Lift Up your Hearts

Here is the school hymn with a sixth verse not usually sung.

“Lift up your hearts!” We lift them, Lord, to Thee;
Here at Thy feet none other may we see;
“Lift up your hearts!” E’en so, with one accord,
We lift them up, we lift them to the Lord.

Above the level of the former years,
The mire of sin, the weight of guilty fears,
The mist of doubt, the blight of love’s decay,
O Lord of Light, lift all our hearts today!

Above the swamps of subterfuge and shame,
The deeds, the thoughts, that honor may not name,
The halting tongue that dares not tell the whole,
O Lord of Truth, lift every Christian soul!

Above the storms that vex this lower state,
Pride, jealousy, and envy, rage, and hate,
And cold mistrust that holds e’en friends apart,
O Lord of Love, lift every brother’s heart!

Lift every gift that Thou Thyself hast given;
Low lies the best till lifted up to heaven;
Low lie the bounding heart, the teeming brain,
Till, sent from God, they mount to God again.

Then, as the trumpet call, in after years,
“Lift up your hearts!” rings pealing in our ears,
Still shall those hearts respond, with full accord
“We lift them up, we lift them to the Lord!”

Baggy Green

As England close in on victory in the final test and not only retain the Ashes but win a series in Australia the headline in one paper was "Saggy Green," a reference to the famous Baggy Green caps worn by the Australian national team.

A Baggy Green cap was on display or a in the Pavilion for a few years. It was not any old cap, but one awarded to Sir Donald Bradman, that greatest of Australian cricketers in his last season, playing in England in 1948.

Bradman used to give his caps away and this one was given to Owen Truscott, an Australian who had helped him with his banking arrangements. The cap came to Truscott's son, Kevin (K 1944) who loaned it to Haileybury. In the 1990s another Bradman cap was sold for a great deal of money and it was felt that the school could no longer provide a safe home if the cap were to be displayed. Arrangements were made for it to be sent to the Bradman collection in the South Australia State Library. They were delighted, especially as it had been thought that there had only been one cap issued for that series and the existence of the second Baggy Green was unsuspected. The full story is narrated here.

Pursuit of Knowledge

This medal was awarded as the Sanskrit prize at Old Haileybury. The inscription reads, in Sanskrit, "The pursuit of knowledge is better than the pursuit of gold."

You need gold to win the medal today though. The opening bid for it is at least US$5,700. You can bid for it here.

The description says:

East India College Haileybury, England. Gold Sanskrit Prize Medal. Unsigned by Conrad Heinrich Kuchler, ND (Circa 1806-1810, Possibly made after his death in July 1810). Struck at the Soho Mint.
37 mm; Puddester-948.1.2. Goddess 'India' walking right, flower right, alter left; Rev: In Sanskirt: Pursuit of Knowledge is better than the pursuit of gold. EXTREMELY RARE. Mounted in a broach as a spinner with original jewelry box.


Kuchler made a number of commemorative medals including for the execution of Marie Antionette. 

Narbs

Did you have lots to eat over the holiday? I learnt a new Haileybury word for good food: Narbs. My spy in the Removes was unaware that it was not current thirty years ago. 

"Good narbs" is a good nosh. "Got any narbs?' asks whether you have any tuck (a word which is still current). 

Do you know when narbs was coined?

Network Aware Resource Broker

As to the etymology, there are various possibilities. 

NARB is an acronym for Night/Day Angle Rate Bombing System or for "Network aware resource broker." I am not sure what that mans but there is an explanation here, which I have not tried to fathom. Staying in the world of IT, Narbs is also a term meaning 'narrative bits,' units of information used to build a presence on a social network site. See here. There is someone with a twitter account who is @narbs.

Narb is also an online art catalogue for which you can get an app for your iphone. 

Care might be needed as narb seems to be a 'street word.' It has two definitions here - warning, one of them is a bit rude, and the singular (a narb) has nothing to do with food and cannot be defined on a family blog. 

None of this seems to have anything to do with food, and is all narb and not narbs. Help us out anyone?

Lift Up Your Hearts

Tomorrow is the feast of the Epiphany - maybe. The 6th January is when the arrival of the Wise Men is commemorated, but it is often now kept on the nearest Sunday. This is the case with almost all major festivals - except Christmas of course as those of us who spent most of last weekend in church one  way and another can  testify!

Schools make even greater transfers of dates. Christmas at Haileybury was done ans dusted before the fourth Sunday of Advent because of the term dates. The short Holidays are set when they are to allow the celebration of the great Festivals of Christmas and Easter, meaning that for active church families they can be almost busier than term time. In 2011 term starts again on Easter Monday with no relief for those who will have just completed the rigours of Passiontide and Holy Week.

Time in fact is of course not as rigid as we like to think. The New Year is just a convenience of measurement - nothing real about it. our measurements are relative to each other, but not fixed by anything objective. Even BC and AD are probably wrong. But they do attempt to point us to something eternal, by giving us as the point of reference the moment at which the timeless One bound Himself into time for us. There is a logic in the financial year renewing around the quarter day on March 25th, which marks not the birth, but the beginning of the Incarnation at the Annunciation (celebrated exactly nine months before Christmas).

I guess few if any of us will have celebrated the turn of the calendar year as pupils or adults at Haileybury: but new years in the first days of September and new terms in January and April remind us that our time is less 'real' than the eternity to which the succession of our dates point.

Happy Epiphany!

New Year's Eve

The year turns once more. There is a lot planned for 2011. The Society website has a calendar here. There are to be events in Bath, Exeter, Cambridge, Oxford, Haileybury, London, and at the National Memorial Arboretum in the first few months of the year.

The extraordinary diary of Geoffrey Burnaby (BF 1908) arose as the result of a bet between two brothers, when John (BF 1905) bet his brother 6d that he could not keep a diary every day for a year. Geoffrey produced a note and often a drawing for the whole of 1912. It was published in facsimile in 1994. A bit like an early 20th century blog. Though I would not have won my 6d as I do not manage a post every day!

Here is the entry for new year's eve 1912.

Happy New Year to one and all.

Streets Called Haileybury

This is not exactly a street called Haileybury, so much as a road through Haileybury - Ontario. Highway 11 is a major route through Ontario, and runs through the town founded in 1889 by Charles Cobbold Farr, (Tr 1864) which is now part or a municipality called Temiskaming.

Highway 11 in Downtown Haileybury

Here is a video of the journey along the road made by a biker.


Highway 11B through Latchford, Cobalt, Haileybury and New Liskeard from MCC CMC on Vimeo.