I am not a number!

School Number 208

What was yours? Mine was 430, but I did not use it much. The main thing was to put on chits so that the invoice went to the right school bill. There were still coat hooks on the corridor outside the upstairs form rooms with school numbers on them, but nobody used them. Older books had them written in the fly leaf Does anyone know the basis on which they were allocated? At Marlborough the entrants to the school are numbered consecutively and the number appears in the Register and identifies you for life in respect of school things. As far as I know Haileybury school numbers never had any such individuality and were presumably reused in other generations.  When my own boys entered Haileybury I thought that school numbers would be a relic of a dead past. But no! They have been given a number which is more important to the modern Haileyburian than our numbers ever were to us. They are all four figures which together with their initials make up their school e-mail address.

Pegs outside chapel. No numbers here

Upstairs Corridor in the Form Room Block - where the pegs with school numbers used to be

Railways

In the current edition of The Haileyburian there is an article about the Schools Class locomotive Haileybury  No 924. You can read it on the school website here.

If you are a railway modeler Hornby now have a Schools Class locomotive, and more than that, if you can't find one which is named for Haileybury there are places you can buy the name plates of your choice for it. 

Sons of the Morning

I had a note from Simon Watson (Staff 1977 - 1986) telling me that he has published the latest in his sequence Sons of the Morning. The novels follow Johnny Clarke through the adventure of schooling. Volume 1, A Storm of Cherries (published 2006) is set in prep school, Volume 2, Dancing Days, (published 2007) is set in public school; Volume 3, The Last Enchantments (published 2008) is set in Oxford, and Volume 4, A Touch of the Sun (published 2008) is set in India where Johnny’s teaching career begins. Newly published Bring Me My Bow is the fifth book in the sequence. Simon noted that "Haileybury's the next volume." His website, from which the books can be bought, notes that the stories are not autobiographical but draw on his experiences. Simon taught English at Haileybury and was the House Master of Russell Dore when it was a dedicated day boys' House. He left Haileybury to be Head Master of Hurstpierpoint. He also published a children's book, The Partisan in 1975.

Lift up Your Hearts

Lots of things happen at Haileybury when the school is on holiday. This is grace before breakfast at European Youth Summer Music which is the Federation of Festivals' summer course.

Heretic!

Despite all the well publicised ructions in Anglicanism it is rare for there to be a formal charge of heresy. One of the few to have been brought was against Bishop John Jameson Willis (M 1887.1) about whom I blogged last week. Frank Weston, the saintly and determined bishop of Zanzibar, was outraged when Willis, together with the Bishop of Mombassa (William Peel) convened a conference of Christian missionaries at Kikuyu in Kenya. 

The Bible in Kikuyu

The meeting, to which Weston was not invited, sought to develop a scheme which would allow African converts to ignore denominational differences if they moved between districts. It was a vision of a pan Protestant church, but it was based on fudging doctrine and lowering the standard of ecclesial discipline to a bare minimum. At the end of the meeting Holy Communion was celebrated by the Anglican Bishops Willis and Peel and all the delegates except those from the Society of Friends were communicated. This was long before any idea of intercommunion was accepted, and Bishop Weston protested to the Archbishop of Canterbury in the strongest terms. He sent an Open Letter to the Bishop of St. Alban’s and when he came home in February 1914 there was a national ferment in ecclesiastical circles. Archbishop Randall Davidson was forced to intervene and the scheme was dropped.

Kikuyu tribes women in traditional dress

The dispute is largely forgotten now. The following year there was another conference at Kikuyu at which Weston was present, and the movement fizzled out as it became apparent that such a watered down form of Christianity was not anyway attractive in the mission field. 


Bishop Weston was a member of the Society of the Holy Cross, a priests' society of which I am also a member. I researched this incident for a History of the Society a few years ago, but never realised that Willis was a Haileyburian. 

Most Successful PM

Over the last couple of days there has been a media flurry about a survey of academic historians rating the success of Prime Ministers since 1945. Clement Attllee (L 1896.2) was rated as 'most successful.' It seems the criterion was an assessment of how much of a mark the various PMs left on British society and politics, and how much of their programme they managed to impliment. The establishment of the welfare state is viewed as defining the modern political landscape. This is the second time the survey has been undertaken by Professor Kenneth Theakston of the University of Leeds and Mark Gill of Woodnewton Associates, and on the  previous occasion as well Attlee came out top.

The survey was done for the Financial Times, but as they have a paywall you may prefer to follow the story on free sites here, here and here

If anyone has had time to read Niklaus Thomas-Symonds' new biography of Attlee, Attlee - A Life in Politics do post a comment. Philip Zeigler reviews it in the Spectator here and says that it is a useful corrective to what he views as the over sympathetic work of Kenneth Harris but that Thomas-Symonds fails to bring in any new material beyond some things about his time at Haileybury. Zeigler remarks that this is covered in less than a page. There may be some room for more there in that Attlee was such a supporter of the school and of Haileyburians. I seem to remember being told that Attlee remarked once that "all other things being equal I would rather have a Haileyburian with me than another man." One assumes that he actually meant "all other things being equal" at face value!

Over the next couple of days I shall try and dig out a link to a recording of Attlee giving an interview to Sir Robin Day. It shows how much things have changed as the by then former PM gives basically monosyllabic answers. 

Model United Nations

Haileybury has pioneered MUN. It is impressive stuff.


HAILEYBURY - MODEL UNITED NATIONS