Book: Uppingham by the Sea

J >> John Henry Skrine >> Uppingham by the Sea



UPPINGHAM BY THE SEA.


A Narrative of the Year at Borth.

BY
J. H. S.

[Greek text].

London:
MACMILLAN AND CO.

1878.
[_All Rights reserved_.]

CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS,
CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS.

EDUARDO THRING,

_SCHOLAE UPPINGHAMIENSIS CONDITORI ALTERI_,
_OB CIVES SERVATOS_:

ET

MAGISTRIS ADJUTORIBUS,
QUI,
SALUTE COMMUNI IN ULTIMUM ADDUCTA DISCRIMEN,
DE RE PUBLICA
NON DESPERAVERUNT.




PREFACE.


In the spring of 1876 and of 1877, letters under the heading "Uppingham
by the Sea" were published in _The Times_ newspaper, and were read with
interest by friends of the school. We have thought the following
narrative would be best introduced to those readers under a name already
pleasantly familiar to them, and have borrowed, with the writer's
permission, the title of his sketches for our own more detailed account
of the same events.

The readers whom we have in view will demand no apology for the attempt
to supply a circumstantial record of so memorable an episode in the
school's history. It deserves indeed an abler historian; but one
qualification at any rate may be claimed by the present writer: an eye-
witness from first to last, but a minor actor only in the scenes he
chronicles, he enjoyed good opportunities of watching the play, and risks
no personal modesty in relating what he saw.

The best purpose of the narrative will have been served if any Uppingham
boy, as he reads these pages, finds in them a new reason for loyalty to
the society whose name he bears.

JUNE 27TH, 1878,
FOUNDER'S DAY.




CHAPTER I.--EXILES, OLD AND NEW.


"_O what have we ta'en_?" _said the fisher-prince_,
"_What have we ta'en this morning's tide_?
_Get thee down to the wave_, _my carl_,
_And row me the net to the meadow's-side_."

_In he waded, the fisher-carl_,
_And_ "_Here_," _quoth he_, "_is a wondrous thing_!
_A cradle_, _prince_, _and a fair man-child_,
_Goodly to see as the son of a king_!"

_The fisher-prince he caught the word_,
_And_ "_Hail_," _he cried_, "_to the king to be_!
_Stranger he comes from the storm and the night_;
_But his fame shall wax, and his name be bright_,
_While the hills look down on the Cymry sea_."

FINDING OF TALIESIN.

Elphin, son of Gwyddno, the prince who ruled the coasts between the Dovey
and the Ystwith, came down on a May-day morning to his father's fishing-
weir. All that was taken that morning was to be Elphin's, had Gwyddno
said. Not a fish was taken that day; and Elphin, who was ever a luckless
youth, would have gone home empty-handed, but that one of his men found,
entangled in the poles of the weir, a coracle, and a fair child in it.
This was none other than he who was to be the father of Cymry minstrelsy,
and whom then and there his rescuers named Taliesin, which means Radiant
Brow. His mother, Ceridwen, seeking to be rid of her infant, but loath
to have the child's blood on her head, had launched him in this sea proof
cradle, to take the chance of wind and wave. The spot where he came to
land bears at this day the name of Taliesin. On the hill-top above it
men show the grave where the bard reposes and "glories in his namesake
shore."

* * * * *

There is something magnetic in a famous site: it attracts again a like
history to the old stage. Thirteen centuries and a half after the
finding of Taliesin, the same shore became once again an asylum for other
outcasts, whose fortunes we propose to chronicle.

But since the day when they drifted to land the cradle of the bard, the
waves have ebbed away from Gwyddno's weir, and left a broad stretch of
marsh and meadow between it and the present coast, where stands the
fishing village of Borth. The village fringes the sea-line with half a
mile of straggling cottages; but the eye is caught at once by a massive
building of white stone, standing at the head of the long street, and
forming a landmark in the plain. This building is the Cambrian Hotel,
reared on a scale that would suggest the neighbourhood of a populous
health-resort. But the melancholy silence which haunts its doors is
rarely broken, between season and season, by the presence of guests,
unless it be some chance sportsman in quest of marsh-fowl, or a
land-agent in quest of rents.

When, therefore, on the 15th of March, 1876, a party of four visitors--the
Rev. Edward Thring, Headmaster of Uppingham School, one of the Trustees
of the school, and two of the masters--were seen mounting the steps of
the porch, it was a sight to make the villagers wonder by what chance so
many guests came to knock at the door in that dead season. Had the wind
blown them hither? It blew a hurricane that day on the bleak coasts of
Cardigan Bay; but it was a shrewder storm yet which had swept this
windfall to the doors of Borth.

The story must be briefly told. On November 2nd, 1875, Uppingham School
was dispersed on account of a fever which had attacked both town and
school, not without fatal casualties. On January 28th, 1876, the school
met again. In the interval the school-houses had been put in complete
sanitary order, and though the efforts made to amend the general drainage
of the town had been only on a small and tentative scale, it was thought
that the school, if secure on its own premises, might safely be recalled,
in spite of remaining deficiencies outside those limits. But, _tua res
agitur_--the term began with three weeks of watchful quiet, and then the
blow fell again. A boy sickened of the same fever; then, after an
interval of suspense, two or three fresh cases made it clear that this
was no accident. An inspection of the town drainage, ordered by the
authorities, revealed certain permanent sources of danger. It was clear
that the interests of school and town, in matters of hygiene as in
others, were not separable; perhaps the best fruit of the sequel has been
the mutual conviction that those interests are one.

Meanwhile the new illustration of this connection of interests had a
formidable significance for the Uppingham masters. Men looked at one
another as those do who do not like to give a name to their fears. For
what could be done? The school could not be dismissed again. How many
would return to a site twice declared untenable? But neither could it be
kept on the spot: for there came in unmistakable evidence that, in that
case, the school would dissolve itself, and that, perhaps, irrevocably,
through the withdrawal of its scholars by their parents from the dreaded
neighbourhood. Already the trickling had begun; something must be done
before the banks broke, and the results and hopes of more than twenty
long working years were poured out to waste.

When the crisis was perceived, a project which had been already the
unspoken thought in responsible quarters, but which would have sounded
like a counsel of despair had the situation been less acute, was suddenly
started in common talk and warmly entertained. Why should we not
anticipate calamity by flight? Before the school melted away, and left
us teaching empty benches, why should we not flit, master and scholar
together, and preserve the school abroad for a securer future afterwards
at home?

In a space of time to be measured rather by hours than days, this project
passed through the stages of conception, discussion, and resolve, to the
first step in its execution. On Tuesday, March 7th, a notice was issued
to parents and guardians that the school would break up that day week for
a premature Easter holiday, and at the end of the usual three weeks
reassemble in some other locality, of which nothing could as yet be
specified except that it was to be healthier than that we were leaving.

The proposed experiment--to transport a large public school from its
native seat and all its appliances and plant to a strange site of which
not even the name was yet known, except as one of several possible spots,
and to do this at a few days' notice--was no doubt a novel one. But the
resolve, if rapidly formed and daring, was none the less deliberate and
sane. Its authors must not be charged either with panic or a passion for
adventure. All the data of a judgment were in view, and delay could add
no new fact, except one which would make any decision nugatory because
too late. It was wisdom in those with whom lay the cast of the die, to
take their determination while a school remained for which they could
determine anything.

It was a sharp remedy, however. For on the morrow of this resolve the
owners of so many good houses, fields, and gardens, all the outward and
visible of Uppingham School, became, for a term without assignable limit,
landless and homeless men, and the Headmaster almost as much disburdened
of his titular realm as if he were a bishop _in partibus_ or the chief of
a nomad caravan. It was a sharp remedy; but those who submitted to it
breathed the freer at having broken prison, and felt something, not
indeed of the recklessness which inspires adventure, but of the elation
which sustains it:

Why now, blow wind, swell billow, and swim bark;
The storm is up, and all is on the hazard!

There was cited at this time a somewhat similar event in the history of
Rugby School. Dr. Arnold, in a like emergency, had removed the school,
or all who chose to go, in numerous detachments under the care severally
of himself and others of his masters to various distant spots, among
others his own house in the Lake country, where they spent some two
months, and returned to Rugby when the danger was over. It was felt,
however, that this incident furnished no real precedent for the present
venture. What we were proposing was not to arrange a number of
independent reading-parties in scattered country retreats. Such a plan
would hardly have been practicable with a system in which, as in our
case, the division of the school for teaching purposes has no reference
to the division into boarding-houses. It was proposed to pluck up the
school by the roots and transplant it bodily to strange soil; to take
with us the entire body of masters, with, probably, their families, and
every boy who was ready to follow; to provide teaching for the latter,
not only without loss in the amount, but without interruption of the
existing system in any branch; and to guarantee the supply of everything
necessary for the corporate life of three hundred boys, who had to be
housed, fed, taught, disciplined, and (not the easiest of tasks) amused,
on a single spot, and one as bare of all the wonted appliances of public
school life as that yet uncertain place was like to prove, of which the
recommendation for our residence would be that no one else cared to
reside there.




CHAPTER II.--A CHARTER OF SETTLEMENT.


_Habet populus Romanus ad quos gubernacula rei publicae deferat_: _qui
ubicunque terrarum sunt_, _ibi omne est rei publicae praesidium_, _vel
potius ipsa res publica_.

CICERO.

HAMLET. _Is not parchment made of sheep-skins_?

HORATIO. _Ay_, _my lord, and of calf-skins too_.

HAMLET. _They are sheep and calves which seek out assurance in that_.

SHAKESPEARE.

The Trustees of the School met at Uppingham on March 11th. This was the
earliest opportunity of consulting them collectively on the resolution to
break up the school and to migrate, which had been taken on the 7th. They
sanctioned the breaking up of the school. On the question of its removal
elsewhere they recorded no opinion.

Meanwhile a reconnaissance was being made by one of our body, who was
despatched to visit, as in a private capacity, Borth, and two or three
other spots on the Welsh coasts, while inquiries were also made in other
directions.

On Monday, 13th, the Headmaster left Uppingham for a visit to the sites
which promised most favourably. A deep snow on the ground made the
departure from home seem the more cheerless, but it had melted from the
Welsh hills before we reached them. On Tuesday, the party--which now
consisted of the Headmaster, two of the staff, and one of the Trustees
(whose services on this occasion, and many others arising out of it, we
find it easier to remember than to acknowledge as they deserve)--stayed a
night at the inland watering-place of Llandrindod, one of the suggested
sites. The bleak moors round it were uninviting enough that squally
March day. But the question of settling here was dismissed at once;
there was not sufficient house-room in the place. So next morning we
bore down upon Borth.

The first sight of the place seemed to yield us assurance of having
reached our goal. The hotel is a long oblong building with two slight
retiring wings, beyond which extends a square walled enclosure of what
was then green turf; Cambrian Terrace overlooks the enclosure at right
angles to the hotel, the whole reminding us remotely of a college
quadrangle. On entering the hotel, the eye seized on the straight roomy
corridors which traverse it, and the wide solid staircase, as features of
high strategic importance. A tour of the rooms was made at once, and an
exact estimate taken of the possible number of beds. Besides two other
members of the staff, who joined the pioneers at Borth, the school
medical officer had come down to meet us, and reported on what lay within
his province. Meanwhile two of the party were conducted by mine host to
explore a "cricket-ground" close to the hotel, or at least a plot of
ground to which adhered a fading tradition of a match between two local
elevens. The "pitch" was conjecturally identified among some rough
hillocks, over the sandy turf of which swept a wild northwester, "shrill,
chill, with flakes of foam," and now and then a driving hailstorm across
the shelterless plain. So little hospitable was our welcome to a home
from which we were sometime to part not without regretful memories.

Next day, March 16th, a contract was signed, which gave us the tenancy of
the hotel till July 21st, with power to renew the contract at will for a
further term after the summer holidays. Our landlord, Mr. C. Mytton, was
to provide board (according to a specified dietary) and bed (at least bed-
room) for all who could be lodged in his walls, and board (with light and
firing) for the whole party; to supply the service for the kitchen, and
to undertake the laundry. Servants for attendance on the boys were to be
brought by the masters. The payment was to be 1 pound a head per week
for all who were lodged and boarded, or boarded only, in the hotel. For
washing, and one or two other matters, an extra charge was admitted. We
have only to add that the bargain was one with which both parties, under
their respective circumstances, had reason to be satisfied; and that the
arrangement worked not more stiffly than could be expected where the
large margin of the unforeseen left so much to subsequent interpretation.
Even Dido and Hiarbas were not agreed about the precise width of a bull's-
hide. We do not, however, wish it to be inferred from this classical
parallel, that our settlers claim to have rivalled the adroitness of the
Punic queen in her dealings with the barbarian prince:

[Greek text] {12}




CHAPTER III.--TRANSFORMATIONS.


_Your snail is your only right house-builder_; _for he builds his
house out of the stuff of his own vitals_, _and therefore wherever he
travel he carries his own roof above him_. _But I have known men_,
_spacious in the possession of bricks and mortar_, _who have not so
much made their houses as their houses have made them_. _Turn such an
one out of his home_, _and he is a bare_ "_O without a figure_,"
_counting for nothing in the sum of things_. _He only is truly
himself who has nature in him_, _when the old shell is cracked_, _to
build up a new one about him out of the pith and substance of
himself_.

Ten days after the reconnaissance described in the last chapter, the
pioneers of the school were again upon the ground.

On Monday, March 27th, a goods train of eighteen trucks, chartered by the
Uppingham masters, was unloading three hundred bedsteads, with their
bedding, on Borth platform. These were to be distributed among the
quarters of their respective owners, in some dozen different houses,
which we had engaged in addition to the hotel. The workmen were mostly
Welshmen, anxious to be doing, but understanding imperfectly the speech
of their employers. With the eagerness of their temperament, they went
at the trucks, and Babel began. Amid a confused roar of contradictory
exhortations, with energetic gesture, and faces full of animation and
fire, they were hauling away, to any and every place, the ton-loads of
mattresses, and the fragments of unnumbered bedsteads. It was time for
the owners to interpose; and those of the school party who were present,
knowing that time was very precious, and that example is better than
precept, especially precept in a foreign language, put their own hands to
the work, the Headmaster being foremost, and earned a labouring man's
wage at unloading the trucks and carrying the goods to their billets.
Some of our new acquaintances watched the scene with a shocked surprise
that authorities should share in the manual labour, instead of looking on
and paying for it. But their feelings at last determined to admiration.
"Why, sirs," they exclaimed, "you get it done as if you were used to move
every three weeks." But, in fact, there was so much to be done, and so
few days to do it in, that the exigencies of the work spared neither age,
sex, nor degree of our party. None were exempt, and those who were not
employed in porterage and rough carpentry might be found shifting
furniture, or stitching curtains, or jointing together bedsteads.

Meanwhile, workmen in and round the hotel were as busy as
stage-carpenters preparing a transformation scene. First, by the
elimination of carpets and furniture, the interior was reduced to a
_tabula rasa_. Then, in the somewhat weather-beaten top story,
plastering and surface-washing went briskly on. Our hosts assured us no
hands could be found for this work, but the Headmaster made a descent
upon Aberystwith and returned with the required number. A contractor was
fitting the large coffee-rooms, the billiard-room and others, and the
ground-floor corridor from end to end, with long narrow tables--plain
deal boards on wooden trestles--for the accommodation of three hundred
diners. Outside, the stables were converted into the school carpentery,
and the coach-house into a gymnasium. Above all, a wooden school-room,
eighty-three feet by twenty, had been designed, and its site marked out
on the north side of the enclosure behind the hotel.

Then there was the care of providing supplementary house-room for many
purposes: rooms for music practice, and for the boys' studies (of which
we shall have more to say), and for hospital uses. Ordinary "sick-room"
accommodation was soon obtained by paying for it, but a fever hospital
was also a requirement which, with our experiences, we were not likely to
forget, and this was less easy to secure. We had to scour the
neighbourhood, knocking at the door of many a farmhouse and country
homestead, before we were provided.

The house-room being secured, came the labour of furnishing; the
distribution of tables, benches, bookshelves, &c, for the class-rooms,
and of furniture (in many cases a minimum) for the needs of masters and
their families; the ticketing of the bed-room doors, the beds, the chests
of drawers, and each drawer in them, with the name of the occupant--with
many like minutiae, which it took longer to provide than it does to
detail them. The task was not rendered easier by being shared in part
with our hosts, who had hardly taken the measure of our requirements. It
became necessary at the last moment to telegraph to the Potteries for a
large consignment of bed-room ware, which, in spite of protestations, had
been laid in only in half quantities. The world of school has marched
forward since the days when three or four basins sufficed for the toilet
of a dozen boys.

While the elementary needs of the colony were being attended to, its more
advanced wants were not neglected. There were those whom the anxiety of
providing for the school amusements, and in particular its cricket,
suffered not to sleep. We believe that the first piece of school
property which arrived on the scene was the big roller from the cricket-
field. Resolved to gather no moss in inglorious ease at home, it had
mounted a North-Western truck, and travelled down to Bow Street station,
where it was to disembark for action. It cost the Company's servants a
long struggle to land it, but once again on terra firma it worked with a
will and achieved wonders, reducing a piece of raw meadow land in a few
weeks' space to a cricket-field which left little to be desired. This
meadow lay within a few hundred yards of Bow Street station, four miles
by rail from Borth. It is the property of Sir Pryse Pryse, of Gogerddan,
who gave the school the use of it at a peppercorn rent.

This was but one of the many acts of unreserved generosity shown by this
gentleman to the school. It is not often that the opportunity offers of
winning so much and such hearty gratitude as our neighbour of Gogerddan
has won by his prompt liberality; still less often is the opportunity
occupied with such thoughtful and ungrudging kindness.

We had help in the same kind from the Bishop of St. David's, who put at
our service a field close to the hotel; a rather wild one, but in which
little plots and patches for a practising wicket were discovered by our
experts. The firm sands to the north were reported to yield an excellent
"wicket;" with the serious deduction, however, that the pitch was worn
out and needed to be changed every half-dozen balls.

Among such cares the week rolled away only too speedily, and brought the
day of the school's arrival upon us. If we have failed, as we have, to
convey a true impression of the serious labour and anxieties which
crowded its hours, we will quote the summary of a writer who described it
at the time, and knew what he was describing: "It was like shaking the
alphabet in a bag, and bringing out the letters into words and sentences;
such was the sense of absolute confusion turned into intelligent shape."
{19}




CHAPTER IV.


_Gesta ducis celebro_, _Rutulis qui primus ab oris_
_Cambriae_, _odoratu profugus_, _Borthonia venit_
_Litora_; _multum ille et sanis vexatus et aegris_,
_Vi Superum_, _quibus haud curae gravis aura mephitis_:
_Multa quoque et loculo passus_, _dum conderet urbem_
_Inferretque deos Cymris_.

AN EPIC FRAGMENT.

[Greek text].

The careful general who has completed his disposition without one
discoverable flaw, who has foreseen all emergencies, and anticipated
every possible combination, may await the action with a certain moral
confidence of success. But he would be a man of no human fibre, were he
not to feel some disquiet in his inmost soul when he gets upon horseback
with his enemy in sight, and listens for the boom of the first gun. Not
very different, except for the absence of a like confidence in the
completeness of their dispositions, were the emotions of the masters who
manned the platform of Borth Station, when the gray afternoon of Tuesday,
April 4th, drew sombrely towards its close. The station was crowded with
spectators from Aberystwith and Borth itself, curious to watch the entry
of the boys. Expectation was stimulated by the arrival of a train, which
set all the crowd on tip-toe, and then swept through the station--a mere
goods train. Half an hour's longer waiting, and the right train drew up,
and discharged Uppingham School on the remote Welsh platform. It struck
a spark of home feeling in the midst of the lonely landscape, and the
chill of strange surroundings, to see well-known faces at the windows,
and to meet the grasp of familiar hands. But there was no time for
sentiment that stirring evening. The station was cleared with all speed
of boys and spectators, the former turning in to tea at those endless
tables, the latter strolling away to carry home their first impressions
of their invaders. Then one group of masters and servants set to work to
sort the luggage which cumbered the platform, while others received it at
the hotel door, and distributed it to the various billets. Light was
scant, hands were not too numerous, and the work was not done without
some confusion. But it was done; and the tired workers went to their
beds, thankful for what was finished, and full of good hopes for the work
which was yet to be begun.

And the boys--how did they feel? As they stepped out from the railway
carriage into those bare, vasty corridors and curtainless dormitories,
did some little sense of desolateness in the new prospect temper its
excitement? Did some homesickness arise in the exile as he pondered on
the retirement and comfort of the "house" at Uppingham, and his
individual ownership of the separate cubicle, and the study which was
"his castle?" He was a unit now, not of a household, but of a camp.
Small blame to him if life seemed to have lost its landmarks, and things
round him to be "all nohow," as he sat down in some bare hall upon a
schoolfellow's book-box (wondering whether he should ever see his own),
to while away with a story-book the listless interval before bed-time,
under the niggard light of a smoking lamp, or a candle flickering in the
draught. What exactly he felt or thought, however, we do not pretend to
know. We only know that there was not one of them but felt proud to be
out campaigning with his school, and would have counted "ten years of
peaceful life" not more than worth his share in that honourable venture.

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