Winchester College Publication Winchester College War Inscriptions | Page 5

flint from Shawford, just south of
Winchester, to imitate the
original cloister; and stone, for
the corners, from India, Africa,
Australia, Canada and New
Zealand (all ultimately shipped
free of charge as gifts). The garden
was to be designed by Gertrude
Jekyll, whose entry in the
Dictionary of National Biography
(actually, a quotation from
Baker) reads:
Gertrude Jekyll, by William Nicholson, 1920.
© National Portrait Gallery, London.
View from the Warden’s Garden.
“Her outstanding possession was
the power to see, as a poet, the art and creation of home-making as a whole
in relation to Life; the best simple English country life of her day, frugal, yet
rich in beauty and comfort; in the building and its furnishing and their
homely craftsmanship, in the garden uniting the house with surrounding
nature; all in harmony and breathing the spirit of its creator.” inscription in the usual sense of the word”, he explained, “but a prose poem,
which fell naturally into biblical language. The Lombardic script has been
designed, with much labour and skill, to suit the special qualities of flint
work”. In January that year, he informed Baker that “the inscription must be
adopted soon: I have now reached finality, I think”. But there were still over
two years of tweaking to go.
The Lombardic script for the commemorative text was
to be designed by the distinguished craftsman and artist,
R M Y Gleadowe, Art Master at the school at that time.
As the project developed, Rendall’s interest in War
Cloister deepened almost into the obsessive: he would
spend some portion of every day, and often several
hours in the day, on the site. The task he set himself was
to provide the texts for the inscriptions on the outer
R M Y Gleadowe,
wall, and these were a complex and demanding
from a photograph
challenge.
Almost all of those commemorated were
of dons, late 1920s.
known to him, the majority as his pupils: many of
them, such as Asquith’s son Raymond, had been young men of exceptional
promise. Even more problematically, Rendall believed Winchester College
the perfect place. The school’s unique effect, Budge Firth recalled, was “to give
to boys and to Old Wykehamists the vision of Winchester as a holy place” –
and such Rendall openly proclaimed it to be. How could he reconcile such
beauty and such vision with “the hell where youth and laughter go?” Space was Rendall’s first problem. The available length of walls could only
accommodate a certain number of characters. “Each clause has to obey the
maximum numbers of letters”, Rendall explained, “the first 266, the other
three 160.” In many ways, Rendall can lay claim to authorship of the nation’s
The challenge was immense. “Day after day and since the term was over, I
have been working hard at this inscription”, Rendall wrote to Harold Trevor
Baker (MP, and Warden of Winchester 1936-46) in 1922. “It is not an
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Inscriptions from the outer walls of
War Cloister, designed by
R M Y Gleadowe.
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