Garden House

When Dr Henley, first Principal of the East India College, retired the Company refused to 'buy in' his effects. Despite his stipend of £1,000 Henley was hard up and he sold some of his things. Specifically he sold a 'Garden House' to Professor Malthus, who erected it in the Hailey Garden. The garden is described in a letter quoted by Patricia James in her biography of Malthus, and maybe as the weather gets colder again now we can take heart from the beautiful description of Spring in the Hailey Garden:

The House is in a cluster of tall shrubs and young trees, with a little bit of smooth lawn sloping to a bright pond, in which old weeping willows are dipping their hair, and rows of young pear trees admiring their blooming faces… There are young horse-chestnuts with flowers half a yard long, fresh full-clustered white lilacs, tall Guelder roses, broad spreading pear and cherry trees, low thickets off blooming sloe, and crowds of juicy looking detached thorns, quite covered with their blooming May flowers, half open like ivory filigree, and half shut like Indian pears… and resounding with nightingales, and thrushes, and sky-larks, shrilling high up, overhead, among dazzling slow sailing clouds.

No wonder Malthus liked to be outside, and the tradition is that in the 'garden house' he worked through his great theories of population.

Generations of Haileybury swimmers will know the garden house as the "Wings Hut" at the shallow end of the old pool. There it still stands, sadly dilapidated. There is talk of trying to get it fixed up, which would be a good thing. But where then to put it? The Hailey Garden is now mainly lawn and the ponds are gone. Maybe it should go back to the Master and be placed near the Moorhen Pond where still the willows dip their hair in the still waters.

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.'