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T he T rusty S ervant
above relates to his conduct during
the two rebellions (1793 and 1818).
He provoked them (the first by a
harsh communal punishment because
one boy went to see a military band
play up town), and he crushed them,
with the help of the militia and little
regard for keeping any promises made
to the rebels. His reactionary defence
of the establised order is embodied by
his favourite phrase: ‘No innovation’,
with the ‘a’ pronounced as in
‘father’. He perhaps more than any
other figure embodies the Georgian
regime, by turns slack and savage,
which those zealous Victorians on
the Clarendon Commission and
the reforming headmaster George
Ridding were so keen to sweep away.
So much for his place in school
legend. But his correspondence
reveals an altogether more thoughtful
and industrious character. One letter
in particular makes an interesting
partner from two centuries earlier
to Stephen Anderson’s article above.
Huntingford wrote it in 1791 to his
friend Revd Henry John Richman,
headmaster of the Free Grammar School
in Dorchester, and in it he outlines his
method of teaching Latin and Greek at
Winchester.
In Latin, ‘beginners’ are taught with
‘Versus Soluti’ – lines of Latin poetry
with the English opposite – so that
they can start ‘to make Latin and
arrange verses at once’. One wonders
how the beginners of 2018 would
cope with being plunged straight into
verse composition! Even the most able
Winchester classicists today do not learn
that discipline (although your author
was presented with a Latin wedding ode
by a private enthusiast when news of his
engagement broke, and a current boy
is fluent in oral Latin). For their prose
tasks, Huntingford’s beginners attempt
‘short and easy sentences of English’
to be rendered into Latin; this much
as least has not changed. The more
advanced boys ‘composed from their
own conceptions’, which Huntingford
then corrected to show how ‘the same
thought should be express’d in Latin’
and he would then make them ‘read and
construe a composition of my own on the
same subject, with a view of giving them
an idea of the manner in which prose
tasks should be written.’ He concludes,
‘to tasks, reconstruing and repetition of
what had been previously construed, I
directed the chief of my attention.’
The letter then sets out his methods in
teaching Greek, a rigorous progression
through the grammar which would be
familiar to any current Wykehamist using
Andrew Leigh’s Winchester Greek Course:
first all the patterns of nouns ‘so that the
learners might tell at once the declension
of any substantive’. Then all the
adjectives, followed by the conjugation of
verbs, involving ‘the formation of tenses
ten thousand times.’ His model verb was
τυπτω, so it was probably this relentless
repetition which earned Huntingford
his nickname, ‘Tupto’ (although some
sources give it as ‘Tipto’ and explain it as
a snide nod to his father’s profession as
a dancing-master). We can assume that
11
in this he was using his own A Short
Introduction to the Writing of Greek
(1778), which became Winchester's
preferred textbook for the next 60
years. The aim was to get to Greek
literature as quickly as possible,
although the choice of Homer as first
author seems foolhardy. Intriguingly,
different boys read different texts,
‘some [were directed] to the Iliad,
some to the Odyssey, according
to their future destinations’. Does
he mean that he directed future
soldiers to Homer’s martial epic, and
sailor-adventurers to the travails of
Odysseus? Huntingford’s main battle
here would be familiar to any modern
Classics don teaching literature:
‘Any reference to translations was a
capital offence’; the work was done
‘by Lexicon under severe threats if
any help was got.’ Only after Homer
did his boys move onto prose writers.
He concludes, ‘My leading principles
were these: to be continually over-
hauling what had previously been
learnt, that all which had been read
should be printed indelibly on the minds
of the learners; and to suffer no boy to
leave me till he understood every word in
his lessons; and to watch with a jealous
eye, that no assistance should be given
from one to another. In all this great was
my labour, but the effects in my scholars
were answerable.’ Sound principles
indeed.
Firth’s savage judgement on Huntingford
thus seems overly harsh. He may have
been a duplicitous negotiator and
indolent bishop, but his main concern
seems to have been enforcing the
school’s adherence to its statutes, rather
than ignoring them. And he certainly
seems to have produced the goods in
the div room. Indeed, one of his pupils,
William Stanley Goddard (scholar, 1771-
76) gives his name to the school’s most
prestigious classical prize. Its current
holder (the oral Latinist mentioned
above) will follow in Huntingford’s
footsteps from Chamber Court to New
College.