Travelling Tomorrow

I have not been to Frankfurt before, but tomorrow we are off to the OH German Dinner there, the last engagement before the AGM and the end of my year as President. It seems extraordinary that the time should have flown past already. We are due back late on Sunday and I may or may not manage to report on the events of the weekend before then.

Remember Remember the 12th of November

The notices for the AGM have been dispatched and members will have had their Haileybury Society News for a little while. It is beautifully produced, and thanks to those who do a lot of work to get to all together and sent off. I have just found my booking form under a pile of things on my desk. I expect they know I am coming, but don't forget to send yours.

Seem Familiar?

The Haileybury half term is two weeks, so yesterday I took the boys to Portsmouth to go round the historic dockyard.

This is the gun deck of HMS Warrior.

Seem familiar?

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!

Lift Up Your Hearts

The news this week has been full of the sorry business at S Paul's Cathedral. That our economic system brings great benefit is true, as is the fact of terrible inequalities. Yesterday evening the Bishop collated and  I inducted the new vicar of S Paul's church in north Tottenham, serving the Northumberland Park ward where youth unemployment is higher than nearly anywhere else in the country. It is less than sixteen miles from Haileybury.

Writing in 1908 Lionel Milford (L 1867; Staff 1879 - 1919) quoted a speech made by Thomas Hughes in Big School in 1880. Hughes was the author of Tom Brown's Schooldays, and was a friend of Dr Bradby's. Hughes sent his own sons to Haileybury. After making mention of the upheavals in Europe in 1848, Hughes went on:

England has come grandly through that shaking of the nations. But, by all the signs of the time, another great crisis is upon us in these days. How will our country come through it? For myself, I am more and more convinced that that question must be answered in these great Schools. If they are sending out a constant stream of young men, not only of high intelligence because that goes without saying but simple in habits, strong in principle, who have learned that lesson, so hard to learn in this luxurious and self-indulgent time, to say the words 'No' and 'I can't afford,' then I have little fear of our country losing her great place among the nations. If, on the other hand, they are sending out a stream of young men of many wants, hungry for enjoyment of all kinds, greedy of change, without simplicity, without true manliness, then indeed, for my part, I have little hope that the sceptre will not pass as so many say it is already passing from English hands. On which side is Haileybury going to stand ? I hope and believe it will be on that which she has held so staunchly hitherto, during her short life of eighteen years. And how is it to be done ? How is this ground, so well won in the past, to be held well in the future ? Only in one way, only by the old method.  Read your grand motto, which faces you there at the end of this room ' Sursum Corda.' Boys ! Up with your hearts ! Act up to that, be true to that. Lift up your hearts for the strength and help which never fails them who will lift them up honestly and humbly, and you will answer that question in a way which will do honour to your School, and make your country glad and grateful that it has risen up in our midst.

Sunset

This picture seemed to come out well. 

It Is Not Just The Houses

Yesterday I attended a conference for those who work in community ministry projects in the inner city parts of London. Titled 'A Passion for the City,' the conference took place at the church of Basil Jellicoe (BFr 1912), S Mary's Somers Town. The work and example of Fr Jellicoe was very often adduced by all the participants as we considered how we work in the inner city today.

Jellicoe insisted the new flats in Somers Town should have community spaces where neighbours could meet and talk, and public art. These coloumns are for clothes lines. These principls inform puplic housing design to this day. 

There are many themes. Internally, the focus on the inner city and its needs which was so much part of the life of the church in the 1980s in the wake of the Faith in the City report, has somewhat waned. The Bishop of Stepney reflected on the reasons for this and what we should be doing about it.

Fr Caster and the tour of the S Pancras Housing Association blocks materminded by Jellicoe

One of the fruits of that report was the Church Urban Fund, which is 25 this year, moving to renew its grant making capability and continuing to work to provide start up funding for innumerable community projects run from and by our churches. Tim Bissett, Cheif Executive of CUF was there.

The Diocese of London, whose churches are growing in attendance and in number has over 700 community projects running in our 400 parishes. Jellicoe recognised the pressing urgent need to do something about the physical condition of his parishioners who lived in some of the worst slums of the day. But he would say 'it is not just the houses.' The physical needs were only a part of the needs of the whole person and Jellicoe was at least if not more concerned with souls. The Bishop of London preached at the Mass in the middle of the day, celebrated where Fr Jellicoe himself  brought the physical and spiritual needs of his people together in the simple meal in which body and soul are fed.

The Magdalene Club at S Mary's, home of a drop-in lunch club replaing a provision which has been cut by the local authority. Fr Jellicoe's portrait looks on

Over lunch there were walking tours in which Fr John Caster, Fr Jellicoe's successor as priest in charge of S Mary's showed us the results of the work of slum clearance by his predecessor.

Today government is taking the church seriously as a partner, but the 'Big Society' is, no more than any other political system, entirely without challenge for the church or subject to questions from us. Jellicoe looked to the building of the New Jerusalem, and that is not, ultimately, a Kingdom of this world, though it requires us to work to make this world a better reflection of the Kingdom of God. A panel in the afternoon helped us to reflect on the Government's agenda and our response to it. Chaired by Fran Beckett OBE, it featured Paul Goodman of Conservative Home, Francis Davis fellow of Blackfriars in Oxford, The Rev'd Dr James Walters , chaplain of the LSE, and the Bishop of Stepney.