Clifton andThe Great War
Dr R.J. Acheson
Painting: WHT Titcombe, The Soldiers’ Communion
1
The Calm Before the Storm
It is all too easy to read history backwards. For those at Clifton
and other Public Schools just before the outbreak of the First
World War there were few clouds on the horizon.
True, Lord Roberts, when inspecting
the combined Offi cer Training Corps of
Clifton, Cheltenham and Marlborough at
Beggar’s Bush in 1912 had hinted that
there were diffi cult times ahead and
commented that the young men in front
of him had made
and one boy who was there later wrote
that he remembered Lord Roberts
a good start in preparing yourselves to defend your country if your services should be required
warning us of the need to be ready for a great war which he could see coming. But no one took him seriously. Like those other exhortations from the chapel pulpit to prepare ourselves for “the battle of life”, they seemed empty words, and anyway there was nothing we could do about it.
But, on the whole, Clifton pupils
continued to bathe in the warm after-
glow of the 1912 Jubilee celebrations,
secure in their own little world
and enjoying the sunshine and the
apparently changeless horizon which
stretched out before them in that last
Edwardian summer before events were
to shatter that world for ever. Anthony
Eden later recalled that
all seemed gaiety, sunshine and good food
one perfect summer idyll that I ever experienced, the lovely legacy of a vanished world.
whilst Vera Brittain, looking back
on her brother’s fi nal Speech Day at
Uppingham, wrote of that
2
as part of Lord Haldane’s post-Boer
War reforms and which Douglas Haig
was to later acknowledge as having
played a vital part in stemming the
German invasion of France in 1914.
Following on from this, the College
had been presented with a trophy,
called The Canada Trophy, which was
to be competed for on an Inter-House
basis involving military skills such as
Drill, Musketry, Lashing and Knotting,
Bridging and so on. Such renewed
emphasis on matters military did not go
down well in some pupil quarters:
A contemporary Cliftonian, looking back
after the war, described the Commem
weekend as follows:
The occasion was one of brilliant sunshine, marquees, fl ags and free strawberries and cream. Even the parents were to be admired, as they fl uttered their parasols and puffed their cigars.
Industrial unrest, the Arms Race with
Germany leading to the triumph of
jingoism over patriotism, Irish Home
Rule and an increasingly strident
Suffragette movement – all of which
were beginning to shake the hitherto
granite confi dence of English society,
made little impact on the inhabitants of
the buildings in College Road. Council
was grappling with the issue as to
whether or not a Chaplain should be
appointed, the Head Master’s proposal
to lengthen the Easter holidays by one
week on health grounds, and arguments
with the residents of Pembroke Vale
about fencing and with the Zoo about
their attempts to get an annual licence
for a musical steam organ.
The School had other things on its
mind. Contributions to The Cliftonian
included moans about “living in a
constant hurry”, the state of the Chapel
Quad, the dilapidated condition of
the cricket pavilion and the weather.
There are signs, also, that the gloss
was beginning to wear a bit thin after
the 1912 celebrations, the magazine
reporting that support at the Penpole
Runs was falling off, the Chess Club
had collapsed through lack of interest,
Debating was poorly attended, and the
School appeared to be losing interest in
its involvement in the St Agnes Mission
down in St Paul’s. Geoffrey Tregelles (NT
1904-1911), who was killed in action in
1916, wrote rather sternly to the School:
The School has in this matter a responsibility which has been unmistakeably shirked….it is to be earnestly hoped that next year we shall fi nd willing volunteers for work which is useful, interesting and our bounden duty.
Counter-balancing this apparent
malaise, however, was the growing
dominance of the Offi cer Training Corps
or OTC as it was called, which had
been established across the country
The Corps was made for the School, not the School for the Corps, nor was the School ever meant to be barracks, with people going about with their hair cut like Tommy Atkins.
As the Summer Term of 1914
meandered peacefully to a close, the
School braced itself for the fi rst cricket
match against Tonbridge at Lord’s and,
in common with many Public Schools
of the time, the annual Corps Camp at
Aldershot. Commem had passed off
“fi ne and sunny” with the Head Master
noting that ten leavers were bound for
Oxford and Cambridge adding to the
large number of Cliftonians already
in residence at these two universities,
many of whom were amongst the fi rst
to volunteer when war broke out. As
Subalterns, they were to be the fi rst
casualties of the war – a fact which
rather challenges the Blackadder view
of these young men as being “nice but
dim” products of a privileged elite.
Lord Haldane
3
Huntly Gordon (WaH 1911-1916),
returning to Clifton after an idyllic
summer in Scotland, noted that
As the Tonbridge Match began (seven of
the Clifton XI were to be killed over the
next four years), Austria declared war
on Serbia prompting Russia to follow
suit. By the end of the week, Germany
had declared war on Russia and, on
the Sunday, on France. Against this
background of mounting tension, the
OTC camp carried on:
Camp was torn with many rumours, which were suddenly ended on Monday morning at reveille by orders to strike camp at once and entrain by 11 o’ clock. This we managed to do, and the next day war was declared. Owing to this sudden break-up we were deprived of all fi eld-days and night-work.
When the boys returned to Clifton in
September, it was to a very different
world. The fi rst hint of any impact on
the School was a Minute in the Council
Meetings Book concerning
Fee remissions:
It was decided to charge only a reasonable proportion of the Tuition Fee in the case of boys who may leave during the course of the term for Woolwich and Sandhurst or to take commissions in the Army
and this was followed by an agreement
to continue to pay a portion of Sergeant
Sheppard’s wages whilst he was on
secondment to the Army as a Physical
Training Instructor.
Understandably, the tone in Clifton as a
whole was markedly solemn in contrast
to the year that had gone before, the
Editor of The Cliftonian attempting to
capture this in his Editorial:
It is not without misgivings that we take up our pen to write these few paragraphs. So much has happened in the last two months that the gulf between last Term and this cannot be bridged by any words of ours. Events of such momentous importance are taking place even as we are writing, that it seems almost impossible to give our attention to more trivial matters…..
……The routine of the Term has quite naturally undergone considerable alteration, and military training is the most prominent feature. All School football matches, with the exception of the Wellington and Marlborough matches, have been cancelled.
Back at Clifton, all was bustle and change. With Kitchener of Khartoum at the War Offi ce and Winston Churchill at the Admiralty no one expected the war to last beyond Christmas.
The Cadet Corps took precedence over games, a minor revolution in itself. A number of elderly masters did their bit by joining the Corps…..To see men, so formidable in their rightful place, openly step down and assume the role of humblest recruit was so disarming that none of us had the heart to take advantage of it.
He recalled that much of his time
was taken up with cleaning boots and
buttons, and route marches twice a
week as well as on Sunday afternoons,
often as much as twelve miles at a time:
4
1914
The fi rst Cliftonian casualties were, understandably,
amongst those who were already serving in the Regular
Army and thus in the BEF as it attempted to prevent the
German Army from invading France, or overseas, for example,
in Africa.
The Cliftonian published their names,
twelve killed and eighteen wounded. It
was to be the fi rst of many such lists.
In November, the Head Master, Dr
King, informed Council that six masters
had joined up and that he intended to
cover their lessons with temporary
appointments. This was a problem for
all HMC Headmasters at this time. In
their recent book, Public Schools and The
Great War, Anthony Seldon and David
Walsh make the point that boys
were not impressed by the replacements….Boys at Winchester were delighted by a temporary teacher who had been a Belgian High Court judge; when giving private tuition in his house, he would offer cigarettes to his students.
5
The National Anthem was introduced
into Chapel Services as an almost
refl ex reaction to the call to arms
and the Debating Society whirled into
action once more to debate the motion
“That in the opinion of this House
the personal ambition of the German
Emperor is the chief cause of the War.”
Understandably, it would have taken
an inspired opposition speaker to
defeat that proposal. One pupil who did
speak against the motion, somewhat
courageously under the circumstances,
was Rolf Tapken (WiH 1911-1915),
a German student at the College.
He had, in fact, been the subject of
correspondence between Council and
the Home Offi ce, a Council Minute of 16
December recording
Gradually, Clifton geared up for the
war. The Close was used for drilling
by troops billeted in Bristol and the
School Range was lent to local troops
for shooting practice. “All the hills and
vales along, Earth is bursting into song”
was very much the national mood, and
Clifton naturally refl ected this.
The Cliftonian was full of patriotic
fervour, printing a lengthy (and not very
good) poem entitled The New Crusade
by GC Garratt (WiH 1882-1887) which
very much catches the mood of the time
as the stories of German atrocities in
Belgium began to dominate the media:
For, lo, a mightier tyrant hath sprung forth, Yea, bloodier, and more ruthless, with a leerMouthing the Holy Name, and in his wakeA smoke of blazing towns, and piteous cryOf women wailing over helpless babes,Maimed, dying, starving, tortured to the shoutof hellish laughter, follows, and dogs his stepsAnd chokes his impious prayers. Therefore ariseYe noble of all nations! Raise the gageThus pitiless fl ung down! Hurl back the hordesOf murdering warriors, raging chiefs, andAll that godless multitude, whose burning trackDevours the peaceful earth, and ruining castInto the pit they digged.
The Secretary reported on behalf of the Head Master the arrangements which had been made with the Home Offi ce for RWG Tapken, a German boy in the School, to remain at Clifton.
Given the groundswell of anti-German
sentiment, whipped up by the popular
press, Dr King’s and Clifton’s stance
on this was pretty remarkable and
later extended, unsuccessfully, to
an attempt to keep Tapken at Clifton
as a Laboratory Technician once he
had reached school leaving age. He
eventually returned to Germany where
he died in 1919. Within this context,
several HMC schools came under
pressure both from the media and from
parents to remove any German-born
master from their respective Common
Rooms. At Ipswich, the governors were
asked to retire the German master and
replace the language with Spanish, for
example. It was again to Clifton’s credit
that their own Otto Siepmann continued
to teach there throughout the war in
spite of several parental demands
towards the end of the war that Council
should dismiss him and in spite of
several parents removing their children
from Clifton as a protest against his
employment.
If anti-German sentiment ran high then
the same can also be said in the Public
Schools of the time for pro-Belgian
feeling, and Clifton was not alone when
it opened its doors to Belgian exiles,
admitting Jack and Harry Jefferys
to School House in September 1914,
Council noting that it would
6
These brothers were to be the fi rst of
quite a few boys from Belgium, and,
curiously, from Romania over the next
few years, to fi nd a safe haven from the
war in their respective countries in the
elegant suburb of Clifton. Jack Jefferys
left in April 1915 and his brother a year
later, signing up as a Private in the
Belgian Army. He was killed in action
in 1918 in the fi nal campaign of the war
along with another Belgian Cliftonian,
Maurice Navir.
The last edition of the School magazine
for 1914 opened with these words:
not charge the Entrance Fee in their cases nor make any charge for Tuition for the proportion of the present term during which they had been in attendance.
We cannot help feeling the inappropriateness of any words of ours at a time like this, when almost every day shows the name of one or more past members of the School in the list of casualties from the Front. Not only has the list of killed and wounded reached terrible proportions but there are many whose names appear in them with whom present members of the School were personally acquainted. While we deeply deplore the loss of those who have fallen in the defence of their country, we are able also to be proud of the honours the School has already won.
7
The First to Fall
Twenty-seven names were recorded as having been killed,
with thirty-six wounded or missing, refl ecting the serious
fi ghting that had taken place between Mons and Ypres.
Some of these deaths would have hit
hard since six of those killed had left
Clifton between 1911 and 1913, within
living memory of many of the boys at the
school. One such was John McPherson
(ST 1908-1911):
Another was William Campbell
(OH 1908-1913):
He was wounded at Ypres, and died as a result of his subsequent exertions. Many Cliftonians have joined the ranks of the Army during the present crisis rather than wait for a commission. He is the fi rst to die as a private soldier, and his death is deeply regretted.
Known as he was to large numbers still in the School, his early death is greatly mourned. For both in his House and in the School he showed that he had high ideals which in no small degree he was successful in approaching.
the watchword of the time. Nevil Shute,
a boy at Shrewsbury in 1914, later wrote
in his piece entitled Slide Rule that
One will never really know what impact
the growing list of deaths year after year
had on the boys at Clifton. They have
left few personal records, stoicism, that
much underrated virtue today, being
we knelt praying for their souls in Chapel, knowing, in a year or so, the little boys in our houses would be kneeling for us.
one morning we noticed a piece of paper, pinned to the chapel door. It read: “Killed in action: AEJ Collins, Captain, Royal Engineers.” That name to us was a legend, for its bearer had made the highest score in the history of cricket, and on our Clifton ground. I had thought of him as one of the Ancients in a furry top-hat, defending something like a croquet hoop with a prehistoric type of bat. It came as shock to discover that he had only left the school twelve years ago, and was now lying dead in France. Later we became hardened to these reminders of mortality; but that fi rst death blow against one of the immortals was hard to accept.
At Clifton, the lists of casualties
were pinned on the Chapel Door.
One contemporary remembered that
8
The Cliftonian was similarly struck,
reporting his death as follows:
World famous – to his own unceasing annoyance – for a phenomenal innings in a Junior School House Match, he distinguished himself at all games, fi ves, rackets, football, boxing; at the same time, he possessed mental abilities of a high order, and won a School scholarship. A regular visitor to Clifton when he was home on leave, he loyally supported the Old Cliftonian Cricket Tour. His death will be a shock to many.
Collins was thus one of the early
casualties of the confl ict. On 11
November the Prussian Guard, one of
the Kaiser’s crack regiments, launched
an attack along the Messines-Menin
Road front in an attempt to break
through and complete the second stage
of the Schlieffen Plan. Collins was
in charge of a sector called Polygon
Wood and, as an engineer rather
than a frontline offi cer, he suddenly
found himself having to rally a motley
assortment of cooks, batmen, clerks
and transport soldiers in an attempt to
hold back the German advance. After
fi erce fi ghting, they were successful but
Collins was mortally wounded – had
he lived he would have undoubtedly
been awarded a DSO at the very least,
and had the Prussian Guard broken
through, given the limited resources
of the BEF, the First Battle of Ypres
might have proved decisive for all the
wrong reasons as far as the allies were
concerned.
“Proud of the honours the School has
already won.” Chief amongst these was
a VC awarded to Capt. Theodore Wright
(SH 1897-1900). Wright had already
exhibited extraordinary courage in the
fi rst days of the fi ghting at Mons where,
in spite of being wounded in the head,
he continued to try to connect up an
explosive charge in order to delay the
German advance by blowing up a vital
bridge.
On 14 September, at Vailly, under heavy
fi re he ensured that the 5th Cavalry
Brigade managed to cross a river via a
pontoon bridge which he and his men
had just laid down. The cost in terms
of casualties during this operation was
high and he personally ensured that
many of his wounded men made the
safety of a shelter. Whilst engaged upon
this, he was shot and killed.
9
This attack was one which required
considerable courage given the
unpredictability of air fl ight in 1914.
Briggs and his fellow offi cers fl ew over
250 miles across mountainous terrain
and over 100 miles of German territory.
Briggs was indeed captured, but he
escaped in 1917 whilst being relocated
by jumping off a train at Krefeld, and he
made his way back to England to live to
tell the tale. He died in 1963 although,
poignantly, his son had joined the RAF
in the Second World War and was shot
down and killed.
Bravery of a very different kind was
exhibited by Squadron Commander
Edward Briggs who had joined what was
then the Pre in September 1893, leaving
two years later. Before the war he was
one of several Old Cliftonians involved
in the developing air industry and in
1912 he held the record for the highest
fl ight (8270 feet) in the Royal Navy. In
November 1914 he was awarded the
Croix de Chevalier of the Legion of
Honour, the citation reading
On Saturday a fl ight of aeroplanes, under the command of Squadron Commander EF Briggs of the Royal Naval Air Section….fl ew from French territory to the Zeppelin airship factory at Friedrichshafen. All three pilots in succession fl ew down to close range under a heavy fi re from guns, mitrailleuses and rifl es, and launched their bombs according to instructions Commander Briggs is reported to have been shot down wounded, and taken to hospital as a prisoner. Both the other offi cers have returned safely to French territory, though their machines were damaged by gunfi re. They report positively that all the bombs reached their objective, and that serious damage was done to the Zeppelin factory.
1915
Against this background, School life ground on although
there were grumbles about the amount of marching the
boys had to endure, and the impact of the war on the
quality of food, one Cliftonian noting that
A letter to the School magazine in
December 1914 gives a little insight into
one aspect of the national mood:
meat, butter and eggs were short. Some said this was due to the German submarine blockade of our island; others mischievously suggested it was due to the stinginess of the housemasters who fed us.
It has occurred to me that it would be a good thing if, during the holidays, members of the Junior OTC were allowed to wear a distinctive badge approved by the War Offi ce, my reason being that many members of the Junior OTC throughout Great Britain are above the average height for the Army and below the age limit, and yet look older than they really are. The public, not being aware that they are doing their part in preparing themselves for the defence of their King and country, may quite easily look upon them as “shirkers.”
A Lecture on Strategy and War was
delivered at the School by Hilaire
Belloc, whilst collecting magazines
for minesweeping crews, and a talk
on the uses of Gun-cotton brought the
term quietly to a close, the editor of the
magazine remarking
10
We can look back with satisfaction on the excellent amount of work which the Corps has got through, and we can be sure that all members of the Special Instruction Squad who receive commissions at future dates will fi nd the experience gained invaluable.
1915 dawned relatively quietly for
Cliftonians. Casualties recorded
were quite light (ten killed and twelve
wounded by the New Year) and bore
little relation to what lay ahead within
this context. The editorial for the
February 1915 edition of the magazine
opened with these words:
It is with no feeling of ease that we take up our pen to write during this tremendous crisis. Such world-shaking events are being brought to pass, such momentous issues are at stake, that we cannot help feeling the comparative triviality of the affairs with which we are concerned.
This, however, did not stop a host of
complaints from pupils concerning
the over-prompt closing of the Chapel
doors, the ringing of the School bell,
increasing use of the name “College”
instead of “School” and the poor nature
of the School’s heating system, the last
of these being explained perhaps by a
Council Minute in January:
The Secretary reported that Mr Gullick had estimated that owing to the war he might not be able to supply the full quantity of Anthracite Coal contracted for, a contingency by the War Clause in his contract.
The magazine also published a poem
written under the name of Gerald
Caldwell which had recently been
published in The Times
(From a Private Soldier in England)O not in vain we have seen the royal decrease,The splendid sinking of the slow-dying year;O never again so dear to us, so dearThese golden days, these nights of starlit peaceWhen the moon rides in white-cloud companies.
O ye that have eyes to see, and ears to hear,Who wait the call across the narrow seas,God is not mocked, God mocks us not with these, But, in the inferior fortress of the heart,That we may fail not to fulfi l our partNor altogether lose Him when we fi ghtNor, falling, altogether fall forlorn,Hangs up remembered banners of the dawn,And turns our faces inward to the light.
The poet was, in fact, Gerald Siordet (SH
1899-1904). Of Huguenot descent, he
left Clifton for Oxford and then went to
London to try to make his way as a poet,
artist and critic. As a freelance writer of
literary reviews he found work with the
Folio Society, and the Medici Society,
and as a cataloguer of the V & A’s ivory
collection. Well-known in artistic circles of
the time – Glyn Philpot, John Sargent and
Brian Hatton all produced portraits of him
– he volunteered as a Private when war
broke out and was later commissioned,
winning the Military Cross. He was killed
in Mesopotamia in 1917.
11
This recollection, along with letters
complaining about the savagery of
haircuts now demanded for OTC
parades, the lack of punctuality when
it came to the Corps being dismissed,
and the usual round of Concerts and
Lectures indicate that, on the surface
at least, life at Clifton attempted to
continue along its well-trodden path.
In truth, there is no reason that it
should not have done so.
After his death Philpot arranged to have
a slim volume of his drawings and poems
published privately, prompting one
reviewer to write:
Our fi rst thought on reading these few pages is deep regret. Here is another young poet of whose promised gift the war has robbed our nation’s literature!
Throughout 1915, Clifton casualties
began to mount up as the School began
to realise that the war was not, after all,
going to be over as quickly as had been
anticipated. An insight into life at school
comes from the unpublished diary of
Oliver Folds who arrived at Clifton
in 1915:
Meat was scarce but we survived and we did have fi sh. The potato crops had got some sort of disease, which was a great blow and was replaced by lots of rice…..…..there was very little selection in the Grubber…..I suppose life was pretty normal with a few extra fi re drills. School House, being near the School buildings, ran the School Fire Brigade and had a few practices where one got pretty wet as the idea was to turn the hose on everyone else.
The war was now in full swing and food was short and we were rationed. There were considerable shortages particularly of butter, meat and potatoes. We had some so-called potato butter, which was one ounce of butter to a pound of very fi nely mashed potatoes.
12
13
The result was that “the customary
festivities” were abandoned and
Commem weekend reduced to a Chapel
Service at which the Dean of St Paul’s
was invited to preach. Dean Inge was
a clerical fi gure of some stature, and
he sounded a warning in his sermon
concerning the future:
Cliftonians at War
Council had debated how to approach Commem in 1915.
Many HMC schools had decided to suspend all forms of
celebration whilst the war continued and the Governors
decided to leave it up to the Head Master, Dr King.
We have been presuming our fancied security, we have become frivolous, self-indulgent and careless. I hope and believe that the day has come just in time to save us from ourselves, our worst enemies. It will be a new and strange England to which we will wake up after peace is signed.
Dr King Dean Inge
14
an outstanding sportsman, who was
to be one of the last Clifton casualties
of the war, for it refl ects what so many
young men must have thought and felt
as they faced the likelihood of their
death in battle:
He concluded by urging his
congregation to work hard to restore a
peaceful and prosperous nation:
Might all the boys here do something, however small and insignifi cant, for God and our country, so that in the holy temple which is rising before God, stone by stone, and age by age, some little piece of honest material contributed by your lives might be accepted by your Great Master Builder.
“Small” and “insignifi cant” were words
that could hardly be applied to the
ninety-three killed or wounded recorded
in the June edition of the magazine,
two of whom, perhaps, stand out for
very different reasons. Henry Miller
(WiH) came to Clifton in January 1909
and left to go up to Cambridge in 1913.
He was one of the fi rst to volunteer for
Kitchener’s Army. Wounded twice, he
insisted on going back to the Front and
was killed near Ypres in May 1915. His
Commanding Offi cer wrote:
He proved himself an excellent offi cer, and it was his devotion to duty in not leaving his trench while he could stand that caused his death.
whilst one of his men stated
If ever a man deserved a Victoria Cross he did. During the few days he was out the fi rst time, on one occasion there were a number of wounded lying in front of his trench suffering dreadfully from thirst, but no-one dared to go out to them except him. Amidst a hail of shell and bullets he conveyed water to them, with the utmost coolness assuaging their sufferings.
Such bravery from one so young in
a sense should not surprise given
the emphasis on duty and service to
others that lay at the heart of a Clifton
education. The shortness of a life
knowing little more than childhood and
Clifton is all the more poignant but was,
of course, increasingly common as
more and more young men signed up
straight after leaving school. Something
of this is captured in a letter written to a
friend by George Whitehead,
Then there’s the ripping old – not in the sense ancient – buildings. Go and stand in the bottom corner of The Close one fi ne evening at about 7.15 when there is fi elding out all round; can you imagine anything more perfect? The sun sending great long shadows from behind School House and the Wilson Tower and the dome of the Chapel, and everything showing up against the skyline. If I was an architect given the job of designing Heaven, I’d make it Clifton.
15
At the other end of the scale was
another VC awarded to one of Clifton’s
“regulars.” Cyril Martin (DH) had left in
1910 and went straight into the Army.
On 12 March at Spanbroek Molen in
Belgium he volunteered to lead a small
bombing party against a section of the
enemy trenches which was holding up
the British counter-offensive. Before he
started, he was wounded but he carried
on regardless, captured the trench and
held it for over two hours until a general
withdrawal was ordered. He went on to
have a highly successful military career,
rising to the rank of Brigadier and
serving in Iraq in the Second World War.
He died, aged 88, in 1980, appropriately
at his home near Woolwich Barracks.
Reactions at Home
Already the question of how to commemorate the fallen
was beginning to exercise the minds of grieving parents,
of whom Bishop Percival was also one, as well as both
Council and the Old Cliftonian Society.
The result was the setting up of “Special
War Exhibitions”:
The movement for funding temporary Exhibitions at Clifton to meet the special emergency created by the war has made good progress since the issue, ten days ago, of a circular by the Old Cliftonian Society. At the moment four exhibitions of the annual value of £60 for six years have been completely provided for.
These were to be the fi rst of many such
gifts, some of which are still silently
with us a hundred years on.
As 1915 drew to a close, there
was clearly a more sombre feel in
the School. Huntly Gordon wrote
of “Business as usual” being the
watchword whilst they went about the
routine of lessons and games with not
much thought for what next year might
bring, but he did observe
16
17
Latterly, however, the war had taken on a grimness that could not be ignored. Battle after battle brought no result…..with lengthening casualty lists and no results to show for them.
Amongst these growing losses was
the third son of a former Head Master,
Canon Wilson. His son had gone out to
France as an Intelligence Offi cer, his
last words to his men being “I’m done
for, keep your courage up.” One of the
Sergeants in his Regiment later wrote:
I have felt today as if someone had cut a big piece out of my world….As an offi cer he was perfect in every respect, and always carried out his duty in the work he loved and had undertaken for his country.
Another such was Geoffrey Robinson
(NT 1909-1914) who was killed on 20
September in an attack in which only
120 men of his battalion survived. He
had been kind to Huntly Gordon upon
his arrival at Clifton and his death hit
the young Cliftonian hard:
Geoffrey Robinson, who was old enough to get a commission in the 10th Gloucesters at the outbreak of war, wrote to me full of enthusiasm during his fi rst spell in the trenches at Loos. His letter was still in my pocket when I saw his name on the Chapel door…..A fortnight later his mother sent me his silver pencil as a keepsake. From her letter I learned that her other son, not at Clifton, was also killed in the same attack……her heart must have died that day.
Literary contributions refl ected this
deeper awareness of loss and sacrifi ce
but, as with the nation as a whole,
they still tended to refl ect the Brooke/
Newbolt school of thought; the Somme,
and the immense impact that battle was
to have on views concerning the war, lay
in the future. One such poem printed in
the magazine was entitled By Night:
Upon the Close the moon-beams sleep.They clothe with light the Chapel walls,And shadows dark the cloisters steepAnd echoing lone my footstep falls.
So shimmering quiet all tonightYou scarce could dream the world’s afl ame,And half the nations mixed in fi ght,And Europe drenched in blood and shame.
The boys who worked – the boys who played –Where march or halt their feet this hour?In trench or gully unafraidThey front the Dark – they fi ght Death’s power.
and the poet concluded:
And some no more will “tread the pitch”,Or hear the School Song wildly roll;Poor – poor are we – They greatly rich –– They touch – they win God’s fi ery goal.
More than a touch of He Fell Among
Thieves here.
By the end of 1915 over two thousand
Cliftonians were serving and 172 had
lost their lives, exactly four times those
who had perished in the Boer War.
1916
1916 was to prove an important turning point in the war and
how it was perceived on the Home Front, and this is refl ected
in events at Clifton and in the number of Cliftonians who were
killed or wounded during the course of these twelve months.
Another poem from Gerald Siordet
appeared in The Times:
To the DeadSince in the days that may not come againThe sun has shone for us on English fi elds,Since we have marked the years with thanksgiving;Nor been ungrateful for the lovelinessWhich is our England, then tho’ we walk no moreThe woods together, lie in the grass no more,For us the long grass blows, the woods are green.For us the valleys smile, the streams are bright,For us the kind sun still is comfortableAnd the birds sing; and since your feet and mineHave trod the lanes together, climbed the hills,Then in the lanes and on the little hills,Our feet are beautiful for ever more.And you – O if I call you, you will come,Most loved, most lovely faces of my friendsWho are so safely housed within my heart,So parcel of this blessed spirit landWhich is my own heart’s England, so possestOf all its ways to walk familiarlyAnd be at home, that I can count on you.Loving you so, being loved, to wait for me,So may I turn me in, and by some sweetRemembered pathway fi nd you once again.
Then can we walk together, I with you,Or you, or you along some quiet road,And talk the foolish, old, forgiveable talk,And laugh together; you will turn your head,Look as you used to look, speak as you spokeMy friend to me, and I your friend to you.Only when at the the last, by some cross-roadOur longer shadows, falling on the grass,Turn us back homeward, and the setting sunShines like a golden glory round your head,There will be something sudden and strange in you.Then you will lean, and look into my eyes,And I shall see the bright wound at your side,And feel the new blood fl owing in my heart,And I shall hear you speaking in my ear –O, not the old, forgiveable, foolish talk.But fl ames, and exaltations, and desires,But hopes, and comprehensions, and resolves,But holy, incommunicable, things,That like immortal birds sing in my breast.And springing from a fi re of sacrifi ce,Beat with bright wings about the throne of God.
18
19
Of its time, maybe; but it still has the
power to move with its elegiac, wistful
nostalgia for times and friendships
recaptured now only as dreams in a
foreign land.
The year for the School opened with
a Zeppelin scare, the editor of The
Cliftonian reporting
Apart from this, the Corps is taking up most of our time. Parades take place fi ve days a week, though not necessarily for all. We shall retain our position as our Engineering Corps, one of two schools to whom this privilege is provided, and rumour has it that we are to wrestle with a single-lock bridge instead of our old familiar trestle…
…The Zeppelins have cast their shadow over the School. We eat our evening meal in darkness, and in the shaded glimmer of the light we mislay our clothes, and even in bed the horrid fear hangs over us that we may be torn from our couch by our House Master’s shrill whistle of alarm.
Impact on School Life
Chapel routine was also affected since the apparent need
to enforce a blackout meant that the School reverted to
the old routine in place under Glazebrook with Services in
the daylight only on Sundays.
Sunday evening lectures in Big School
were suspended with House activities
substituting as long as the threat
of aerial bombardment existed. The
Debating Society was another casualty.
Bristol and Plymouth were certainly
targets for German air-raids because
of the burgeoning aircraft industry and
munitions production at the former,
and the naval base at the latter. Bristol
City Council was moved to combat this
threat by turning two-thirds of the City’s
street lamps out. In fact, as so often
happens in war, the chances of this ever
happening were remote. The prevailing
winds would have made it well-nigh
impossible for Zeppelins to reach
Bristol. Nevertheless the threat was
enough to have an impact on School life,
one pupil remarking:
The two chief features of the present Term would appear to be the Zeppelin scares and the cat concerts. Would it be presumptuous to suggest that the two might be combined with advantage? On the fi rst note of the feline song let the Houses be raised, and descending by the fi re escape, disable the disturbers of their sleep.
20
The fate of the Zeppelin attacks is
known – the fate of Clifton’s mighty cat
chorus in 1916 remains unrecorded,
but the threat of Clifton being bombed
was enough for Council to take out
extraordinary insurance against
“aircraft damage.” As 1916 unfolded,
Council was much preoccupied with
Staff leaving to join up, the steady fl ow
of gifts in the form of Exhibitions, and
“the releasing of certain masters….
to undertake research work under the
Munitions Inventions Department.”
21
Since these were by and large chemists,
it would appear that Clifton scientists
were being recruited by the War Offi ce
to help in the development of chemical
weapons to counter the increasing use
of gas by Germany on the Western Front.
The fi rst memorial windows in Chapel
were accepted by the School with
gratitude in May. Mrs Seignitz donated
one in memory of her son, and
Major-General Atkinson likewise,
following the death of both his sons.
One of the early casualties of the year
was Lieutenant HP Nott who had left in
1913 and had arrived in France in 1915.
He was the youngest of three brothers,
all of them to give up their lives in the
trenches. They were a remarkable
family, as this testimony from a Private
soldier to their mother concerning the
youngest brother demonstrates:
It was he alone who ventured out to the German trenches gathering valuable information. He was of a brave and fearless disposition, thinking always of his men and doing all possible in his power to make their load lighter. He was here, there, and everywhere, a veritable ministering angel on many occasions.
By the middle of the year, the School
was becoming increasingly aware
of the grim reality of the war and its
consequences. A lecture on the dire
state of the national economy pulled
no punches and many boys would have
quickly understood this as a result of
severe shortages of fare on offer in
the Grubber. A solemn and moving
sermon delivered in Chapel by Canon
Glazebrook left his congregation in no
doubt as to the darkness of the hour,
calling upon the School to remember
its deeply-embedded tradition of service
and urging the boys before him to
honour the service of others:
You must never forget the price for which your privilege had been purchased. The harvest of peace and progress and brotherhood, which you will reap in an Empire united and regenerated by suffering, can only grow from soil which has been fertilized by the blood of our best, our bravest, our dearest. Do you wish to raise a memorial to them? Then register a sacred vow, if aught which you can do may avail, their sacrifi ce shall not have been made in vain.
Even on the cricket fi eld Cliftonians
could not escape the confl ict, as one
contemporary remembered when
involved in the annual match against
the MCC on the Close. Fielding at cover
point he suddenly heard
the unusual sound of a newspaper boy’s cry….down College Road. At fi rst I thought I had misheard him, but the cry was repeated, “Lord Kitchener drowned! Lord Kitchener drowned! Special!” Play stopped…..Then those few who had secured a newspaper passed on the appalling news. It was heard with deep misgivings, presumably by all, certainly by me……There would be no early end to the war now.
22
With the Somme offensive starting in
July, Clifton casualties grew daily, one in
ten serving now having lost their lives.
One such was a Pre master who had
joined the Clifton Staff in 1908. He led
a successful raid on German trenches
but was killed by a shell whilst making
his way back across No Man’s Land. His
Commanding Offi cer wrote to Dr King:
You gave us a good offi cer and a good man. I only wish he had lived to take his honours back to his friends and fellow-masters.
The Pre Head Master, Harry Matthews,
took the news badly and wrote this
testimony:
To those who were privileged to know Harry Alfred Butt he will always remain the type of modesty, loyalty and gallantry. He knew the world as few schoolmasters can do, for he “roughed it” for nearly fi fteen years in the peach orchards and mining centres of California and had travelled extensively in Europe and the West Indies. His devotion to his parents, his loyalty to the School, his affection for the “little lads” in the Pre, endeared him to all who knew him…….Of no one can it more be truly said:
“E’en as he trod that day to God so walked he from his birth,
In simpleness and gentleness and honour and clean mirth.”
Matthews attempted to commemorate
Butt’s name by raising funds for a new
classroom block in the Pre to be named
after him but Council eventually decided
against this on cost grounds. Harry Butt
is commemorated in one of the lancet
windows in the Chapel’s chancel.
Commem came and went, the Bishop of
Bristol making the point that
The sons of the School who have gone forth to war are a refutation of the idea that it is material things which count
and, as Term drew to a close, Clifton
boys looked forward to a summer
break in which many of them would be
involved in a variety of activities, as The
Cliftonian records:
For many years past our relations with the farmers of Gloucestershire and Somerset have been most friendly…..It is therefore with great pleasure that throughout the hay harvest parties of boys have gone out to lend a hand in the hay fi elds, and in this way repay our neighbours to some extent for their friendliness and forbearance.
Others volunteered further afi eld,
101 boys and 9 masters attending a
“Lumber Camp” in East Bergholt in
Suffolk from 1 August to 14 September.
These camps were run on military lines,
the boys living in tents arranged on
three sides of a square. The tents were
camoufl aged because of the real fear of
Zeppelin attacks. Conditions were fairly
primitive and the weather not always
conducive to enjoyable camping, but
one of those who attended looked back
and remembered camp-fi re sing-songs
round a battered piano, boxing matches,
football and the moon and stars,
canoeing and boating on the Stour and
tennis parties held by local families in
nearby villages.
23
The work of felling and stripping trees,
many of them for use in the trenches as
props, was hard and monotonous:
but in spite of that and in spite of the weather, it was a good holiday, for were we not living in the open air all the time, and were we not doing something for the nation?
Huntly Gordon, who had found it
impossible to sing the hymns in his fi nal
Chapel Service so moved was he at the
thought of leaving Clifton which “had
come to mean so much” – some things
remain immune to the march of Time
– was one of over 120 who attended the
OTC Camp at Tidworth Pennings and he
later recalled
The programme exceeded our expectations. Contingents from many famous public schools were there, and we were given demonstrations of every aspect of warfare. We put on gas masks, hesitatingly entered a tent full of chlorine gas, and were relieved to fi nd ourselves unaffected by it.
No Health & Safety or Risk Assessment
documentation required in those days!
The fi nal day saw a realistic night-
operation involving a trench attack:
On the dot of time whistles blew, up the ladders we went, and out into no-man’s-land, while the barrage crashed deafeningly overhead. Several hundred cadets from rival schools charged forwards, and a free fi ght for the honour of our respective schools was just beginning when the bugles blew the “standfast”, searchlights were switched on, and we all adjourned for hot cocoa. That night’s operation was the most realistic piece of training that ever came my way. We thought it a pity that the war itself could not have been conducted on similar lines.
If the Clifton war poems of 1914 had
been full of patriotic fervour and those
of 1915 had displayed a yearning and a
nostalgia born of the growing realisation
concerning the nature of the confl ict,
then, as with war poetry in general,
the 1916 poems begin to reveal an
understanding of, and a sadness at,
the scale of the loss. As one Cliftonian
noted, the casualty lists pinned to the
Chapel door were getting longer and
longer, and this is refl ected in a poem
published in The Cliftonian entitled
Somewhere in France, which confronts
for the fi rst time how many of the dead
were increasingly being denied a fi nal,
known resting-place:
24
Somewhere in France, ‘mid crash and blaze,O’er riven earth, through shell-shock’d airCharging upon the entrench’d foe, While surged the battle forth and fro,He fell – none witting where or when.
Where to his grave can Love repair,To lay her wreath of sorrow there?Tis No Man’s Land; and no men know –“Somewhere in France.”
Somewhere in France? – Nay, whereso’erYoung hearts are brave, young faces fair;Where fresh winds blow, and sweet fl owers grow,And whispering streams through woodlands fl owThough all be bleak, and cold, and bare,“Somewhere in France.”
The Autumn Term saw Clifton thrown into
crisis:
Disappointing and unsatisfactory is the only verdict that can be given on the achievements of our football XV this Term. We fi nish up the season with defeat in every match in the 1st XV….This season must appear in the light of a crisis, for it is apparent that the present system on Big-Side is a failure.
The war had now become such a fi xed
part of life as a whole, rather than an
extraordinary event in its own right, that
fewer and fewer references to it can
be seen in various Clifton publications
and documentation. During the winter
holidays, evidence of the impact that the
German U-Boat campaign was having
on the nation’s food supply can be seen
at the School:
During the Christmas holidays members of North and South Town were engaged upon the task of levelling the ground at Beggar’s Bush, under the supervision of Mr Imlay, and now a portion of that fi eld is being cultivated, but owing to the effects of a severe frost it is impossible to say yet what kind of vegetables the authorities will select for plantation.
One of the early casualties of 1917 was
Lieutenant Herbert McLaughlin (WiH
1912-1915), his elder brother having
been previously killed in the year he left
Clifton. The cross carried in Chapel today
was presented by his father in memory of
his two boys, but he did not live to see his
gift, dying before the cross was fi nished
and presented to the School – one of the
sadder footnotes to Clifton at war.
Thrift was becoming an increasingly
rallying cry both nationally and at School.
The Sixth Form rose to this challenge as
a note in Council’s Finance Committee
Minutes for 17 January reveals:
A memorandum was received from the Sixth Form asking that the cash value of the various Prizes to be awarded this year might be invested in War Savings Certifi cates, the said Certifi cates to be held by the College and realised after the War when the Prizes should be given in books to the winners.
25
Memorial
In common with the rest of the country thoughts were
beginning to turn towards how the dead could be most
effectively commemorated.
Douglas Haig (SH 1877-1879), newly
promoted to Field Marshal, wrote to
Frances Younghusband (SH 1876-1880)
about the growing number of named
War Exhibitions being offered by Clifton
as a result of the efforts of the OC
Society. By 1917, seventeen such awards
had been founded. Haig concluded:
It is only right that the sons of those who have sacrifi ced everything for their country should be given the chance of an education such as their fathers would have wished for them, and the knowledge that the chance will be given will bring comfort to the minds of many who are yet serving.
founded, windows dedicated, and splendid endowments made in memory of some of those who have fallen in the war.
But, natural and entirely good as these are, they seem to me not to reach the whole heart of our feeling for those who have gone. Many of us have lost brothers; some of us sons; most of us, inevitably, school-friends, to whom we should rejoice to grave some personal memorial for them that will come after.
Such thoughts were echoed in a letter
to The Cliftonian from Cuthbert Buckle
(OH 1894-1904) who had been a master
at St Paul’s when war broke out, and
who immediately joined the RASC. He
survived the war and went on to work
for the League of Nations although his
brother Henry (ST 1892-1897), did not,
being one of the fi rst to fall in 1914:
Many of us as the war goes on must be fi nding that our thoughts, set in the main so steadily forward, turn at times, perhaps with growing insistence, to the achievements of the past two years and a half, and, above all, to the doers of great deeds done. After the war is over there will be of course a Memorial or Memorials;already, indeed, scholarships are being
His suggestion was that the Chapel seats
should have named plaques attached to
them with the name and other details
such as House, dates at Clifton, regiment
and where and when they fell inscribed
upon them, the seats preferably being
the ones that they occupied whilst at
school. Nothing came of this idea but it
is the fi rst mention of the need to create
a permanent, physical Memorial to
Clifton’s dead which was fi nally to see
expression in the building of Memorial
Arch. The fi nal logic of his letter was and
is hard to refute:
The main thing is the idea. What I suggest would institute a personal, living, and growing memorial, bringing back and setting for ever in the Chapel the memory of Cliftonians who had loved Clifton as she should be loved, and confi rming in this very heart of the School a greater tradition than ever for those yet to sit in these seats of the mighty dead.
1917
The early months of 1917 at Clifton were dominated by the
state of games, the experiment of abandoning runs and
concentrating more on athletics and football having made
not a jot of difference to the results.
The consequence of all this was the
setting up of a committee to discuss the
whole matter with the Old Cliftonians
and others “who have the interests of
the School at heart” and to come up with
a solution. Other than that, the magazine
no longer comments on casualties, such
a routine occurrence had they become,
and contented itself with reporting that
all prizes at the Annual Sports, barring
the cups, were done away with “as a war
economy” and that the School would be
entertaining Colonel Gordon Leith of the
Army Canteen Committee whose task
was to expand arrangements for Clifton
boys to go on camps during August
and September.
Clifton’s Roll of Honour by June 1917
had risen to 350 and included the
remaining brothers of the Nott family.
Their Commanding Offi cer wrote as
follows to their parents:
Your family have played truly a noble part in the great war, and it will be some consolation to you to know how unselfi shly and bravely your sons gave their lives for their country.
whilst a letter from a former Head
Master could have put it no better:
I knew and loved all your boys. They were men who counted for something in College life, and who were not afraid to take a strong Christian stand. Their infl uence was all for the good.
26
27
Clifton poems continued to move in a
solemn direction in terms of addressing
loss – not much mention now of glory.
Dr FS Boas (BH 1877-1881), an eminent
writer, submitted a poem about his
nephew, Ernest, the concluding verses
of which sound a very different tone:
There, blithely venturing in the van,A kinsman of mine own,In years a boy, in heart a man,Was radiantly o’erthrown.“Gay as a lark” – the tribute thisBy chief and comrade penned.He sang his way to the AbyssAnd smiled on Death as friend.For him no sombre requiem,No threnody of tears,Who bartered for Youth’s diademThe dross of After-Years.
This was followed by an extraordinary
poem refl ecting the wholesale change
in attitude to war by the middle of 1917.
Composed by a grieving father, there is
now anger and helplessness here which
no amount of patriotic fervour or noble
sentiment could possibly assuage:
He died; and me a wild eidolon seized,Revenge. A fl aming curtain of desireFor victory and revenge hid from my sightThe inviolable depths where gods inspireThe soul of men with knowledge of the Right,And torment is appeased.There was one service, and by this, they said,We could repay the living and….. the dead.Repay, we whom our days’ declineHad forced to watch the sufferings of youthThought only to repay; but few were foundSo damned in soul that they could shroud the truthUnder a velvet path of lies, and hound To death all the divine.The beast in man may hold the god at bay,But silver-tongued the beast can ever slay.
They told us that golden, glorious pageOf History, when all the world had bowed‘Neath the all-shadowing plumes of Germany’s crest;Would hail us as the feats to have allowedNo sentiment to enter in their breast,The fi rst fruits of the ageWhen men of iron should Reason throne aboveAnd discipline the vagaries of love.
The war-lords’ summons whispered through our homes,We, mad for victory, answered with a shout,And went. Mine was the work to guideThat yielding mass along the ways and outInto the tanks; to watch their oily glideWithin the vast steel domes,Wherein the morning gloom they heave and roll,And every bubble’s pregnant with a soul.
Even those walls of steel denied their gleam,And dully lowered. I thought the putrid sea,The starving eyes and bloodless tangled limbsFuel, scarce worthy of the mournful hymnsSung by the hissing steam;Till for a moment short the vengeful tideRevealed the fi gure of my son who died.
No boy at Clifton reading this would now
have any illusions about what awaited
him in Flanders.
By the middle of 1917, discussions
about a suitable Memorial were moving
forward, the editor of the School
magazine writing:
By the time these lines appear the war will have lasted for just three years. 365 names now appear on the Roll of Honour; that is, of every eight Old Cliftonians who have been serving the King in the Navy and the Army one has given his life. A heavy toll has indeed been taken of our best and bravest. And as each one falls, two others step forward to fi ll the gap. “Clifton, remember these thy sons!” are words that are ever before us, and many of us are wondering what form of memorial will be selected as the most worthy to commemorate our fallen heroes.
28
Several OCs had written in support of
the suggestion made by Captain Buckle
concerning Chapel plaques, but the OC
Society decided to set up a committee
to consider this matter in some depth.
Food shortages continued to affl ict the
School but many looked back in later
years on that period with fondness:
Looking back they were wonderful and happy times for which I shall always be grateful
recalled one such. Oliver Folds
remembered an amusing anecdote
relating to food shortages in School
House in 1917:
In our House we had a South African called Terry East and knowing we were hard up for food, his people in South Africa sent him a leg of biltong…..We did not know how to deal with it, nor did Mrs Franklin. So after much boiling and other cooking it still remained as hard as wood and sadly eventually went into the dustbin.
Commem was moved to the end of
June and once again there was no
Prize Giving. The sermon was preached
by Canon Wilson, who foresaw the
founding of the League of Nations when
he told the boys that he hoped to live
long enough to see a “federation of free
nations” which will work to make war
only a “tradition of the past.”
Unlike many HMC schools, Clifton’s
pupil numbers, after an initial drop,
did not suffer much doubtless to the
considerable relief of Council’s Finance
Committee. By October 1917, there were
650 pupils in the School and this, whilst
being welcomed fi nancially, presented
its own logistic diffi culties in terms of
feeding and teaching them with a Staff
depleted by war service. Once again,
large numbers of Clifton boys had
worked on the land during the summer.
One camp, mostly involving logging and
potato-picking, was based in Wareham
in Dorset, whilst the other was a
more mobile unit assisting farmers
in Lostwithiel, Looe and Liskeard
in Cornwall – “Fun but hard work”
commented one attendee. However,
the boys covered themselves in credit
with locals, offi cial returns being full of
praise for their work.
The Roll of Honour had now reached
402, one of whom was the Clifton
master Harry Clissold. Canon
Glazebrook preached about him to
the School in October 1917, talking
of the example he had set and of his
oft-spoken phrase to the boys – “What
matters is not what we do but who we
are” – and concluding
We must often lose our heroes; but it is the loss which proves them to be heroes. Our grief is the price we pay for learning their value.
So this day to day picture of life at
Clifton crystallizes into this curious
combination of schoolboy laughter, of
well-worn routines, punctuated with
moments of quiet solemnity and sorrow.
Whilst one correspondent found the
state of the Chapel Quad the most
pressing issue of the day, another was
beginning to formulate proposals for a
tangible memorial:
My point is that whatever form the memorial takes it should be regarded as a consecrated spot, and every Cliftonian, now and to come, who passes by should raise his hat or make his salute, as a recognition that he owes to the dead honoured there his liberty and his right to move unfettered in the world.
29
I believe it has been proposed that a memorial arch should be built at the entrance from College Road. May I add to that by suggesting there should be cloisters of moderate length beyond the archway, fl anked by rooms dedicated to memorials, trophies, and historical records of this world-wide upheaval. Should this idea be carried out, those belonging to the School who have given their lives could be suitably commemorated on the walls of the cloisters.
My hope is that for all time those Cliftonians who stood in the breach and gave everything shall be held in daily remembrance.
Apart from the normal round of House
matches, the College also hosted a
Lecture on the evolution of submarines
and submarine warfare, and the whole
school was taken down to the Triangle
Picture House to see the offi cial
Government fi lm of the war in Italy.
In addition, Clifton entered the NRA
Sniping Competition, coming fi rst. Oliver
Folds remembered the occasion:
One was automatically in the OTC and this enabled the older boys going into the Army to get a commission after quite a short training in a cadet battalion. The Corps was one of only two RE Corps which meant that besides the ordinary rifl e drill you were taught how to build bridges. This was done on some bridging pits on the Close or, if pontoon bridges, on the Zoo pond – an extra attraction for visitors to the Zoo.
I remember on one occasion that we were building a pontoon when a small party of offi cers came to watch and later we were assembled in Big School for a talk by a rather ordinary looking Major. But when he took off his greatcoat for the lecture one saw the most decorated soldier ever up to that time – General, later Field Marshal Lord Birdwood, who was an OC. We also had a visit from another very well known soldier, Field Marshal Robertson. An extraordinary man who rose from the ranks which was very unusual in those days. He came to present a trophy to a boy in our House, Douglas McDougall, who had won the top prize for rifl e shooting for a cadet at Bisley. It was immediately after breakfast and on a very cold day and the Corps was assembled in the Quad. Several boys fainted and Robertson was not amused and said so.
Lord Birdwood
Field Marshal Robertson
30
As the year drew to a close, a shadow
was cast over the School with the
resignation as Chairman of Council of
the founding Head Master, now Bishop,
John Percival due to failing health. The
School was in good heart – full, healthy
and having enjoyed a term of reasonable
weather. Football results had failed
again to match this, but the editor of
The Cliftonian was at pains to remind his
readers that
more serious things, naturally and properly in times like these, occupy much of the time and most of the energy of the older boys.
Casualties continued to mount
remorselessly, and the magazine
recorded a further twenty-three killed
and twenty-seven wounded, many of
them recent leavers and thus known
to boys and masters at Clifton. On 22
November, the OC Society met at the
Central Buildings in Westminster:
The report and the balance sheet having been adopted, Sir Henry Newbolt proposed the following resolution:- That the Clifton College War Memorial consist of three parts; (1) a permanent memorial to be erected at Clifton, (2) an Exhibition fund for sons of Old Cliftonians killed or incapacitated in the war, and (3) an Endowment Fund.
This proposal was seconded by the
Head Master, Dr King, who rose to
speak, reminding the meeting of the
lines on the South African Memorial
and recounting
one of those who fell quite early in the war writing home shortly before his death, said that the thing that had been in his mind and helped him to go through what he had to go through, and to do what he had to do were the words “Clifton, Remember”. Probably those words had helped other old Clifton boys to do their duty. He therefore thought in any memorial set up they should have something which appealed to the imagination and would speak to the boys in generations to come.
Sir Henry Newbolt
31
1918
1918 opened to a new sporting regime designed, it was hoped,
to halt the decline in Clifton sport. Over 16s were divided into
four packs which ran once a week on Saturday afternoons.
Tuesday afternoons were to be given over
to engineering, a short Cross-Country race
was to be introduced and Athletic Sports
taken more seriously.
Signs of increased economic hardship
abounded, including the reduction in font
size for the magazine in order to save paper
along with the cancellation of the School
Orchestral Concert, the Director of Music,
Dr Beachcroft, giving instead a lecture on
“How to listen to Music.”
More memorial windows were donated
to Chapel, perhaps the most poignant of
these being those on the south side of the
chancel, depicting St Augustine and St
Oswald. The former was donated by two
families whose sons had been the very best
of friends at Clifton, as the dedication reads:
To the Glory of God, and in loving memory of FW Marston and LC Wall, who fell fi ghting in France. Firm friends in life, death severed them, but for a space.
For most conspicuous bravery and self-sacrifi ce. When a unit on his left was driven back, thus leaving his fl ank in the air and his company practically surrounded, he
fearlessly exposed himself to re-adjust the line, walking up and down within fi fty yards of the enemy under a withering fi re. He personally removed several wounded men and was the last to leave the village. Later he again re-organised the line, exposing himself regardless of all danger the whole time, and when the enemy four times counter-attacked he sprang each time upon the parapet, deliberately risking his life, and being eventually mortally wounded, in order to stimulate his command. After the enemy had broken through on his left, he again mounted the parapet, and with a few men – who were inspired by his great example – forced them once more to withdraw, thereby undoubtedly saving the left fl ank.
Food shortages continued to exercise
the minds of the School administration
and Dr King was asked to give Council
a full report on how food rationing was
affecting the boarders and what steps he
was taking to ensure that the boys were
being fed adequately. German attempts
on the Western Front to make a decisive
breakthrough brought another Victoria
Cross. GHT Paton (WaH 1909-1914) had
already gained the Military Cross for bravery
in a previous campaign. At Gonnelieu he
behaved with quite extraordinary courage at
a time when all seemed lost, as the citation
for his Victoria Cross suggests:
32
He was just 22.
Throughout the war, the Library had
benefi ted from gifts purchased by Old
Cliftonians at Red Cross sales, one of
which was a letter from Lord Nelson.
In May 1918, Henry Newbolt gave the
Library one of his poems, entitled
A Letter from the Front. The whole tenor
of this piece is very far removed from
his earlier verse – many soldiers had
carried copies of Vitaï Lampada in their
pockets as they went over the top and
“Playing the Game” was one of the
recurring catchphrases of the war. But
Newbolt’s son George had been badly
wounded and never really recovered,
which affected his father deeply for
the rest of his life. Gone is the naïve
patriotism of his pre-war verse to be
replaced with a wistful and somewhat
puzzled comment on the whole
incongruity of war at the Front:
I was out early to-day, spying aboutFrom the top of a haystack – Such a lovely morning –And when I mounted again to canter backI saw across a fi eld in the broad sunlightA young Gunner Subaltern, stalking alongWith a rook-rifl e held at the ready, and – would You believe it? –A domestic cat, soberly marching beside him.
So I laughed, and felt quite disposed to The youngster,And shouted out “the top of the morning” to him,And wished him “Good sport!” – And then I rememberedMy rank, and his, and what I ought to be doing:And I rode nearer, and added, “I can only supposeYou have not seen the Commander-in-Chief’s orderForbidding English offi cers to annoy their AlliesBy hunting and shooting.”But he stood and salutedAnd said earnestly, “I beg your pardon, Sir,I was only going out to shoot a sparrowTo feed my cat with.”So there was the whole picture,The lovely early morning, the occasional shellScreeching and scattering past us, The empty landscape, –Empty, except for the young Gunner salutingAnd the cat anxiously watching his Every movement.
I may be wrong, and I may have told it badly,But it struck me as being extremely ludicrous.
By July, the desperate fi ghting on
the Western Front can be seen in the
long list of casualties appearing in the
School magazine. That summer over
fi fty Cliftonians were killed, over seventy
wounded and nineteen taken prisoner
– though both serving Cliftonians and
the School were not to know that the
war was, in fact, grinding at last to a
conclusion as an exhausted German
Army and a collapsing Home Front in
Germany itself were beginning to make
it impossible for Germany to continue
with the confl ict. None of this was
apparent at School:
33
We are now at the close of another School year, and one nearing the fourth anniversary of the outbreak of war, whose end still seems as far as ever; and this year we are not even comforted, as we have been for the last two or three years, by the assurance that the war will certainly be over by Christmas.
Among those who were reported killed
was Robert Reynolds, who had left
Clifton in 1916 after a successful career
culminating in him captaining the 1st
XV. He went straight into the Army and
was killed by a shell landing near his
dugout. He was just nineteen and was
buried in the military cemetery at Anzin,
west of Arras.
School life thus meandered on – a
lecture entitled “Belgium under
Germany” was given to the boys
refl ecting perhaps the growing debate
nationally on what the war aims of the
confl ict actually were, the invasion of
Belgium having long receded into the
past. The arrival of the Americans, too,
touched Clifton:
On July 4th the Corps took part in a procession through Bristol to commemorate America’s Independence Day, and the same evening a detachment of American troops marched through the School precincts from the Zoo to College Road, and were heartily cheered by the School.
Thus began a relationship between the
US Army and Clifton which was to take
on a far deeper meaning some twenty-
fi ve years later.
Once again the summer holidays saw
the boys working on the land:
We have had a number of opportunities of assisting local farmers with haymaking and other work….and several camps for agricultural work in the holidays have been arranged in different parts of Cornwall, where we hope to prove as useful as we did last year.
By the time the boys returned to Clifton
in September, Europe was gripped by
an infl uenza pandemic which appears
to have left the School relatively
unscathed –
The practice of daily spraying probably is responsible for our comparative immunity, a theory which should reconcile us to a continuance of it
- and the German Army was in full
retreat. Rumours of peace at last
abounded:
We publish this number at the beginning of a School year which may well be the most momentous that Clifton has ever known. It will bring us within sight of peace if not peace itself.
Most of the boys now at Clifton had
known nothing other than the School
operating against a background of this
major confl ict:
To us, whose whole thinking life has been passed amid the strain of war, peace seems almost a dream, but we must face the new problems and the new ideals nobly.
Peace
By the time the last edition of The Cliftonian
came out in 1918, the war had, indeed, come to
an end.
Oliver Folds had decided to apply for a
commission in the Tank Corps – he only
found out later that the role of junior
tank offi cers was to walk in front of the
tank guiding it to its target. He merely
recorded the end of the confl ict in his
diary with these words:
November 11th at 11am the armistice was signed. Obviously there was great rejoicing and everyone went mad but there were many gaps in most people’s lives.
Relief tempered with gravitas was
the dominant emotion, one Cliftonian
writing:
34
Peace has come at last, and the load that has weighed so heavily on the School for more than four years has been removed. And looking back on these years of stress, we may claim that the sons of Clifton have borne themselves nobly. At the beginning of the year 1915 it was estimated that 1500 Old Cliftonians were serving. That total at the end of the war was more than doubled. The oldest soldier serving entered the School when it was but one term old; some who are well within the recollection
of many of us have laid down their lives. Even yet it is not possible to count the full toll, and it is probable that the present total of 530 will be increased. “Their name liveth for evermore.”
Relief at the cessation of hostilities was
tempered by the news of the death of
John Percival. For some years Council
had been planning to meet his request
that he should be burried in a vault in
Clifton’s Chapel and Council members
now began to put this in motion to the
evident satisfaction of the School:
he has watched over our destinies faithfully and lovingly, and now that his long life of toil and service has ended the School is profoundly moved by the thought that he has been laid to rest in the Chapel where he inspired so many generations of boys to share his own high ideals and noble principles.
35
As yet the School was still in the dark
as to what great memorial should
appear at Clifton to mark the sacrifi ces
of its former pupils over the past four
years although it was clear to the
pupils that the OC Committee charged
with deciding this had already raised
signifi cant sums, over £8000 having
been collected for Scholarships and war
Exhibitions, and over £20,000 for “other
purposes” of which a lasting physical
reminder was one. Remembering was
high on the list of the many mixed
emotions at the School and was, once
more, refl ected in verse:
PEACE!
Peace! The cry rings throughout the world,The bells repeat their message far and wide,Yet in some lonely hearts there still shall beSorrow and grief for loved ones who have died.
Deeming their lives of little worth,They fought with courage high, nor knew they fear;They died, they gave for us their lives, their all;Their mem’ry shall we ever cherish dear.
No useless coffi n shrouds their bones,No gorgeous monument, for eyes to see,Tells where they lie, save just a wooden cross,Whereon is grav’n the legend – R.I.P.
Not great verse perhaps, but we should
not underestimate the strong feelings
of this generation, young and old, when
the guns stopped. In the silence that
followed, it refl ected on the scale of loss
and on the fact that for many there was
to be no permanent grave to mark their
passing.
And so life at Clifton, as with many other
HMC schools of the time, returned to
some sort of normality. Sport came
back onto the agenda, along with
lectures, concerts and all the pre-war
activities. That this world had in fact
passed, such was the enormity of the
social and economic changes that were
a direct consequence of the confl ict,
had yet to seep into the collective
Clifton consciousness. Casualty lists
continued to appear in the magazine,
solemn reminders of what had been,
as returning Cliftonians succumbed
to wounds. Throughout the war, these
lists had appeared under the heading
“Vitae Prodigi Patriae Profuere”, and a
poem under that title appeared in the
February 1919 edition of the magazine:
O spent with battle, garnered to your rest,It this not bliss?Slain in strange lands and seas, or East or West,Know you of this
Peace won by your blood shed, and lives laid low,Weariness, pain;Grim strife neath wintry skies or tropic glow,Fierce suns, chill rain.
On swamp, dark, burning sand? The world’s black nightYe turned to day,Saluting from afar Dawn’s promised light.And shall we say
“For you there is slight guerdon; ours the gain?”Ah no, for youThe joy of having trod a pathway plain:Your price, your due.
Never in this world or the other canRust or decay!Loud rang the call: “Arise! And play the man!”And so your pay
36
Glory of having followed one clear gleamO’er waters dark:Seeing the right and scorning things that seemThe blind man’s mark.
Taking your cross, foreknowing that earth’s crownWas thorns, wounds death:Yours the strong love no cataract may drown,Nought vanquisheth.And ours the thanks shall grow from year to yearTo you who sleep; But oh, for those who drop for you the tear,For them we weep.
This mixture of guilt and grief, of trying
to make sense of the senseless, merely
refl ected the national mood as the
country struggled to come to terms with
the events of the past fi ve years. For
some, putting these feelings in verse
was one of the only ways they could
come to terms with all of this.
For the next few months, the last of the
casualties were recorded and another
VC. Edward Bellew (OH 1897-1900) had
shown extraordinary courage at the
2nd Battle of Ypres but had then been
captured and he was not repatriated
until 1919. He died in 1961, the sad
postscript to his story being the theft of
his VC from the museum in which it was
housed. It has never been recovered.
The death of Frank Callingham (OH
1913-1916) was, perhaps one of the
saddest of the Clifton fallen:
He received his commission in the Sherwood Foresters in 1917. He died in hospital in London on February 29th as a result of being gassed on the very last day of the war.
In June, the Head Master received a
curious letter from the war Trophies
Committee:
Sir,
I am directed by the War Offi ce Trophies Committee to inform you that, at the wish of the Offi cer commanding 293rd Siege Battery, an Austrian gun has been allocated to Clifton College, for safe care and custody. Will you please inform me whether you are willing to accept this trophy?
Dr King did so and one wonders what
happened to it – one of Clifton’s “urban
myths” is that it was later buried on
the Close.
Commem returned to its pre-war
format in July:
A very large gathering of Old Cliftonians was present, and other visitors, whose number unfortunately had to be limited by the diffi culty of obtaining accommodation in the neighbourhood…..a large number of young soldiers and sailors fresh from active service were particularly welcome on this occasion.
It is almost as if those who had survived
the war needed to come back to their
School to touch base and plug back
into what they had known, and to
draw strength from the College which
stood as it had stood in their youth as
a constant, untouched and unsullied
memory. This combination of the here
and now and the past was encapsulated,
perhaps, by a recital given by Harry
Plunket Greene of The Best School of
All fame; followed by a torchlight tattoo
courtesy of the School’s OTC.
37
The Commem Service continued
the theme of memorial with the
presentation of a “fi nely bound volume”
containing the names of all Cliftonians
who had fallen. The whole concept
of remembrance dominated national
thinking at this time, which was
understandable especially in view of the
fact that for so many mothers, wives
and children there were no tangible
graves to visit in order to express their
grief. The queues which formed to
see the tomb of the Unknown Soldier
in Westminster Abbey and the impact
the building of the Cenotaph had in
Whitehall was clear evidence of how
deeply such grief was imbedded in so
many families of the time. No “closure”
or “grief counselling” available in those
days. The need to keep memories alive
exercised the minds of the War Cabinet
in 1919:
There is a danger that a precedent will be established which in remote years…..might conceivably prove inconvenient and devoid of meaning.
The Bishop of Norwich touched upon
this in his Commem sermon:
You have the list of those who made the supreme sacrifi ce. We shall presently lay it on the altar…..You cannot, you will not, think of them as dead. They live, and not only do they live, but their spirit lives in you….in the years to come you will need jealously to guard this inspiration. It is natural – it is well-nigh inevitable – that a time of reaction, of relaxation of effort, should follow upon a period as strenuous as that which we have been through.
and he concluded by urging the boys to
perpetuate the tradition of service for
which so many Cliftonians had made the
ultimate sacrifi ce:
For you, as for them, the opportunity will come suddenly in some unlooked-for way.
At the end of the year, Council fi nally
decided in favour of the building of a
Memorial Arch on College Road.
38
The Aftermath of War
1919-1922
Evidence from the next two years suggests that the School
rapidly returned to normal with pupils concerning
themselves with such matters as the clock on New Field,
the thorny question of the wearing of top-hats when off campus,
and the growing custom (to be deplored, of course) of clapping at
cricket matches.
Yet two themes emerge which hint
at the growth of a confl ict of culture
between pupil and adult at Clifton.
Several articles complain about the lack
of enthusiasm of pupils over a variety
of issues, and especially in terms of
supporting their sports teams, and
about the tedium imposed upon them by
the OTC and the summer OTC Camps.
This culminated in a poem, set to the
rhythm of The British Grenadier, the
publication of which would have been
unthinkable two or three years ago:
The Clifton College Corps
Some talk of Alexander and some of Hercules,But they and others like them ne’er saw parades like these,Of all the OTCs there are there’s never a
one has moreThan that which we all know of the Clifton College Corps.
More verses continue in much the same
mocking vein, and the concluding lines
pulled no punches:
Then let us pluck up courage and make complaint to thoseWho make us carry rifl es and wear these khaki clothes,For since we have all these parades we only hate the moreThat ancient institution, the Clifton College Corps.
38
This, and the views of some Old
Cliftonians complaining about the
shallowness of the times and the fact
that the young of “today” are over-eager
to embrace all things new, echoed the
cultural split in the nation as a whole.
Two very different generations, the one
looking forward and the other looking
back, struggled to come to terms with
post-war Britain. There was predictable
outrage at the publication of this verse
and the editors of the magazine were
compelled to make a public apology
and a recantation of the attitude it
expressed. The genie, however, was
out of the bottle and the uncertainty
that this must have caused for those
in authority equally determined to
remind pupils of the past generation
must have been akin to that faced by
Heads and Housemasters in the 1960s.
Such fragility of confi dence was seen
in a sermon preached to the school by
Canon Wilson in February 1920. The war
had shaken the foundations of English
society to the core – in a sense, it could
be argued that the 20th Century started
not in 1900 but in 1916 – and one of
the many institutions rocked by the
experience of 1914-1918 was the Church
of England. After the Somme and Ypres
in 1918, the “old dispensations” were no
longer enough. Wilson refl ected on this
in his address:
What is God really like? That is paralysing the Church today.
and he continued by trying to make
sense of the whole issue to his young
congregation:
Which of us suspected, a few years ago, that England was so heroic, that your predecessors in these stalls and on these benches were so splendid, as the last years have proved them to be. It was the life of the unseen Spirit of God building up the sense of right in the hearts of many generations that went before them, the result of the prayers and work of some few whose memories still live among us, and of a vast unnumbered host of the unremembered men who here and elsewhere did their duty in obedience to the voice therein. Now your generation is called upon to face a spiritual crisis –
the spiritual rebuilding of Church and State in the faith of a living and ever present God. Quit you like men. Be strong.
This theme was repeated in the Dean
of Gloucester’s address to the School
at Commem in June of the same year.
He talked about how the war had swept
away “all the old human landmarks”
and urged Cliftonians to call upon the
example of those who fell when faced
with the complex problems of a society
facing an uncertain future:
When now and in the days to come you commemorate those who have fallen and think over the many diffi culties that start up as you contemplate the terrible sacrifi ce of young lives, will you also think over the real message of the Book of Job, that God still is behind all human events, and that He will still justify Himself to those who look with real faith to His great working out of the mysteries of life and death?
Towards the end of the year there is a
hint of irritation in the pupil body over
the fact that its views had not been
sought as to what a fi tting War memorial
at the School should be. The die,
however, had been cast at a meeting of
the OC Society in December where it was
agreed that an architect should now be
appointed to consider a range of designs
and make a fi nal recommendation to the
Committee for its approval.
Lack of certainty continued throughout
1921 with the onset of serious industrial
disputes resulting in the threat of
wholesale strikes and deepening chaos
in Germany, Italy and Russia. The Dean of
Wells referred to this at Commem in July,
referring to Cliftonian traditions which
have been greatly enhanced by the splendid record of lives laid down for the country. To your school be true, and England can wish no more…..I confess I am amazed, I dare not say dismayed, at the prospect of what is going to happen to England. The forces which before the war were threatening us have not gone; the problems are not solved. We have yet to face them all over again.
39
40
In Memoriam
By October, Cliftonians were complaining about the length
of time it was taking to build the Memorial Arch, but the
beginning of its construction did, once more, bring the
focus of the School back to the whole question of remembrance
in a more practical way, inspiring a more considered and
technically better poem from a pupil:
In Memoriam
This, to their memory: though the thing they wroughtNo record needs, that human hand can give –Who, with their love, their life, our freedom bought;Who died, that we may live.
Nay, not in marble their memorial lies,But in the spirit, that quickens us within;The hope, that looks, henceforth, with larger eyes;The peace, they warred to win.
But, for our love of them, and that high cause,This portal stands: that ye, who knew them not,May, for a moment, as ye enter, pause,And they – be ne’er forgot.
The summer of 1922 at last saw the
Arch completed:
The coming out of the trees into leaf, which a late Spring long delayed, greatly adds to its presence.
and although The Cliftonian editor was
somewhat critical of the fact that the
building looked isolated during the
winter, and that the names recorded
within were not in columns as on the
Menin Gate, he conceded that
when the letters have been painted the names will stand out more distinctly.
The passage of time has long since
faded the original painted lettering –
perhaps, if the School does nothing else
to mark the centenary of the outbreak
of the Great War, and the part played
in it by Clifton pupils, masters and Old
Cliftonians, restoring the lettering would
be the most appropriate gesture it could
make in their memory.
40
Mem Arch was offi cially opened
on Friday 30 June 1922 as part of
Commemoration weekend. The
proceedings began with a lunch for
seventy in the Council Room given by
Council and presided over by Earl Haig.
The menu was substantial – Salmon,
Chicken, Ham, Ox tongue, Veal and so
forth indicating that pre-war appetites
were much in evidence. At 3pm there
was a procession from the Wilson Tower
to the South African War Memorial.
The School OTC was drawn up on the
Close facing the statue of St George
whilst the rest of the School stood on
the Chapel side of the Quad. Relatives
of those whose names were newly-
inscribed on the walls of the Arch
gathered near the Memorial. The
procession, headed by the Dean of
Gloucester and the Bishop of Newcastle,
then moved towards the Arch and, as
they moved off, the OTC presented arms.
There then followed a short Service.
41
42
Following the Blessing, the procession
returned to the South African Memorial
where fi rst Earl Haig, and then the Head
Master, addressed those still assembled
there. Haig began by talking of the War:
War may let loose the worst passions of human nature, but a war that is just, that is imposed upon a peace-loving nation by the desire to protect and further the safety of the homeland and justice and liberty among the peoples of the Earth, must always call forth the highest qualities of men. It was such a war that these men, old school-fellows of our own, some of them, all of them linked to us by the knowledge that they too loved and lived among these courts and buildings that have become part of our own being – it was in such a war and for such a cause that these gallant Old Cliftonians laid down their lives.
He went on to talk of the qualities
needed to withstand evil, quoting
Francis Bacon – “Number itselfe in
Armies importeth not much where
the People is of weake courage” –
and concluded
Let your actions and thoughts be worthy of the burden you will one day have to bear as citizens.
Little was he or any of his hearers to
know that once again many of them
would be called upon to put these
words into practice in 1939 and that a
similar ceremony would take place on
the same spot on 3 October 1948. Dr
King responded by thanking Earl Haig,
mentioning the signifi cant role that
he had played during the confl ict, and
commending Sir Henry Newbolt for
the noble lines in which he enshrined for us the meaning of the gateway and the names inscribed upon it, as once before he did for the Memorial at which we are now standing
and he concluded by saying that
In the last months we have seen the Memorial gradually rising. As with all Memorials, there have been questionings and doubts as to the form which ours should take. But we here in winter, spring and summer have seen the stones of the gateway set in their place….Day by day in the future the School will pass beneath its arches, day by day they will see the names upon its walls.
The National Anthem was then sung.
The fi nal act was a march past by the
OTC, Haig having moved to a special
platform in front of the School House
garden to take the salute, encouraging
the younger cadets at the rear, who had
fallen out of step, with the words “Don’t
hurry, you are doing very well.”
43
On the Sunday, Canon Wilson preached
the Commem Sermon. Much of this
was devoted to Percival, but he did talk
of remembrance in words which are as
relevant today as they were then:
Our Commemoration this year has been exceptional. It has been the commemoration of former members of the School who fell in the Great War. To us older people their memory is still fresh, and will remain so as long as we live. To the School, with its brief generations, the memory must soon fade as the years go by. But none of you will ever, I hope, lose the impress of what you have seen and heard in the last two days and to the generations to come our memorial gateway will carry some haunting tribute to the past and those who fell.
44
What still echoes down that corridor of
years to any who read the fate of those
young Clifton men during this time is
one constant fact. Every citation, every
record of these young men without fail
mentions the values for which they gave
up their lives. Chief amongst these was
service, built into the College’s DNA
by Percival at its birth and nourished
by subsequent Head Masters, and by
Canon Wilson in particular, so that it
became the default setting of a Clifton
education in the years leading up to the
war. Jeremy Paxman puzzles over the
question as to why so many wounded
young offi cers, such as Sassoon and
Owen, went back time and time again
to the Front in spite of their injuries.
The answer is simple and is seen
in the words written about those
young Cliftonians by their respective
Commanding Offi cers. They did what
they did out of a deeply refi ned and
embedded sense of duty and of service
to others that was enshrined, whatever
the Ben Elton school of history likes to
imply otherwise, in their characters and
consciences. Service, duty, a sense of
obligation to things outside of oneself,
faith in the triumph of what is right and
what is good, stoicism in the face of
threat, disappointment and danger –
these were the values for which these
Cliftonians fought and for which they
died. The quality of such values are as
much needed today as they were then.
If this Centenary Supplement does
nothing else, let it honour and
remember these Clifton men. The
example of the lives they led and the
values they espoused keep alive the
meaning of their sacrifi ce, their gift to
their own and future generations as
long as such things are talked of.
In an age when everyone has an opinion,
and the means of expressing it widely
in public, it is perhaps not surprising
that the marking of this centenary
has caused controversy. Much of this
has been fuelled by the centre-left
twitterati’s determination to emphasise
the present over the past, the argument
being that the problem with British
institutions, of which a historic Public
School such as Clifton is but one, is that
they continue to defi ne themselves by
what they were rather than by what they
have become, an attitude which has no
place in a modern 21st Century state.
Yet if we do not know where we have
been and if we have no comprehension
of the rock from which we have
been hewn, how can we understand
what we are or the journey that has
100 Years On“Time’s ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away.” Here we
now stand, one hundred years later, “remote” indeed from the
events that took place at Clifton, in Europe and across the world
in the decade between 1914 and 1923.
44
been undertaken in order for us all,
individually and collectively, to arrive
at the point at which we now fi nd
ourselves? Whether we like it or not,
we are all part of an ongoing narrative
and whilst we may smile benignly or
click our tongues at the actions of our
predecessors in the earlier chapters
of this narrative, it is precisely these
actions and beliefs that have moulded
us into what we are today. Three
thousand and sixty-three Cliftonians
“From the great Marshal to the last
recruit” served in the Armed Forces
between 1914 and 1918. Five hundred
and sixty-eight laid down their lives. For
those obsessed with League Tables,
this places Clifton 10th out of some
200 Public Schools. Celebrating this
centenary is fatuous, but remembering
it is a clean different thing. By refl ecting
upon those Cliftonians who died, by
restating the timeless values for which
they were prepared to sacrifi ce their
lives, we pick up the torch that they
fl ung behind and make sense of what
they did when we try to continue to
defend those values in our daily lives
both at school and in the life thereafter.
2014 is thus not a time to rejoice but a
time to refl ect, remember and above all
respect those names on Memorial Arch.
Like them, we are called to serve and
we should give thanks that in so doing
it is unlikely that we shall have to pay
such a price.
As we move through life, we begin to
understand that grief is the price we
have to pay for love, but that love and
unselfi shness in the end conquers all.
Full honour or mention cannot be given
in a publication of this sort to all of those
whose names we pass when we enter
the School from College Road; so let the
last word belong to one of them, Charles
Stiebel (PH 1890-1892) who was killed in
action in 1917. In his haversack, a letter
was found addressed to his wife which
he had hoped would never be posted:
I believe that if death should separate us for a while I should always love you. Dear, I believe that the love of God and pure love of one another are one and the same thing. Just as a drop of sea-water is in every way like and part of the great God. I don’t believe people can all of them always feel the love of God, nor does He expect it, but we know that it will grow up one day, and then it will be so beautiful that we cannot even imagine it now. Still, I hope, as you do, that we shall keep our individuality.
Dear, whatever you do if we are parted, don’t despair. It is the devil’s strong weapon which hurls many lives to ruin. If faith fails – that is the faith of the heart and mind – go on living faithfully – that is good enough for God – and the other will come. Now my darling. Give my love to the babies.
Your own lover and husband,
Charlie
“The choicest fl owers are watered with tears.”
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