THE HOUSE OF VISION AND THE SCHOOL CHAPEL
§ 1
I come now to one of the most curious and characteristic things in
Sanderson's later life, a conflict and interaction that went on between
two closely related and yet in many ways intensely competitive ideas,
the idea on the one hand of a new sort of building unprecedented among
schools, a building which should symbolise and embody the whole aim
of the school and the renewed community of which it is the germ, and
on the other hand the idea of a great memorial chapel to commemorate
the sacrifice of those who had fallen in the war. These ideas assumed
protean forms in his mind, they grew, they blended and separated again.
I will call the first, for reasons that will appear later, the House of
Vision; the second, the school chapel. For though Oundle had thrown
up a great cluster of houses, halls, laboratories, and other buildings
during its quarter of a century of growth, it had never yet produced
anything more than a corrugated-iron meeting-house for its religious
services. The want of some more dignified chapel had long been evident,
and even before the war was very much in Sanderson's mind.
The idea of a House of Vision was therefore the later of the two.
Very early in the war a boy of great promise, Eric Yarrow, the son of
Sir Alfred Yarrow, the great shipbuilder, was killed at Ypres, and
parent and schoolmaster met at the house of the former to mourn their
common loss. Sanderson and Eric Yarrow had been close friends; they
had discussed and developed the idea of a creative reconstruction
of industry together; Eric Yarrow was to have played a part in the
industrial world similar to the part that Roy Sanderson was to have
played in the educational world.
The two men sat late at night and talked of these vanished hopes.
Could not something be done, they asked, to record at least the spirit
of these fine intentions, and they sketched out a project for a
memorial building that should be a symbol and incitement to effort for
the reorganised industrial state. It should be in a sense a museum
containing a record of human effort and invention in the past; a museum
of the development of work and production and a statement of the
economic problems before mankind. Sir Alfred produced a cheque more
than sufficient to cover the building of such a memorial as they had
planned, and Sanderson returned to Oundle to put the realisation of the
project in hand. Probably the two of them also discussed the need for a
memorial chapel and probably neither of them realised a possible clash
between that older project and the new one they were now starting.
It was in the early stage when the Eric Yarrow memorial was to be
nothing more than a museum of industrial history and organisation
that Sanderson set afoot the building at Oundle which is now known
by that name. Apparently he did not get much inspiration over to the
architect, and at any rate the edifice that presently rose was a very
weak and dull-looking one, more suitable for a herbarium or a minor
lecture-hall than for a temple of creative dreams. It was a premature
materialisation, done in the stress and under the cramping limitations
of war time. Long before it was finished Sanderson's imaginations had
outgrown it. I think this unconfessed architectural disappointment
probably played a large part in the subsequent development of the idea
of the school chapel, still to be planned, still capable of being made
a spacious and beautiful building. To the latter dream he transferred
more and more of the ideas that arose properly out of the germ of the
Eric Yarrow memorial.
At first the House of Vision was to have been no more than an
industrial museum. It was not to be used as a class-room or
lecture-room. It was to be empty of chairs, desks, and the like,
and clear for any one to go in to think and dream. About its walls,
diagrams and charts were to display the progress of man from the
sub-human to his present phase of futile power and hope. There were to
be time-charts of the whole process of history, and a few of these have
been made. As his idea ripened it broadened. The memorial ceased to be
a symbol merely of industrial reorganisation and progress, and became a
temple to the whole human adventure. He began to stress first social
and then imaginative growth. The charts were to be full and accurate,
everything shown was to be precisely true, but there was to be no
teaching in the building, no direction beyond the form and spirit of
the place.
And so while the scaffolds of the workmen rose about the commonplace
little erection in the school fields, the schoolmaster in his
day-dreams realised more and more the full measure of the opportunity
he was missing.
The realisation of the past is the realisation of the future, and it
was an easy transition to pass to the idea of this building as an
expression of the creative will in man. In it the individual boy was to
realise the aim of the school and of schooling and living. It was to be
the eye of the school, its soul, its headlight.
The idea of this 'House of Vision' was still growing in his mind when
he died. He had not yet settled upon a name for it, though he had
tried over a number of names--a House of Vision, which is the name we
have taken for it here, the Home of Silence, the Hall of Industry, the
Anthropaeum, the Making of Man, the Life Creative, the Soul of the
School. All these names converge upon the end he was seeking. This
approach by trial, by leaving the idea to shape itself for a time and
then taking it up again, by talking it over with this man and that, was
very characteristic of his mental processes.
A member of the staff recalls a stage in the development of the idea.
'I talked with the headmaster about the Yarrow Memorial in October
1920,' he says. 'He then seemed to dally with a suggestion to name it
the "Temple of the World"--he expressed his hatred of the tendency to
call it the "Museum." I gathered that his idea was to fill it with
charts of all things and all ages, including pictures of at least all
the world's great men--then to turn a boy loose in it, thereby to
realise his position in the world as a unit of its time, as opposed to
the inculcation of any idea of his having a part in his nationality
only. His root idea seemed to be that it should be a place for
meditation--restful as well as invigorating.'
Here is a passage written by Sanderson himself a little later. The idea
ripens and broadens out very manifestly.
'Every school, every locality and industry,' he writes, 'might build
within their boundaries a new kind of chapel, a heritage, a temple--a
beautiful building in which are gathered together and exhibited the
records of man's great deeds and of man's progress, and the records
of his needs. It is such a "Hall of Needs" that we regard the Yarrow
Memorial, and to this end it is being equipped.'
And here Sanderson speaks again in a sermon preached upon the text of
Moses' withdrawal to the mount.
'A school will grow into a book. It will take upon itself the form of a
Bible. Within it will appear the stages in the life of the soul--"the
coming of a kingdom"; the foundations, the building, the furniture,
the complex apparatus, the organised beauty. A school--its buildings,
workshops, class-rooms, and all that goes towards a great school--can
take on the form of a parable. As we wander from one place to another
all that speaks of life will manifest itself before us. How life
begins, what is needed for its growth; what shall be its standards, its
ideals; what the nature of its proof-plate; the craftsman and what he
is; the craftsman in languages, in mathematics, in science, in art;
the secrets of nature revealing themselves; progress, change, vision.
'And boys will go out into the factory, or mine, or business, or
profession, imbued with the spirit of the active love of humanity. Some
will be called to lead, as Moses was called. They, too, will plant
the "Tent of Meeting," the "Temple of Vision." A return with a new
view-point will be made to the temple of ages gone by. The Assyrian
frescoed his walls with sculptures of the deeds of his hero-kings; the
Franciscans frescoed the walls of their chapels with the life of Jesus
as told in the Gospels--the life of the Divine builder, of Him who came
to restore a kingdom, by whose life and death a new world was created.
'But the Temple of Vision of to-day; the new Tent of Meeting. What
of it? The new home of vision will be frescoed with the thoughts of
to-day, changing into the thoughts of to-morrow. Generations of workers
will go up into the mount, and to them, too, will be shown the pattern.
"See that thou make them after their pattern which hath been shown thee
in the mount."'
§ 2
Now this is a very great and novel idea, the idea of a modern temple
set like a miner's lantern in the forefront of school or college to
light its task in the world. It rounds off and completes Sanderson's
vision of a modern school; it is logically essential to that vision.
But meanwhile what was happening to the school-chapel project?
For, after all, in the older type of school, the chapel with its
matins and evensong, its _Onward Christian Soldiers_ and suchlike
stirring hymns, its confirmations and first communions, was in a rather
dreamy, formless mechanical way undertaking to do precisely what the
new House of Vision was also to do, that is, to give a direction to
the whole subsequent life. But was it the same direction? The normal
school-chapel points up--not very effectively one feels; the House
of Vision was to point onward. Sanderson had a crowded, capacious
mind, but sooner or later the question behind these two discrepant
objectives, whether men are to live for heaven or for creation, was
bound to have come to an issue.
His mental process was at first syncretic. He began to think of a
school-chapel, not as a place for formal services but as a place of
meditation and resolve. He began to speak of the chapel also as though
it was to be 'the tent on the mount,' the place of vision. He betrayed
a growing hostility to the intoned prayers, the trite responses,
the tuneful empty hymns, the Anglican vacuity of the normal chapel
procedure. Had he lived to guide the building of Oundle chapel I
believe it would have diverged more and more from any precedent, more
and more in the direction of that House of Vision, that the premature
and insufficient Eric Yarrow building had so pitifully failed to
realise.
Here is evidence of that divergence in a passage from a sermon preached
after a gathering of parents and old boys in the Court Room at the
London Grocers' Hall to discuss the chapel project. I ask any one
trained in the services of the Church of England and accustomed to
enter, pray into a silk hat, deposit it under the seat, sit down,
stand up, bow, genuflect, kneel decorously on a hassock, sing, repeat
responses, and go through the simple and wholesome Swedish exercises
of the Anglican prayer book, what is to be thought of this project of
a chapel with hardly a sitting in it? And what is to be thought of
this suggestion of wandering round the aisles? And what is this talk
of young gentlemen who have died 'for king and country,' casting down
their lives for the rescue of man?
'For the years to come, when the war is over, it will be well to have
some visible memorial; some symbol of the redemption of the Great
War, and of the heroic part old boys have taken in it; some record of
the great struggle from out of which the new spirit will rise; some
record of the part the whole school took in this; some record of the
boys who have fallen; some thanksgiving symbol for all who have given
their service. And for this it is proposed to build a chapel. But when
the time comes we shall be sad to leave our present building. It is a
poor building, but it is very rich in its associations. The services
in this temporary chapel have taken a large part in the building of
the school. Simple as is the Tent in the Wilderness, yet we have hoped
that the Spirit of God would come and dwell in it. We have hoped that
the Divine Spirit would come into all the activities and outlook of the
school in its diverse occupations, whether they be literary or whether
they be scientific or technical. And we have always looked onward to
the day when a permanent chapel should be built, symbolic of the Divine
Omnipresence for worship and for sacrifice.
'And this is what is in mind to do--and yet I confess to a certain
amount of fear. A lofty, spacious chapel I have had no doubt would at
the right moment be built by the Grocers' Company. Just before the war
the building of this chapel was emerging as the next great building
to undertake--a chapel, such as a college chapel with stalls, as
for private service. But now we look beyond this. We want something
different, more open. A lofty, spacious chapel to form the nave--no
fixed seats, the clear open space; quiet, still, "urgent with beauty."
Joined to this the choir and sanctuary, with aisles round the three
sides of it, forming an ambulatory. Round these aisles, on the walls
and in the windows, the recorded memory of the boys who have fallen.
An east window, a reredos, stalls, altar. A chapel, abundant in space,
not for the mind to sit down in, but for the mind to move about in, for
contemplation, for dwelling in the infinite, for piercing through the
night, for vision, for the clear spirit of thankfulness, for communion
with the saints, our own young saints among them. So we hope. As you
wander round the aisles there will pass before you the memorial of
those boys who have cast down their lives for the rescue of man.'
§ 3
I cannot guess how Sanderson, had he lived, would have resolved this
conflict between his House of Vision and his Great Chapel, just as
I can hazard no opinion of the ultimate form his interpretation of
Christianity would have taken. But the recognition of these conflicts
is fundamental to my conception of the man and his significance.
He stands for a great multitude reluctant to abandon many of the
familiar phrases of the Christian use and eager to read new and deeper
meanings into them. But he never took 'holy orders'; he knew the days
of the priest, except for evil, were past, and it is only by its being
born again as a House of Vision that he could anticipate his chapel
with contentment. The time has come for mankind to choose plainly
between the priest and the teacher.
Some six months after Sanderson's death I went to Oundle and visited
the Yarrow Memorial, that abortive first House of Vision. Except for
a bronze statue of a boy by Lady Scott that Sanderson had liked and
bought, it was as I had seen it with Sanderson a year before. It was
still, deserted, and I suppose I must count it dead. The time-charts
had not been carried on. The collection of inventions, the display of
humanity's growth, were still represented by empty cases. The statue
was intended for the school chapel, but meanwhile it had been dumped in
the House of Vision as a convenient vacant place for such dumping. The
bronze boy is in an eager pose; there is duty to be done and danger to
be faced and a great creative effort to be made. 'Send me!' he said, in
that empty, neglected House of Vision. But the hand that would have put
that dart to the bowstring and aimed it at work and service was there
no more.
Building operations upon the chapel were proceeding slowly. The rising
walls were very like the rising walls of the sort of church for
respectable people that gets built in Surbiton or Beckenham. I gather
that in all probability it will even carry the debt customary in such
cases. The new headmaster was, I found, a thoroughly pleasant man who
came not from an elementary school but from Eton, and had never met
Sanderson in his life and knew nothing of his work. He seemed disposed
to regard Sanderson as a bit of a crank and to be intelligently
puzzled by his originalities. I felt assured that when at last that
old corrugated-iron building is abandoned for the new chapel there
would be pews in the new nave in spite of Sanderson, and services of an
altogether normal type and no nonsense of walking about and thinking or
anything of that sort.
But though I have seen the House of Vision at Oundle dead and vacant
as a museum skull, yet I know surely that neither Sanderson nor his
House of Vision are in any real sense dead at all. A day will certainly
come when his name will be honoured above all other contemporary
schoolmasters as the precursor of a new age in education and human
affairs. In that age of realisation every village will be dominated
by its school, with its library and theatre, its laboratories and
gymnasium, every town will converge upon its cluster of schools and
colleges, its research buildings and the like, and it will have its
Great Chapel, its House of Vision as its crown and symbol even as the
cathedral was the crown and symbol of the being and devotion of the
medieval city. And therein Sanderson's stout hopefulness and pioneer
thrustings will be kept in remembrance by generations that have come up
to the pitch of understanding him.