issue fifteen MICHAELMAS TERM 2014
SherborneNews PREFECTS
DRAMA
SPORT
CLIMBING
Comment BY RALPH BARLOW HEADMASTER
There are traits of character, scholarship, service and kindness that Sherborne draws out
www.sherborne.org
As the Michaelmas term started 100 years ago, Britain had already declared war on Germany, and the British Expeditionary Force were on their way to France. More than 220 Old Shirburnians were to die in the conflict that followed and the echoes of their sacrifice will sound anew at our remembrance service in a few weeks’ time. To put that number into context, the entire School roll in 1914 had fewer than 250 boys. This morning I took the Prefects Book, in which all new prefects write their name, from my study up to the top of the Chapel steps. Many of the names in the book were also carved into the memorial stones. In one volume, the first page, from September 1909, shows the six boys who were installed as prefects that year. Forrest (a), O’Dbarey (f), Tuke (c), Sanctuary (a), Peele (b) and Homfray (a). By Christmas 1915, Forrest had been killed in Malta, and Tuke at Ypres. Henry Leigh (a), the last OS on the memorial, died on 11 November 1919, exactly one year after the armistice. By this time around 1,000 OS had survived the war and returned home. Both they and the world they returned to were profoundly changed. How often in a five-year period do we learn so much about humanity and about ourselves? Just four years before signing in that Prefect Book, Forrest and his friends would have been arriving at Sherborne as the new Third Form, as young, eager and sometimes apprehensive as Third Formers are today. Now, as then, it is a window of fleeting time that a boy will be with us, and that short time makes an indelible mark on the person he will become. Now, as then, there are traits of character, scholarship, service and kindness that Sherborne draws out and nurtures from adolescence into adulthood.
continued ...