Editorial

the many activities by which he will long be remembered are the founding of the Milner-White Scholarship awarded to boys coming to St. Peter's from the Minster Song School and the institution of the Epiphany procession. In this Epiphany Service the School and Minster choirs combine in what is a truly memorable act of worship, and we hope this will continue to be an annual memorial to our beloved Dean.

My abiding memory of our Dean would always be of his firm unshakable Christian faith, and this was enormously strengthened when I was privileged, a day or two before he died, to talk to him and to see the calm serenity with which he awaited his call. I know I am only one of many whose Christian outlook has been deeply affected by his example.

Thus we pay tribute and say farewell to a great Christian, unyielding in what he knew to be right, who feared God and nothing else.

On Speech Day Mr. Ratter spoke of change in all aspects of life: research in old copies of "The Peterite" would indicate that, in school life at 'least, change is very often only an illusion.

On the same occasion in 1913, for instance, the Head Master spoke of "theorists who thought that all educational work must be made as bright and attractive as possible and that all those lessons which did not appeal immediately to the instincts of the boys must be abolished". They are still with us, as are the gentlemen who, like the prize-giver in the same year, "remembered that he had never once won a prize". Going back even further, we hear the lament of the 1903 "Oasis" Committee: 'We wonder whether there was ever a school of so unliterary a turn of mind as St. Peter's", whilst the Preacher of the Commemoration Sermon that year castigated those "poor, weak, tepid, flabby souls who are never eager or enthusiastic about anything". Forthrightness was fashionable in those days, as can be seen from the writer welcoming the formation of the School Orchestra, who used the opportunity to say: "The greatest of all music is classical, that and that alone: however one may like the lighter kind, classical reigns supreme. We are glad to see that many in the School prefer the latter, and we hope that others will in time do the same". The same unabashed partisanship is echoed by the Editor of 1910, who, commenting on a Mock Election held in the School, "in which the Labour and Socialist members came out at the head of the poll", said "We hope in truth it was a 'mock election' ". Perhaps, after all, politically we have changed, an impression confirmed by the debate fifty years ago on the motion "That the craving for picture palaces is deleterious to the English Nation", in which the Proposer dared to use the argument that "the pictures are almost always of a distorting nature, so that the poor man is generally the hero and the rich man the villain; the result of this is that the lower classes (sic) are always wanting higher wages, which is the reason that there are so many strikes and so much discontent at the present day". The motion, incidentally, was carried by the casting vote of the 'President, who happened to be the Head Master and the Proposer of the motion! Have we, perhaps, become more democratic?

Of course, some things do Change: in the rugger results of fifty years ago appears "St. Peter's 23, Headingley A 16", whilst the 2nd XI

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