lower School boys' accommodation in Highfield is in Dormitories of eight.  The Lower School girls' dormitory is in Alban's and while it has great character it is not as swish as the boys' rooms.

Many of the boys' houses have clever bunks in a "T" shape where the top bunk is at right angles to the bottom one and supported at either end by wardrobes.

The Evolution of Dormitories 3

The first signs of a move away from the long dormitories and back to something more like the privacy enjoyed by the Guvnor's of the East India College came with he conversion of the Sanatorium into Alban's for girls in 1973.

This is from the Haileybury Prospectus of 1983. How much more comfortable Albans seems than Trevelyan!

Note the heroic attempt to make the 'relative individuality' of the compart comparable!