Seem Familiar?

The Haileybury half term is two weeks, so yesterday I took the boys to Portsmouth to go round the historic dockyard.

This is the gun deck of HMS Warrior.

Seem familiar?

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!

The Evolution of Dormitories 2

Once the East India College became a school the old single rooms were knocked together to produce the 'long dormitories' which were to be part of Haileybury life from the 1860s to the 1990s. At first each bed was surrounded by a cubicle - 'comparts' as they were known - with high walls.  The hot water of Old Haileybury days was done away with. Dr Bradby, Master from 1868 - 1883, insisted that the wash jugs be filled in the evening to ensure the morning was was always in cold water. It was under Wynne Wilson, Master between 1905 and 1911 that the compart walls were cut down, though in his time curtains were provided around the head of each bed to allow some privacy.

The curtains went in due course, but the old hospital style beds survived until the mid 1980s when new beds were provided with drawers underneath, and the old chests of drawers were removed. In some Houses every other compart wall was removed. The new bed meant that 'lampposting' became impossible as lifting the bed up onto the headboard was now impossible. Maybe this was something only done in Hailey (and Allenby?) as we - being civilized places - had three smaller dormitories rather than one long one. It meant that inter-dormitory raids took place.

The Evolution of Dormitories 1

Four poster beds were the order of the day at the East India College. The students lived in single rooms, which is why the windows in the Quad don't work with what became dormitories and are now increasigly again beig transformed into rooms. The registrar, The Rev'd Edward Lewton persuaded the College Council to buy new curtains for the four posters in May 1828. Eight dozen pairs were required to replace the worn out ones which had been there since the establishment of the college in 1805. In her book Population Malthus Patricia James describes life in the old college dorm.

'The students remained behind their curtains while man servants brought their bath-water, and female bed-makers, in winter, lit their fires; one, Mrs Draper, boasted that she could get twelve fires going in twenty minutes. She was a motherly and religious spinster [so her title must have been an honorific?], and listened to hear the bath water splashing to make sure her young gentlemen would not be late for chapel; the irreverent were pressed into piety, and saved from an imposition [fine] with the aid of a hot cup of coffee.'