NO.120
T H E T R U S T Y S E RVA N T
must have been both
physically active and
rather courageous: not
only was the location a
dangerous one to access,
but it would have
required time away from
his chamber and the
possibility of being
caught.
route would have necessitated a crawl up
and over the roof ridge.
The roof-space would have been in
almost total darkness: such light as there
was would have been admitted by the
newly-opened hatch, and two small trefoil
windows at the east end. This could only
have been ventured on moonlit nights in
the summer months, and even so might
have required a candle; the young Harmar
would then have needed to make his way
carefully across the upper side of the
ceiling. He needed to negotiate the
narrow spaces between the tie-beams and
the king-posts and their diagonal struts
until he got to the east end, where there
was a massive tie-beam just in front of the
windows. This would have been the one
moment of relative comfort, as it is
possible to sit on this beam while carving.
The first example of his name is in a
scratched rectangle on the upper-left
spandrel of the left-hand window and is
rather sketchily incised, suggesting that it
may have been a first attempt. He then
elected to carve his name on the righthand splayed reveal of the same window.
The window is small and unglazed. There
are iron bars. Harmar scratched a straight
line on which he inscribed his surname in
capital letters. In view of the difficulty of
carving into stone, this exercise would
have required more than one expedition
up onto the roof and down onto the top
of the Chapel ceiling. Young Harmar
I couldn’t find any
names from the 1390s –
most of the names were
Collegemen from the
1570s, the mid-18th
century, a flurry of names from the 1940s
from boys presumably on the same
mission as Sir Roger, and then a small
group of names of Hopperites from the
1970s. The names of several generations
of workmen are also included.
Another visit to Chapel roof is
needed to check the names and to take
more photographs. Perhaps we will yet
find a name from the 1390s?
…and other memories
of wartime Winchester
Anthony du Boulay (C, 43-46) writes:
Since it was wartime, we did not have
early-morning school. Instead, on rising,
it was cold tin baths. In winter 1944 these
iced up; and Jun Men naturally had to
break the ice by going in first. This was, of
course, training not only for fighting the
war, but also, more importantly, for going
out to rule an Empire and being tougher
than those to be ruled. For the first two
weeks we were made to learn Notions and
Domum and were afterwards tested and
allotted to a Prefect as a ‘Sweater’.
Up to books, we joined the
appropriate class for our exam results: I
was up to the Jacker (HA Jackson, who
had started his education at Winchester
under Queen Victoria). But when, in the
summer of 1944, I was able to take School
Certificate (which then automatically
gave me entrance to Oxford, provided I
7
had enough credits and distinctions), I
switched to Modern Languages and
started learning German. While we were,
for the period, casually dressed in tweed
jackets and grey flannel trousers, we
always wore straw hats outside. We had to
walk with our books tucked under our
arms and only 3-year men and those in VI
Book were allowed to step on the flints of
Chamber Court. Permission was needed
to go up town; our sweet ration was spent
in Tuck Shop and we used our bogles to
get round the licet parts of town and
nearby countryside. We were secure with
the rules being quite clear and the risks
known for breaking them: while the
prefects had powers to beat, lesser
punishments were often handed out, such
as marking out the tennis court.
In the summer of 1944, because of
the risk of flying bombs, we had to sleep
in the basement, although I sometimes
managed to slip back to the gallery if I was
not able to sleep, until I heard that the
ceiling of my bedroom at home about 12
miles away had been brought down. We
had Chapel every morning before lessons,
except on Saturdays and Sundays, when
we had both a morning and evening
service, religious education being an
important part of the curriculum.
Today the entrance exam for
Winchester is harder than for most, if not
all, other schools and gaining a
scholarship requires excellence of mind,
good teaching and hard work. In 1943,
Greek and Latin were still paramount. I
can remember one task, which was to
translate into Greek elegiacs a poem
which began ‘What boots the ruddy
apple?’ This I apparently managed, unlike
the Mathmā in which I only got 5% today’s questions would probably have
totally stumped me.
While I was not very happy during
my time at Winchester, this was a
personal dissatisfaction in that I always
felt I should have done better. After I left,
I knew that I had had the great advantage
of being better educated than most of
those who had been elsewhere.
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