No . 133
The Trusty Servant
be the warmest New Year ’ s Day on record . To mark the 250 th anniversary weekend , preparations are in hand for an Old England XI vs a Hampshire All Stars XI on Friday , 24 th June , an Old England Women ’ s side vs a Hampshire Women ’ s side on Saturday , 25 th June and a local derby of Hambledon vs the Broadhalfpenny Brigands on Sunday , 26 th June . Old Wykehamists vs the Brigands takes place at the ground on Sunday , 5 th June , to celebrate the Queen ’ s Platinum Jubilee . Full details of all fixtures and events are available at www . broadhalfpennydown . com .
Lords at the memorial , 1925
Heritage Open Day cricket talk
On Sunday , 11 th September at 2.00 pm ( time to be confirmed nearer the time ), John Barclay , former Sussex County Cricket captain and former President of MCC has kindly agreed to speak on Winchester College and the origins of cricket . John followed closely in the footsteps of both Harry Altham and Hubert Doggart ( OW and Staff ) as he , too , became a President of ESCA . John was the Director of the Arundel Castle Cricket Foundation from 1986 to 2022 . He happens , also , to be Patron of the Broadhalfpenny Preservation Trust . He is an Old Etonian with a warm affection for Lords . He is a well-known and entertaining public speaker .
For Old Wykehamists , and particularly Old Wykehamist cricketers who remember Harry Altham and Hubert Doggart , this will be an occasion not to be missed .
Mons Catharinae : Hills in Hexameter
Rupert Mercer ( Coll , 03-08 ; Co Ro , 18- ) examines an 18 th -century poem about St Catherine ’ s Hill :
In 2004 St Catherine ’ s Hill was where bad things happened or , at least , that ’ s what we would have told you . The annual torture of Steeplechā was enough to make us deeply wary of Hills Valley but worse yet was Morning Hills . The teenage mind – and I say this as someone whose current GCSE Latin set has almost all of its hours beginning at 0845 – is not at its best in the morning , and as a consequence , by me and my friends at least , anything that required early rising was viewed with outright hostility . The promise of a psalm at the top of St Cat ’ s was hardly enough to tip the scales .
Returning as a don , I dropped unthinkingly into old habits and greeted my first Morning Hills with customary suspicion . How wrong I was ! A sunny autumn morning , a view down over misty Winchester , a full English breakfast in Toye ’ s and a first-hour bookie : can we do this every week ?
The 18 th -century Wykehamist would have wondered at our misconception . Before George Ridding transformed New Field from a boggy pasture to playing-fields , and with Meads spending most of the century as the Fellows ’ private garden , St Cat ’ s , or simply ‘ Hills ’, was where he spent his leisure time and it was here of course that Winchester College football was born .
This story is well-rehearsed and familiar to any loyal reader of The Trusty Servant . For those looking for a full account of the game ’ s development Steve Bailey ’ s ( Co Ro , 80-09 ) chapter in Puddings , Bullies and Squashes : Early Public School Football Codes , available from all good anticompetitive multi-national technology corporations , is the place to go .
The Trusty Servant , however , concerns itself with nothing so mainstream as the history of Win Co Fo written in English prose . My job is to introduce
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