THE CITY OF OXFORD HIGH SCHOOL MAGAZINE VoL. LVIII, iii JULY 1966 No. 186
A Tribute by FC Lay (1908-1915) and Headmaster (1944-1962): ‘The Headmaster [R. W. Bodey] has kindly invited me to add my tribute to the value of the MAGAZINE throughout its sixty-three years of life.‘
The Magazine
We are all very grateful to the Old Boys’ Club, one of whose prime activities was founding the MAGAZINE and we are particularly fortunate in being able to print messages from its first Editor and the first Treasurer in this final issue. Begun thus by the Club as a way of supporting the School, responsibility for the MAGAZINE was assumed by the Headmaster by a very easy transition in 1926 when Mr. E. H. Binney was Editor, having succeeded the Rev. H. R. Hall, another beloved master, who had been Editor since 1904. Since that time the Editorship has generally, though not always, devolved upon the Senior English Master. Thus Mr. Masters followed Mr. Binney and was in turn followed by Mr. Searson. Since 1945 Mr. F. W. Sutton has been editor and we are grateful for the task which he undertook so readily when Mr. Searson died suddenly.
Throughout these post-war years the MAGAZINE has steadily increased its pictorial content. Mr. I. H. Taylor’s expert help has meant that School groups and other photographic enrichments by way of illustrations for articles have been supplied by him in ample measure. This has meant untold time and trouble on his part. We are grateful also to him for his informative articles on matters connected with school history. Faithful to its task of chronicling school events at the time, the MAGAZINE has thus become a kind of school historian. In years to come it may be that an author will appear who will do full justice to the School’s unique and, as schools go, relatively short life.
For this reason a reminder of what is available and where it will be found will not be out-of-place. Mr. R. H. Prior, the Headmaster of the new Oxford School, has already promised to accept for his study bookshelf the complete bound volumes of the MAGAZINE now kept in the Headmaster’s Room. In addition, the set recently given to us by Mrs. F. S. Thornton will be placed in the Library there. The Bodlean Library and the British Museum have their statutory copies complete. In addition to these, there are other publications sponsored by the Club or intimately associated with the MAGAZINE which will also be found at Oxford School.
Included in this category is the School Admission Register and a copy of the C.O.S. Register of 1881 to 1925. This latter was published in 1938 thanks to the efforts of the then President, Dr. M. R. Lawrence, who writes the Foreword, and under the careful editorship of E. A. Bowen (thus continuing and completing the work of W. T. Coxhill and R. A. Abrams in 1913 and 1915) as a testimony to the gratitude they bore to the School which inspired them and especially to the long headmastership of Arthur Wilson Cave.
The Roll of Service during the first World War was another publication undertaken by and bound up with the MAGAZINE as also are the forms of the War Memorial Services at the Cathedral in 1920 and 1947 and the Seventy-fifth Anniversary Thanksgiving Service in 1956, also at the Cathedral.
Of lasting interest is the brochure entitled Proceedings at the Unveiling of the Memorial to Lawrence of Arabia’. This account-beautifully printed by the University Press which holds the stereos—of the ceremony in the School Hall on October 3rd, 1936, and the unveiling of the Eric Kennington plaque on the staircase by the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill, M.P., C.H., Hon. D.C.L., was due to a suggestion of Mr. Lionel Curtis of All Souls, and it was intended that all boys of the School on reaching the age of fifteen should receive a copy in order that the memory of the proceedings of the day and Mr. Churchill’s oration may be preserved with succeeding generations’ .
In more recent years the diminishing numbers of a further consignment ordered by the Governors have been kept for those reaching the Sixth Form. The Jubilee issue of July 1953, No. 148, is important as it contains letters from the next two Headmasters, Mr. W. C Parkinson, M.C. (1925 to 1932) and Mr. J. E. Badham (1932 to 1944), the latter of whom had joined the Staff in 1906 as an assistant master, as well as messages from the three founding members, C. W. Hurcomb (Editor), J. A. Salter (Treasurer) and E. H. Evans (Secretary).
Contribution to a future for the School
For the first time we are given publicly the news of Mr. Parkinson’s abortive attempt to move the School to the Cutteslowe site in 1931. He was surprised that the MAGAZINE had no reference to the controversy or the defeat of the plan by a casting vote. The second attempt to move, this time to Marston Ferry Road, was agreed in principle in Mr. Badham’s time but the imminence of hostilities postponed this and later circumstances finally decreed otherwise.
Simultaneously with this Jubilee number was the news of M. J. Soulsby’s unique effort Retrospect which was the first-fruit of his retirement and a labour of love after his thirty years service to the School. The Society provided a copy for every boy and for every Society member. It was for private circulation only, being an Appreciation of Fifty years of “The Old Oxford Citizens’ Society”-the Old Boys’ Club of the City of Oxford High School.’ At the Society’s Annual Dinner that year (October 3rd was the date purposely chosen) Mr. Soulsby was accorded their congratulations and their sincerest thanks for this piece of work, so much prized by all who hold a copy.
The MAGAZINE looms large in his account seeing that it is the written source which substantiates and supplements human memories, which are apt to be so treacherous. It is not a history of the School, and it is not a biographical dictionary. ‘… It is more like a family album. Those whose portraits appear must indulge us as we pry into their past-they need be in no doubt about our pride in the family’. So says M.J.S. in the Author’s Preface.
It was in May 1956 that the Mobile Printing Unit of The Times was touring the country to demonstrate to schools how a complete printing plant in miniature could produce special editions at short notice. The two lorries were located in the grounds of Radley College and schools in turn were invited to contribute an account of themselves on the opening page. As this was the 75th Anniversary year of the School’s opening, advantage was taken of this offer and everyone in the School received a copy of this special edition. Under the heading ‘City of Oxford High School’ the article was sub-headed ‘A Mid-Victorian Educational Ideal: Its Seventy-fifth Anniversary’, and copies have been duly preserved. This was the first attempt to formulate any kind of history of the School to date.
Returning to my theme, the MAGAZINE has since 1903 told the day-to-day and year-to-year story of the life of the School. Football and cricket matches, swimming, athletics, the cross-country runs which developed out of those early paper-chases at half terms, school plays, school operas, school concerts, the doings of the A.T.C. and Cadet Corps, the debates, the competitions, the exhibitions, the outings and other functions have found a place somehow, sometimes delayed until the next issue or sometimes squeezed in by the judicious use of small type.
Nor is this all. Since 1945 when Speech Days in the Town Hall were resumed, copies of the programmes, containing the scholastic results in full were bound up in the Magazines. In the very early years reports of Prize-Givings held then in the School Hall were reprinted as pamphlets by the Oxford Chronicle and these were sent out to subscribers and friends. A nearly complete set of these has been bound for the years 1887 to 1913 and this volume also joins the School archives. When Prize-Givings were resumed after the first World War and prizes were again given instead of the wartime certificates, the proceedings were again reported in the MAGAZINE.
A suggestion was made after one Prize-Giving that whereas most schools proudly displayed their Scholarship successes on an honours board, the High School had no such thing. We are pleased to report that after the lapse of another generation this was remedied and four Honours Boards were provided by various donors and the lettering was done by Mr. Basil Field. Another piece of work by Mr. Field was his superb lettering on the second War Memorial, and he, too, drew another cover for the Jubilee number to replace the original one of F. T. Skinner, already twice redrawn.
The MAGAZINE had at all times to think of cost, but having reported all the essential news, there was always limited space for a few literary articles or accounts of the doings of Old Boys in all parts of the world. Verse, serious and otherwise, here found a place and not a few of the earlier poems of John Drinkwater are met with from the second number onwards. Some day perhaps an edition of School verse could be culled from the pages of the MAGAZINE.
A feeling that emerges is, I think, the exceptional family atmosphere that has always been so characteristic of the School. It perhaps began with Mr. Pollard. It is increasingly obvious during Mr. Cave’s thirty-eight years of influence. Perhaps continuity of Staff is both a symptom and an explanation. Thus Mr. Cave was Mathematics Master for a year with Mr. Pollard before succeeding as Head- master for thirty-seven years. Mr. Badham served for twenty-six years as an assistant master before becoming Headmaster in 1932. I passed through Mr. Badham’s form and was under Mr. Cave as Headmaster from 1908 to 1915 before returning as fifth Headmaster in 1944. Mr. Bodey was appointed by Mr. Parkinson in 1927 and had Mr. Badham first as a colleague and then as Headmaster until 1944, and he has now followed me since 1962 as the School’s sixth and last Headmaster. When I leit, there were nine members of staff who had been appointed before I came.
The MAGAZINE and certainly the Old Boys’ Club benefited. Besides having plenty of resident members to furnish committees, it was served by many loyal and enthusiastic undergraduate members who gave of their best and moved on. In the matter of the secre- taryship, following C.W.H., the names of H. E. J. Mayo, C. A Bowen, F. S. Thornton, R. A. Loose, R. C. Taylor and I. L Wheal and others spring to mind, with W. T. Coxhill, the Senior Treasurer, preserving continuity through two world wars. Far-seeing and purposeful, he was content to remain in the background, but ready to shoulder any burden for the sake of the School. It was he who established the Life Membership Scheme and some- times against opposition saw that a solid fund was being accumu- lated against a rainy day or for some project connected with a new school.
Informative as the MAGAZINE is since it began to report the doings of the Club and the activities of School life since 1903, it must be remembered, as Lord Hurcomb says in his original editorial note, that the School was twenty-one years old when the MAGAZINE had come on the scene. Even then few if any hints are given of the situation behind the scenes, of controversies and decisions in high places with which the MAGAZINE could not properly concern itself but into which the historian would wish to probe. Mr. Parkinson was amazed that no mention of the Cutteslowe project was made. It is to the local press that we should direct our historian and express here and now our thanks for the very helpful and forthright columns that High School business always received at the hands of The Oxford Chronicle, The Oxford Guardian, The Oxford Times and later The Oxford Illustrated Journal.
Of these it is well-known that by a process of merging, only the name of The Oxford Times survives. I have referred to the bound volume of the Oxford Chronicle Reports on Prize-Givings. Mr. Cave had kept also a volume of parallel press-cuttings from 1887 from both Conservative and Liberal newspapers where verbatim reports of Town Council meetings had dealt with High School business and these also are valuable for our archives. The School always had a good press and both sides were most eulogistic on the subject of the School’s academic achievements. Some idea of how quickly a storm can blow up has already been given in Lord Salter’s early article. But though the Town and Gown hostility, we hope, can be said to have received its death-blow by the life and work of T. H. Green and his foundation, the party political hatchet on educational matters had by no means been safely launched, had been running for six years, had already made a name for itself and had proved it was capable of being the ladder strong enough to give realisation to the best dreams of its supporters.
Attacks on the School
Mr. Pollard speaking at the second Old Boys’ dinner seventeen years later said: ‘They had had their difficulties but the great difficulty had always been an incessant want of pence.’ He himself had always maintained that the School ought to be, and it certainly was designed by T. H. Green to be, a ladder of learning for boys of ability. He hoped it would not be converted into a Technical School; that would be a retrograde step, but he had been Headmaster for six and a half years and at the end of that time he felt he had been working for nothing. He had handed in his resignation in 1887 and on September 19th the Mayor (Alderman Hughes – the giver of the Clock – ever a strong supporter of the School and, as Mayor, the ex-officio Chairman of Governors) moved that the School grant of £100 should be increased by £150 ‘to maintain the high position of the School’. The money was required for payments to assistant staff.
In spite of able support to his own outstandingly able presentation of the case he was met by fierce opposition from men who six years earlier had accepted the School as a most valuable amenity for the Citizens of Oxford. What they wanted, they said, was a Commercial School, not a Classical School, and a Commercial School they would have. It was as if the School’s very success was to be the source of its undoing. In vain was it answered that only 25 per cent did Greek and that the remaining 75 percent had every subject to fit them to become successful business men as indeed they were doing; but the opposition won by 18 votes to 14. There were eight members absent who might have reversed the decision and it was pointed out in the course of the debate that the sides taken were political ones, although in spite of appearances, letters to the Press after- wards strenuously denied this and challenged that the following November elections should be fought on this issue. In a letter to the Press as he was leaving.
Rearguard Action by the Headmasters
Mr. Pollard reviews the progress during his headship in the attempt to set up the ‘ladder system’ in Oxford. The debt of about f2,000 when the School was opened had been finally cleared off by the generosity of Alderman Hughes and a contribution from the Jubilee Fund, and one Queen Victoria Scholarship was being founded from the same fund. There were nine Corporation three-year Scholarships for boys under twelve and three Exhibitions, one each year, for boys going to the University. What were now needed were two more permanent Intermediate Scholarships for boys of 15 besides the one Victoria Scholarship. He estimated that a capital sum of £430 for each of these would suffice. My excuse for troubling you must be that the friends of Professor Green and of the High School would wish, and Will be pleased to know that the ladder system is only f860 short of permanent completion’.
Mr. Pollard stayed for a further term at the special request of the Governors whom he exonerated from any complicity in the adverse vote. He had, out of his own pocket, contributed more than £300 to the building and initial costs. The Oxford Gazette— the organ of the Senior members of the University —in December 1887 writes Mr. Pollard, in his Parthian fight, shoots another arrow into the Mayor of Oxford the new Mayor elected in the November was the chief of the opposition] and his ill-advised supporters. Last week two successes at Balliol were scored; now he takes an Open Scholarship at Trinity, and yet leaves the field, as Thucydides says, not so much of his fear as of his fame’ . Of the two Balliol Scholarships, one was for Classics and the other for Mathematics. Altogether six open awards were won that year. It is perhaps not always appreciated by this generation when public education is provided free as one’s birthright that the public purse was such a difficult thing to loosen even for a cause which it had helped to launch and with which it was associated by name and which it was pledged to support.
Survival of the School
It was all the greater tribute to Arthur Wilson Cave, Headmaster trom January 1888 to 1925 that not only did he leave a name behind him for the high academic standard of the School and the material he sent on to the University by means of Scholarships and Exhibitions but that he managed to make ends meet and pay the Staff which he gathered round him. Brietly when costs go up nowadays, the man in the street expects them to be passed on to the public; but when the avowed intention was to provide a liberal education for the sons of Oxford Citizens at a price they could afford-the fees being fixed by the Governors then the only way was for the friends of the School to provide more bursaries and the Corporation to provide more places free or subsidised. Mr. Cave survived the storm and the School and the City were fortunate that, like many schools in Victorian times, they had a great and revered Headmaster. This fact was recognised by honouring him in 1925 with the Freedom of the City. But he confessed both publicly and privately that his whole Headmastership had been an unending fight against lack of financial support.
Events have moved rapidly since 1944 in the educational world. Notably primary education in the new localities and in due course secondary and technical education received priority, and even they were subject to national and international situations. With the country hampered by recessions and rearmament, Grammar Schools had to wait, and the rebuilding at Marston Ferry fell sadly behind schedule. Yet something had to be done. A third General Inspection in 1957 had reminded the Governors that since the one in 1927 and that in 1934 they had done nothing in the way of a move. It was increasingly obvious to Staff and Governors that they had not the room to expand and only expansion could provide the variety in curricula that a reawakening of the national needs demanded.
It is recent history that a bilateral scheme, first mooted, was superseded by a suggestion to fuse two Grammar Schools to make a new foundation which would be economically able to hold its own in days of much larger schools. The friends of the School, who were jealous of its past, and many members of the Old Oxford Citizens, apprehensive at first, saw the ultimate benefits and the wisdom of this and loyally supported the Head- masters and staffs in making the move proceed smoothly. In fact the two Old Boys’ Associations amalgamated two years before the two Schools could possibly do so and thus became, in rather a paradoxical way, the Old Boys’ Association of a School which so far had never existed!
In the April issue of 1962 (No. 174) in a short life of the philosopher T. H. Green, I sought to tell of him as the public-spirited and far-sighted innovator of the ladder’ system who was determined to put his theories into practice. If evidence were needed to demonstrate his success, two facts are readily quoted. After the second world war we had no less than sixty-five old boys resident at universities. More striking still is a fact of which we are all immensely proud. It was an Old Boy, a member of an honoured Oxford family, who was sent by his University to Westminster as their Senior Burgess and who held his seat there until university seats were abolished. We are honoured to have his permission to reprint his two Foundation articles.
With the passing of the 1944 Education Act the way is open to all. As the upsurge for Secondary Education gathered momentum, the School can now be seen to have been a prototype for the new kind of Grammar School, so many of which were built to meet the requirements of the Balfour Act of 1902. That we ourselves have been privileged to have been so much a part of the experiment is a matter for self-congratulation and we can the more loyally follow the progress of Oxford School with an enhanced sense of gratitude and also of belonging. Think- ing too of the building where the experiment took place, we hope it will survive to serve other generations purposefully and that its owners, the Citizens of Oxford, will see that it is preserved as a landmark in the City’s long history as well as the delightful architectural heritage that all avow it to be.
F. C. LAY – O. H. S. 1908-1915, Headmaster 1944-1962.