Commemoration Service

The weekend before the Confirmation Service the St. Peter's candidates went away to Marrick Priory (Youth Centre) near Reeth, with Mr. and Mrs. Butler, my wife and myself. We spent the weekend discussing "Belonging" (to society, school, the Church, etc.) and were able to go fell walking and canoeing. (Here I felt a duty to keep an eye on things from the bank, rather than go canoeing myself!) We were able to display in the school ante-chapel the results of the various discussions, and certainly found the two days an invaluable preparation for Confirmation.

Preachers during the year have been the Rev. Bob Lewis (Archbishop's Chaplain) at the Beginning of Year Service, myself at Harvest, and the Headmaster at Commemoration.

Jillian Harness, aged 17 years, died in April after a valiant and cheerful battle against cancer. Great numbers of her friends in all the school years came to the Memorial Service in Chapel. The whole school responded magnificently to a special collection for Cancer Research, an organisation that Jillian herself did so much to help.

At the very beginning of the School year the new vestments were dedicated at a communion service. These are the "Margaret Ping Memorial Gift", and we are most grateful to Hugh Ping for his generous help in the purchase of these cassock-albs in memory of his mother.

The term and year ended with the Commemoration Service, devised this year by the Headmaster. The choir played a very important part, as always, and the whole service was uplifted by the magnificent playing of the band. I hope that they will be able to play for us far more frequently than in the past.

The choir have given a good lead at the weekday services and have sung at all the special occasions in chapel. Their anthem at the Memorial Service and their singing at the Advent Carol Service were particularly outstanding. We are indebted to Mr. Pemberton and all the choir.

My thanks to all members of the Chapel Committee for their very helpful ideas and for their efforts. Particular thanks go to Roderick Craig for his two years' service as a most reliable and unflappable crucifer; to Tony Miller as a very able and dedicated Sacristan; and to William Barnish as an exceptionally efficient and articulate Secretary.

The chapel has been beautified throughout the year by Sheila Nix and all the women who have helped her with the flowers. We are most grateful to them.

We have been able to welcome this year the new chaplain of St. Olave's, the Rev. Raymond Hargreaves, and we wish him well.

J. M. R.

COMMEMORATION SERVICE - 14th July, 1979

The Headmaster delivered the following sermon: At Commemoration we are "compassed about by a great cloud of witnesses". We remember those whose lives helped build up this School and influenced us, its present members. Perhaps each of us will see among that great cloud a few individual faces whose memory remains most strongly with us. Especially I remember some who died having spent the most 23

useful and perhaps the happiest years of their lives in this community — Kenneth Rhodes, Freddie Waine, Paddy Power, Jill Harness. And when they died, the only place in the School where we could adequately sum up our grief and our gratitude was this Chapel. At such moments we can see where the centre of the school truly is.

In the light of their lives, at Commemoration we can take stock. We can contrast the community we would like and we hope for with the reality that we actually have, that falls so far short of that ideal. Thus in our first hymn, the writer John Newton, a very wild ship's captain engaged at one stage in the slave trade, imagined his ideal community, Zion, as some Italian hill town, mysteriously provided with springs, from the walls of which the saved could, rather smugly, gaze out at their enemies. That was the ideal pictured by his eighteenth century Evangelical fervour — I hope he found what he was looking for! And in the second hymn, "Turn Back 0 Man" we see a twentieth-century poet's gloom at the ideological lunacies that have led to wars of unparalleled destruction, wars in which a technology of killing from a distance has been perfected. "Earth might be fair", if only . . . And yet even he dares to say "Earth shall be fair".

How shall we take stock ? How can we judge if this is a good school ? How can we judge if it is, in any important sense, a Christian School ? Do the words "good" and "Christian" have anything to do with each other ?

Well, we all like measuring things, and we can measure '0' and 'A' level results, and we can work out cricket averages, count up rugby points for and against, we can produce plays and concerts, and assess them in our official records; we can organize sponsored events for fund-raising, and so on. Without these things, the School has no apparent purpose.

All of these must take place in a good school. Without them, no school. But they might all b e very good and the school might still be a very bad school.

There are less measurable things that make up the texture of day-to-day life. After Darwin, after Freud, we of the twentieth century are aware that we are animals of impulse, fiercely competitive in order to survive, with deep feelings of anarchy and aggression that threaten to erupt. That's true on the battlefield; that's true in a school common room. We know that we must exercise a judicious control over these impulses. Repress them and you head for trouble; give them free rein and you have chaos. Good order is therefore something of a knife-edge.

So, after our measurements of exams and score, our second criterion is the balance between tolerance and repression that is found in the School.

A third test is in the words we use. We use words not only to inform but also to assert ourselves, to delight, to show off, to identify ourselves in the community, to show concern. At two levels I ask you to think of the state of words in this School.

One, how much jeering is there ? In a bad school the jeer has become accepted as normal. In a good school, it won't have disappeared (that would be unrealistic) but at least it is kept in its place, and at least it is possible for one person to encourage, or express concern for, another.

Two, words are so important because that is how we make promises. If promises are not kept, you can rely on nothing; the place is a jungle. Here are some words of Montaigne (not a Peterite, but he is among the "cloud of witnesses"). "Since mutual understanding is brought about solely by way 24

of words, he who breaks his word betrays human society. It is the only instrument by means of which our wills and thoughts communicate, it is the interpreter of our soul. If it fails us, we have no more hold on each other, no more knowledge of each other. If it deceives us, it breaks up all our relations, and dissolves all the bonds of our society".

Do we keep our promises in this community ?

A fourth test of a school is, how do we treat people ? Can friendship flourish ? In St. Peter's I believe it can and does and that some of the friendships you have made will last for the rest of your lives. But the question must still be asked and faced, do we treat others as ends in themselves (as important as ourselves) or as means to our ends ? Do we even begin to understand in our lives as a practical proposition the biblical injunction to "love they neighbour as thyself" ?

There are four tests then of the goodness of a school — the quality of its achievements; its good or bad order; language; fellowship.

But further to these, the school must draw out and develop the best powers of everyone in it for the needs of the day. Let me take examples from the past from our cloud of witnesses. If you read The Peterite magazines at the end of the nineteenth century you will judge how the School trained men to run an Empire, from the large number of letters to the Editor from Old Boys all over the world — on safari in Africa, sailing adventures in the Far East. I recommend these letters — they're great fun. I think of Sir Frank Swettenham, Old Peterite, who in 1896 masterminded the federation of the Malay States and laid the commercial and technological basis of the rubber plantations there. He answered one need of the time. And I think of another great man who lived in the early twentieth-century, who could see how the development of road and rail communications in this country was entirely in the hands of the business man and the engineer, who, between them, were producing grotesquely ugly sights. That man, the Managing Director of the London General Omnibus and the London Underground companies, had the vision to see that artists and architects must be brought into the world of transport. As a patron, he brought them in; through hi :n posters were revolutionized, and London Underground Stations were built that were good to look at. That man was Frank Pick, an Old Peterite.

I repeat, the School tries to develop the best powers of everyone for the needs of to-day. And those needs, as I hardly need tell you, are frightening. You are growing up into a world of microprocessors, that will probably alter the nature of most people's work; a world in which energy from fossil fuels is fast running out; a world on the brink of revolution in various technologies from genetic engineering to colonizing space; a world in which two-thirds of living people are underfed, and one-third at or below starvation level. Man is at once potentially god-like and potentially destructive in his technological powers. If you are not to be cut off from the sources of power in that world, you will have to be well instructed in the words and the technology which mediate between man and his doings. It is an exciting and dangerous world for you to grow up in.

But it is also a world in which human beings are born, grow up, fall in love, marry, have children, mature, age and die; in it the proportions of human happiness and misery will be much the same as ever. 25