XIII.
Winchester.
In this book, which tries to tell of the Winchester College Mission, you will perhaps be disappointed that so little is said actually about Winchester; but that was the most distinctive part of their method; from first to last they never wanted to intrude. They put me in charge of the Mission, they paid me my salary, they entrusted me, as you will have seen, with large sums of money; but they never from first to last desired to dictate methods, or to hinder even when my methods were not quite at one with their own. It was an extraordinary generosity, and I am afraid that I have oftentimes put it to the test.
Placing the Mission at Landport was a stroke of genius on the part of the late Headmaster, Dr. Ridding. It enabled the men to become quite familiar with the work which was being carried on in their name. Prefects could come down from Saturday to Sunday night, and on leave-out days any man in the school could come down. Recently some change as to leave-out days has made this more difficult, but it is a matter of great congratulation to me that most of the elder men, both present and past, do not know the Mission merely by hearsay. Bedrooms were always kept ready for them, and I think, as a rule, they enjoyed themselves when they stayed with us, or, at least, they had the grace to appear to do so. When I speak of this, people always say, “What did they do?” I am afraid I have to answer, they did not do anything. Someone used to take them round the parish on Saturday night, and show them the different clubs, or they stayed in the gymnasium, or they came up to my own room and talked. Sometimes, if there was a great stress of work, they would help us in directing envelopes, or copying circulars. On Sunday they went to church, and took their meals with us—a plain breakfast of bread and butter, which we have to have on Sundays because so many breakfast with us, was never objected to by them; and the Sunday dinner was shared with thirty or forty other people, mostly of a different rank of life to which they were accustomed. Writing it down now in cold blood it does not seem anything, but I am sure it was everything—a liberal education, a discovery that all men are pretty much the same, that even the grossest sin, the direst poverty, has not the power of annihilating true manhood—above all the lesson that true worth consists not in what a man has, but what a man is; and perhaps they just guessed at the higher lesson that union with God is not only the power of a perfect cleansing, but the power of a renewed life, which renders him who possesses it true and beautiful. Of course, some men grasped all this easily, others saw things only as they were; but I do not believe that any man ever stayed with us who did not go away better for the visit.
I have been astonished oftentimes, when men came back long after they left school to stay with us how much more deeply such thoughts had penetrated their souls than I at the moment had believed. It seemed to them very difficult to realise that almost all our inmates were of what are called the lower, oftentimes of the degraded, classes; but men are strangely imitative, and our inmates naturally adopted the customs of those amongst whom they lived. The boy, too, of the lower class is generally wanting in self-consciousness. He talks freely and easily. The things he talks about are generally matters of experience to him. He seldom theorises. He is desirous of making those in his company feel at ease. I have seen Winchester men coming to us very anxious to condescend, to be polite, and I have seen them utterly nonplussed at the extraordinary good manners, simplicity, and powers of conversation of the fellows sitting round our table. Practically they came to teach, they remained to learn. I do not suppose that they were conscious of their intention, or of the result of their visit.
Then, too, their coming down gave me an opportunity of speaking plainer and straighter than I well could at Winchester. It was a great gain, having this opportunity with the leading men and heads of houses. It is very wonderful that they never seemed to resent this at all; sometimes I even flatter myself they liked it. They saw, too, the awful havoc which sin makes in character. Their lives at Winchester are so happy and so employed that they have little time or, perhaps inclination, to imagine the lives of those who are the very opposite of themselves, and, I think, seeing these lives did impress them very much. I judge this not only from what they said, but from the fact that several, I might say many, of them have privately helped me not only with money, but by taking pains in getting lads situations. And this interest has not been merely for a moment, just quickened by the sight of the poverty or distress, but has lasted after they left Winchester. Men did me even the honour of making me their confidant about themselves, or about some other man in the school for whom they were anxious. I grieve to-day, now that the chance has gone from me, over many opportunities wasted, sloth and pride so often preventing one, and one’s own selfish nature continually supplying the excuse, “This is not the proper moment to speak,” or, “You might lose your influence by speaking.”
These days spent with me gave me the right to ask for hospitality in return. At first I only went to College, Joseph, my first Prefect of Hall, making this a very easy matter for me; and where Mrs. Richardson, the second master’s wife, is, there can never be embarrassment. And so under her hospitable roof I began my venture of spending one day a week in Winchester. Then Harold Bilbrough, head of Mr. Kensington’s house, asked me to go there. And soon the kind hospitality of the House Dons enabled me to visit every House in the school. I arrived in time to dine with the men in their hall. Then in the afternoon we watched cricket or football, or whatever was going on; in the winter the House Prefects giving me tea up at the House, in the summer ices, or an equivalent, at Louisa’s. Alas! Louisa’s is now no more; there is a school shop instead. The House Don usually asked four or five men in to dinner in the evening; sometimes I was asked to say a few words at “Preces”; then the head of the House would take me into each gallery, and I saw all the fellows in bed, got to know, if possible, the younger ones, saw if there were any clothes I could take down to my people at home; a chance often arose of saying in jest a word that went deeper, or sometimes a word of comfort, but at any rate it broke down all shyness. I cannot for one single moment flatter myself that I exercised much influence, certainly not a religious influence strictly so-called. That was not my business. My religious mission was to Landport, not to Winchester, and I should have been utterly disloyal to the Winchester authorities and the parents of the boys if I had even tried to exercise such influence. On the other hand, I do believe that I was able to help many a man in the crisis of his school life, and to say many a word which would last after he left Winchester, and I judge from many letters received long after men have left the school, and from kind words which Dr. Fearon and the masters have said to me, that they thought the influence which I had at Winchester was really helpful to the school life.
Though it is difficult for me to speak of this, it is very easy for me to speak of the extraordinary help Winchester has been, personally, to me. The days spent there were days of perfect relaxation. In the summer watching cricket in Meads was a pure joy, one after another, men and Dons coming up to tell of all the news, and to discuss what was going on. There is, perhaps, no playing-field as beautiful in the whole of England; in front of you S. Catherine’s Hill with its crown of trees, on one side the College Chapel, on the other S. Cross; everywhere gleams of beauty, and even on the sultriest day a delightful breeze. Then the most restful of all surroundings, a perfectly smooth green sward, and to give life the extraordinary excitement of the game, when the one thing that one desired most was that a man’s batting or bowling in a foreign match should entitle him to get into Lord’s; on the less sacred sward games innumerable, the anxiety of House captains about the younger men coming on, and dear Fort coaching and encouraging everybody. Beautiful as it all was, I am not sure that the intense excitement of Sixes or Fifteens, our Winchester football, was not even greater; the endeavour to fathom the mystery why commoners have a special go and verve of their own, the discussing it over and over again with House men and College men and with Dons. Sometimes people talk as if too much is made of games, that they are altogether Philistine, destroying refinement. At any rate, at Winchester this was never the case. From an experience of ten years, I would say that the vast majority of men in the Eleven and the Football teams were the nicest men in the school, and I have grown to know most of these men extremely well. My first year I did not; men were shy of me. Perhaps they thought that, because I was a parson, I was likely to be a “smug.” But I remember well my second year, when the Captain of Lord’s, I think it was Thesiger, walked arm in arm with me across Meads, I felt I had won a final victory. And the real beauty of the whole thing was, these men never guessed what they were doing for me. Their pure kindness was so modest, so unassuming, it was like eating and drinking new life. Age has nothing to do with years, the Winchester Missioner never can become an old man. Living amongst my own boys at home one did not gain this, there is so much of tears and sorrow, so much that is sordid mixed up in their lives, they are often so very old themselves. But to see these, one succeeding to another, ever young, ever enthusiastic, with literally no cares, and just as much work as was good for them, and to be allowed to enter into their life, to become part of the school, this rendered possible by their wonderful generosity, was to realise all the liberality of their environment and the beauty of their homes. I have come to Winchester oftentimes with a heart almost broken with sorrow; that heart-break has never lasted out one hour. Of course there is another side. We English deem that because a system suits eighty out of every hundred boys, it must suit the other twenty, and so the other twenty have to come to school. It is an atmosphere where they do not develop, where what is best and truest in them seems to be for ever driven back into their own hearts, until the best ceases to be good and sometimes becomes the worst—boys timid in will, weak in body, real cowards in spirit, they cannot help it. If parents, discovering such a one in their family, would devise some other method of education for them, it would be better for them and better for schools, for it is these boys who bring out in others whatever is vulgar and cruel, and there is latent vulgarity and cruelty in most boys from fourteen to sixteen. The best set of Prefect’s eyes cannot be everywhere, and consequently little eyes are sometimes dimmed with tears, and little hearts are broken. And then there are bad boys. Take any four hundred men, women, or girls, and you will find bad ones amongst them. And badness has a strange way of impressing itself on others. Thank God, at that age it does not sink very deep, the bad is very superficial, and leaves little or no mark behind it. Oh, the blessed power of recovery in the young!
We have two great blessings at Winchester. We are a small school—only four hundred—and none of our men are very rich. There is a perfect friendliness between all the masters and the men. Of course, I have heard words of anger against Dons, but I have never known a real hard thought about one of them. It is an extraordinary friendliness, and this friendliness passes down into the whole school. There are generations of brothers, coming one after the other, sometimes three in the same house at the same time, the greatest safeguard possible. And, above all, a deep, wholesome, religious spirit—not perhaps what would satisfy exact theologians, but manly and straightforward. For as I believe of my own children at Landport, so I believe of Winchester men. All that is necessary for the soul’s salvation is all that it is necessary for a boy to learn—the power of prayer, the power of repentance, the power of the Sacraments, and these can be learned long before a boy comes to school—his mother the one priceless teacher. We need at school the opportunity of testing the religion learned, far more than of learning religion, and when the boy is equipped with the simple armour which I have spoken of, he is well prepared for every emergency of temptation. I remember a little lad once saying to me, when I saw him working late at night, “I am mugging John.” I suppose when boys reach the sixth form they are intellectual enough to understand criticism, even of the Greek Testament; but I deprecate myself the Bible in any case being turned into a school book, and I think the parents who imagine that they can impose upon the school-master their duty of teaching religion to their children, inflict on their children a cruel wrong, on the master an impossible task.
I would I had the power to write what I feel about Winchester. I would I had words to make you feel how I have realised the magnificence of its great tradition—an unbroken chain of upright English gentlemen, holding the most useful place in their nation’s history; not perchance the most brilliant, but certainly amongst the most dependable men of their time—and how earnestly I believe that this tradition is realised by almost every man in the school, and that the nation will realise it just as truly in times to come as in times past.
This intimate knowledge of men at school naturally led to my knowing many of their families, in Winchester language their “pitch-up”; and truly the Mission has discovered a new interpretation of that notion, if not perhaps its origin; for I think almost every family that I have known has contributed to the funds of the Mission, not only in money, but in clothes, in asking parties of us to spend the day with them, sometimes even in supporting cases that we were very anxious about. It has led, too, to a kind of association of prayer for the Mission’s welfare, composed of relatives of past and present Wykehamists. Miss Wigram, of South Lodge, Champion Hill, S.E., the sister of “The Cat” and “The Kitten,” would be glad to give particulars.
Once or twice a year, too, I was able to go up to Oxford, sometimes to Cambridge, and thus keep in touch with the men there. There is something especially charming in this hospitality, though I doubt if one could stand it for very long, unless one could discover the curious secret of Mr. Lucraft. There is perhaps nothing more attractive than seeing a man act host for the first time, especially when he has got the kitchens and plate-closet of Magdalen behind him. I remember on one visit a distinguished Low Church clergyman suddenly asking me what I had been doing for the spread of religion, and I could only answer, “Taking three square meals a day.” I think he was very much shocked; but you will likely understand that under this hospitality there was hidden a true generosity, and an interest in the Mission and myself. New College was naturally my head-quarters, and men took really extraordinary pains to arrange that I should see as many Wykehamists as possible at the different centres of hospitality, and I have always thought that taking trouble, certainly at Oxford, was the greatest proof of taking real interest. God, too, allows one to speak more plainly at Oxford than one could at Winchester, and there come into my memory now many conversations full of the deepest interest. At any rate, it is a great privilege to have won the right to speak, even if men did not always follow the advice given, and letters received years after the conversation—many received since men knew that I was leaving Landport—almost induce me to flatter myself that the Mission has been a much greater help than at the time I ever realised. Of course, it is natural that men who knew me at Winchester should have some interest in the Mission, one would have been disappointed if they had not; but to discover that a large number of old Wykehamists were cordially ready to befriend us, not only with money, but with sympathy, was a very astonishing revelation to me. The larger part of the money has come from them; and when you think that it was given into the hands of a socialistic Ritualist to use and to distribute, you can measure something of the generosity. It would not be becoming for me to mention names, but if this book falls into the hands of men who have been on the Committee, especially the Treasurers and Secretaries for the last ten years, I would like them to realise how their loyalty to us has been one of the chief factors in a generous Wykehamical support, which gave us the grace of perseverance in the most difficult time of our work. I am conscious, as no one else can be, how often my own actions have strained this loyalty. I know that not only old Wykehamists, but even the school authorities themselves, have often been very severely tried by things we have deemed it our duty to say or to do. Sometimes a word in a letter, or reading between the lines, might suggest caution to us, but never during the whole of these ten years has any single word been said by anyone in authority, or by others who had gained the right by having contributed to our funds, that could be construed into any other meaning than the tenderest love and the truest desire to help. Perhaps there could be no greater sign of that real liberalism that permeates every true Englishman, in whatever camp, either political or religious, circumstance may have placed him. To Wykehamists at Oxford or Cambridge, to men in the City and at the Bar, to soldiers scattered throughout the world, and to priests working at home and abroad, to schoolmasters, Indian civilians, and to Bishops, I, who have failed in my endeavour to do some work for Winchester, venture to offer my heartiest thanks for innumerable acts of kindness and generosity during these ten years.