Changing Fashions

The HM of Lawrence has sorted out some new House strip for Rugby and Soccer. The difference of the new shirts is pretty striking.

Here are the old ones

And this is the new model.

This is not the first time that the strip has changed. Trawling for a picture from the past I found the online Museum of Rugby with a picture of Jim Unwin (L 1926) in a Lawrence team in 1930. It may be copyright so I have not pasted it into the blog, but you can see it here. The rest of his story with a section on his time at Haileybury is here.

Meanwhile at the end of half term the girls house hockey tournament was going on and there were some shirts which gave me a double take. The blue and magenta quarters of the old Hailey rugby shirt have become blue and pink.

Not as pink as the athletics tops mind. Here is a picture plundered from Haileybury's own website of a competitor in the House athletics in 2010. Quid Forteous Leone!

Indian Summer

At Haileybury today I had my summer hat out in the sunshine on XX Acre to watch the Junior Colts team in which No 1 son plays win against Kings Canterbury. It was more cricket weather than rugby.

Rare picture of the Archdeacon not in clericals!

The school is in Summer uniform and there is talk of having to cancel next week's games if there is no rain. That in turn led to a conversation on the touch line about when conditions ever cause the rugby to have to be cancelled. Frost - which is of course the same problem as heat: the ground gets too hard; but anything else? No1 Son tells me that there was a match last season which had to be stopped when the fog became so thick that they could not see from one end to the other, and the ball (and the chap carrying it) would come out of the murk unexpectedly. Otherwise, rain, snow, wind they play through it all. After all, as we all know, when you stand on XX Acre there is nothing between us and the Ural mountains.

Motto?

I have had an email from Peter Fowkes (H 1957), Father of Chris (H 1987) and Pen (H & Alb 1988) and uncle of George (H 1982) asking whether Thomason has a House Motto.

He writes

I looked up the blog trying to find Thomason’s motto; Helen Tranter [Director of Development] provided me with Edmonstone’s (Nil nisi bonum) – odd as it usually applied to the dead (de mortuis) - but no one can provide Thomason – not even Bob Eastwood (Th 1957) who is coming to a reunion (which is why I want the motto). Can you help?

 

In similar vein, does Hailey have a new and more ladylike motto? Quid fortius leone (what is braver than a lion?) was fine when we were a bunch of thugs;  we won the boxing cup almost every year between about 1956 and 1962, partly by entering 9/10^th of the House, and Cock House rugger I think four times between 1954 and 1961, though we drew with Allenby after extra time in 1961.

 

I do have one other claim – the XXX in 1961 not only won all its matches, but did not have its line crossed. I wonder if any other side can match that! Again we were more a bunch of thugs than skilled players – our impressively large outsides came right up at every lineout – if we won the ball I, as scrum half, kicked it further up the line or gave it to the fly-half to do the same. The rules did not prevent this gaining ground in those days. If the other side won the ball our outsides tackled them very hard, so they knocked on and we had the scrum – which we almost certainly won as our pack weighed a ton!

 

I wasn’t the second best fly half – the younger Sibcy (E 1958) was – but Basil Edwards (bless him) (Staff 1955 - 1972) wanted a thug who could kick with both feet.  Sibcy was a very elegant boxer; I don’t know how good his chin was as he was almost impossible to hit – I never succeeded! As to kicking with both feet, “Killer” Cook insisted we practice with the “wrong” foot, which improved the “right” foot as well. As a former All Black we respected his opinion; his walking stick on the field was much respected too!

 

Imogen Thomas says in Haileybury 1806 - 1987 that the badges were adopted in 1868 to identify teams on the football field. She says that the origin of all the badges is not known, and Thomason is among those. It appears without a motto. Neither Lawrence nor Highfield have a motto.

Lift Up Your Hearts

Playing Rugby on Saturday afternoons and public school sport generally is an assertion of a theological principle. For the Greeks - especially after Plato - the body is merely the prison of the soul. Jews and Christians understand body and soul to be united in forming the whole person. The doctrine of the Incarnation, that God became Man, that the Word became Flesh, is the most audacious assertion of this. Resurrection therefore involves the body. Not in a resuscitation such as the ancient Egyptians hoped for by preserving the remains, but a glorification, in which the vigour of youth, the wisdom of age, the innocence of childhood, the strength of adulthood, the power of health and the vulnerability of the infant and the infirm are all brought together at last so that, no longer spread out in time, I can be whole and complete.

Thomas Arnold, the great reforming Headmaster of Rugby, understood this and set out to educate and train not merely the minds, but also the bodies of the children in his care. So organized school sport was born. Haileybury's first Master, AG Butler, had worked with Arnold and was a friend of his, and Haileybury always asserted this outworking of the doctrine of the Incarnation - that schools should play sport.

In a paper read to the Anglo - Catholic Congress of 1927, Neville Coghill (Tr 1913), later to put Chaucer into fine modern English, quoted William Blake in an arresting line:

"The Body is that part of the soul which is perceived through the five senses."