Diligentiae Praemium

It is Speech Day tomorrow. Let's hope it does not rain.

The Prizes are of course books. What would you choose? Something which reflects the interest of the moment and the subject for which the prize was awarded, but a volume that can be carried through life. A book to treasure, but one also to use and enjoy. It should be hard back so that it can be embossed.

Not an easy call. The most felicitous of my choices was the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations which I still use from time time, even in these days of Google.

We were given book tokens to take to the bookshop in Hertford. Today Hertford is out of bounds, another sign that with the increase of efficiency of transport the actual distances we are prepared to travel day to day and to allow our children to travel are shrinking. The system is that the value of the prize is docked from the school bill and the parent works with the child to buy the book.

Prizes from Amazon are the acme of individual choice. I have some evidence that once there was no choice. Some time ago in a second hand book shop I picked up a volume called 'Britain Long Ago,' a series of of Anglo Saxon and Norman legends, historical stories and poems edited by EM Wilmon-Buxton. It is stamped with the school crest, and has a label inside signed by Wynne Wilson; but there is no name of the prize winner and I can only surmise that it was never awarded.

The mystery deepens in that the label is dated 1900 (mdcccc), but the book was published in 1908.

Cloaca

The eldest son having to go to the orthodontist this morning and the Council meeting on Friday together with an ordinary pick up on Saturday means that I feel as though I have been living on the A10 over the last few days. I was pleased at the Haileybury end of one of the trips that the Bradby was open so that I could answer the call of nature.

Not the least shock of going round the new Hailey after the refurbishment to make the House ready for girls was to discover that my former study has been turned into a toilet. I always thought that the infamous White City (demolished in 1961) was just a well intentioned Edwardian mistake. It was built during the rule of Wynne Wilson to remove the need for earth closets in the dormitories. It seems however that even Old Haileybury brought communality to what we moderns think of as a private activity. There were twelve water closets in Wilkin's design, as accepted. The architect had provided for thirty - in three rows of ten. This was positively Roman. I learnt about Roman toilets from a splendid book I was persuaded to buy by my scatological sons (well, it did not take much persuasion in fact) on a trip to Verulamium this year. Latrinae et Foricae, Toilets in the Roman World by Barry Hobson. (See here.)

Latrine on Hadrian's Wall: a Roman White City?

Lift Up Your Hearts

This week's thought for Saturday evening to take into Sunday is a quotation from the speech given by the Master, Wynne-Wilson on Speech Day 1908 in the newly built Big School. He speaks of men and boys, but the ideal he proposed to a male audience is no less true for today's coeducational school.

In School we try to train the character by making the boys fit to become men of affairs and to take positions of authority, whether they are to be soldiers, lawyers, doctors, or engineers, or the like. Out of School we try to train the boys' characters by making them learn to conform to rules and obey authority, and in Chapel we try to train their characters by holding out to them that without which life is ineffective, sterile, and uninspired: the great illimitable ideal." 

The great illimitable ideal

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.