Transcribed from the 1878 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
UPPINGHAM BY THE SEA.
A Narrative of the Year at Borth.
BY
J. H. S.
[Greek text].
London:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1878.
[_All Rights reserved_.]
CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS,
CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS.
EDUARDO THRING,
_SCHOLAE UPPINGHAMIENSIS CONDITORI ALTERI_,
_OB CIVES SERVATOS_:
ET
MAGISTRIS ADJUTORIBUS,
QUI,
SALUTE COMMUNI IN ULTIMUM ADDUCTA DISCRIMEN,
DE RE PUBLICA
NON DESPERAVERUNT.
PREFACE.
In the spring of 1876 and of 1877, letters under the heading "Uppingham
by the Sea" were published in _The Times_ newspaper, and were read with
interest by friends of the school. We have thought the following
narrative would be best introduced to those readers under a name already
pleasantly familiar to them, and have borrowed, with the writer's
permission, the title of his sketches for our own more detailed account
of the same events.
The readers whom we have in view will demand no apology for the attempt
to supply a circumstantial record of so memorable an episode in the
school's history. It deserves indeed an abler historian; but one
qualification at any rate may be claimed by the present writer: an eye-
witness from first to last, but a minor actor only in the scenes he
chronicles, he enjoyed good opportunities of watching the play, and risks
no personal modesty in relating what he saw.
The best purpose of the narrative will have been served if any Uppingham
boy, as he reads these pages, finds in them a new reason for loyalty to
the society whose name he bears.
JUNE 27TH, 1878,
FOUNDER'S DAY.
CHAPTER I.--EXILES, OLD AND NEW.
"_O what have we ta'en_?" _said the fisher-prince_,
"_What have we ta'en this morning's tide_?
_Get thee down to the wave_, _my carl_,
_And row me the net to the meadow's-side_."
_In he waded, the fisher-carl_,
_And_ "_Here_," _quoth he_, "_is a wondrous thing_!
_A cradle_, _prince_, _and a fair man-child_,
_Goodly to see as the son of a king_!"
_The fisher-prince he caught the word_,
_And_ "_Hail_," _he cried_, "_to the king to be_!
_Stranger he comes from the storm and the night_;
_But his fame shall wax, and his name be bright_,
_While the hills look down on the Cymry sea_."
FINDING OF TALIESIN.
Elphin, son of Gwyddno, the prince who ruled the coasts between the Dovey
and the Ystwith, came down on a May-day morning to his father's fishing-
weir. All that was taken that morning was to be Elphin's, had Gwyddno
said. Not a fish was taken that day; and Elphin, who was ever a luckless
youth, would have gone home empty-handed, but that one of his men found,
entangled in the poles of the weir, a coracle, and a fair child in it.
This was none other than he who was to be the father of Cymry minstrelsy,
and whom then and there his rescuers named Taliesin, which means Radiant
Brow. His mother, Ceridwen, seeking to be rid of her infant, but loath
to have the child's blood on her head, had launched him in this sea proof
cradle, to take the chance of wind and wave. The spot where he came to
land bears at this day the name of Taliesin. On the hill-top above it
men show the grave where the bard reposes and "glories in his namesake
shore."
* * * * *
There is something magnetic in a famous site: it attracts again a like
history to the old stage. Thirteen centuries and a half after the
finding of Taliesin, the same shore became once again an asylum for other
outcasts, whose fortunes we propose to chronicle.
But since the day when they drifted to land the cradle of the bard, the
waves have ebbed away from Gwyddno's weir, and left a broad stretch of
marsh and meadow between it and the present coast, where stands the
fishing village of Borth. The village fringes the sea-line with half a
mile of straggling cottages; but the eye is caught at once by a massive
building of white stone, standing at the head of the long street, and
forming a landmark in the plain. This building is the Cambrian Hotel,
reared on a scale that would suggest the neighbourhood of a populous
health-resort. But the melancholy silence which haunts its doors is
rarely broken, between season and season, by the presence of guests,
unless it be some chance sportsman in quest of marsh-fowl, or a
land-agent in quest of rents.
When, therefore, on the 15th of March, 1876, a party of four visitors--the
Rev. Edward Thring, Headmaster of Uppingham School, one of the Trustees
of the school, and two of the masters--were seen mounting the steps of
the porch, it was a sight to make the villagers wonder by what chance so
many guests came to knock at the door in that dead season. Had the wind
blown them hither? It blew a hurricane that day on the bleak coasts of
Cardigan Bay; but it was a shrewder storm yet which had swept this
windfall to the doors of Borth.
The story must be briefly told. On November 2nd, 1875, Uppingham School
was dispersed on account of a fever which had attacked both town and
school, not without fatal casualties. On January 28th, 1876, the school
met again. In the interval the school-houses had been put in complete
sanitary order, and though the efforts made to amend the general drainage
of the town had been only on a small and tentative scale, it was thought
that the school, if secure on its own premises, might safely be recalled,
in spite of remaining deficiencies outside those limits. But, _tua res
agitur_--the term began with three weeks of watchful quiet, and then the
blow fell again. A boy sickened of the same fever; then, after an
interval of suspense, two or three fresh cases made it clear that this
was no accident. An inspection of the town drainage, ordered by the
authorities, revealed certain permanent sources of danger. It was clear
that the interests of school and town, in matters of hygiene as in
others, were not separable; perhaps the best fruit of the sequel has been
the mutual conviction that those interests are one.
Meanwhile the new illustration of this connection of interests had a
formidable significance for the Uppingham masters. Men looked at one
another as those do who do not like to give a name to their fears. For
what could be done? The school could not be dismissed again. How many
would return to a site twice declared untenable? But neither could it be
kept on the spot: for there came in unmistakable evidence that, in that
case, the school would dissolve itself, and that, perhaps, irrevocably,
through the withdrawal of its scholars by their parents from the dreaded
neighbourhood. Already the trickling had begun; something must be done
before the banks broke, and the results and hopes of more than twenty
long working years were poured out to waste.
When the crisis was perceived, a project which had been already the
unspoken thought in responsible quarters, but which would have sounded
like a counsel of despair had the situation been less acute, was suddenly
started in common talk and warmly entertained. Why should we not
anticipate calamity by flight? Before the school melted away, and left
us teaching empty benches, why should we not flit, master and scholar
together, and preserve the school abroad for a securer future afterwards
at home?
In a space of time to be measured rather by hours than days, this project
passed through the stages of conception, discussion, and resolve, to the
first step in its execution. On Tuesday, March 7th, a notice was issued
to parents and guardians that the school would break up that day week for
a premature Easter holiday, and at the end of the usual three weeks
reassemble in some other locality, of which nothing could as yet be
specified except that it was to be healthier than that we were leaving.
The proposed experiment--to transport a large public school from its
native seat and all its appliances and plant to a strange site of which
not even the name was yet known, except as one of several possible spots,
and to do this at a few days' notice--was no doubt a novel one. But the
resolve, if rapidly formed and daring, was none the less deliberate and
sane. Its authors must not be charged either with panic or a passion for
adventure. All the data of a judgment were in view, and delay could add
no new fact, except one which would make any decision nugatory because
too late. It was wisdom in those with whom lay the cast of the die, to
take their determination while a school remained for which they could
determine anything.
It was a sharp remedy, however. For on the morrow of this resolve the
owners of so many good houses, fields, and gardens, all the outward and
visible of Uppingham School, became, for a term without assignable limit,
landless and homeless men, and the Headmaster almost as much disburdened
of his titular realm as if he were a bishop _in partibus_ or the chief of
a nomad caravan. It was a sharp remedy; but those who submitted to it
breathed the freer at having broken prison, and felt something, not
indeed of the recklessness which inspires adventure, but of the elation
which sustains it:
Why now, blow wind, swell billow, and swim bark;
The storm is up, and all is on the hazard!
There was cited at this time a somewhat similar event in the history of
Rugby School. Dr. Arnold, in a like emergency, had removed the school,
or all who chose to go, in numerous detachments under the care severally
of himself and others of his masters to various distant spots, among
others his own house in the Lake country, where they spent some two
months, and returned to Rugby when the danger was over. It was felt,
however, that this incident furnished no real precedent for the present
venture. What we were proposing was not to arrange a number of
independent reading-parties in scattered country retreats. Such a plan
would hardly have been practicable with a system in which, as in our
case, the division of the school for teaching purposes has no reference
to the division into boarding-houses. It was proposed to pluck up the
school by the roots and transplant it bodily to strange soil; to take
with us the entire body of masters, with, probably, their families, and
every boy who was ready to follow; to provide teaching for the latter,
not only without loss in the amount, but without interruption of the
existing system in any branch; and to guarantee the supply of everything
necessary for the corporate life of three hundred boys, who had to be
housed, fed, taught, disciplined, and (not the easiest of tasks) amused,
on a single spot, and one as bare of all the wonted appliances of public
school life as that yet uncertain place was like to prove, of which the
recommendation for our residence would be that no one else cared to
reside there.