Master’s Foreword

E. F. J. Twohig – Visual homage to W.B. Yeats’ poetry read during lockdown, June 2020

I remember very clearly my first assembly with Marlborough’s pupils and staff on the 5th September 2018, announcing that the vision for Marlborough was that it should be widely known to be the best co-educational full boarding school in the UK; and that how the community would achieve this, given its already incredible co-curricular standing, and enviable pastoral and collegial strength, was for academic ambition, individuality and diversity to be allowed, and encouraged, to soar.

That these should soar in times of lockdown and be articulated through ‘Locks, Lockdown and Isolation’ seems almost counter-intuitive or perhaps something stronger than that. There can be no more fitting playwright for these times of isolation, uncertainty and endurance than Samuel Beckett. In ‘Endgame’, four characters, spanning three generations, are all locked down together, facing death in a comfortless world. Reduced to living in dustbins, Beckett presents a scene which has followed an apocalyptic disaster but his tragedy sees the characters never cease from infusing their situation with humour. Hamm and Clov ruminate over Nell’s question, “Why this farce, day after day?”. For Beckett, there could be no question of a happy ending for the four, but what he left us with was a work of indisputable poetic genius.

And so, thank you to Christopher Moule for his leadership in this remarkable lockdown project; to pupil editors Lara Higgins Anderson (LI L6), Jessica Hughes (SU L6), Jessica Macdonald (IH L6), Anouschka Verdon (LI L6); to all the pupil and staff contributors; to Edward Twohig for his inspiring paintings and to Nadia Johnson (PR U6), Sophie Smith (DA U6), Isabelle Guthrie (DA Sh) and Helvetica Haydn Taylor (NC Hu) for their wonderful images; to Jackie Jordan and the Marketing/Communications Team; and to Professor Sir John Bell who was there, at the cutting edge, as our lives changed beyond comprehension.