Winchester College Publication Winchester College War Inscriptions | Page 3

With no lance broken in life’s tournament:
Yet ever ’twixt the books and his bright eyes
The gleaming eagles of the legions came,
And horsemen, charging under phantom skies,
Went thundering past beneath the oriflamme.
And now those waiting dreams are satisfied;
From twilight to the halls of dawn he went;
His lance is broken; but he lies content
With that high hour, in which he lived and died.
And falling thus he wants no recompense,
Who found his battle in the last resort;
Nor needs he any hearse to bear him hence,
Who goes to join the men of Agincourt.
Monty Rendall, by Glyn Philpot, 1924.
Memorial to Raymond Asquith, outer wall in War Cloister.
The tone of endorsement and reverence was not to last. “You smug faced
crowds with kindling eye”, wrote Siegfried Sassoon in 1917,
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
Three quarters of a million British were killed in the Great War; in all,
globally, there were 41 million casualties. “Never glad confident morning
again”, concluded Firth, quoting Browning’s poem ‘The Lost Leader’.
The challenge of handling the College’s response to the First World War was
the responsibility of Monty Rendall (1862-1950). Appointed a Don in 1887,
Rendall became Second Master and Master in College in 1899, and served
as Headmaster from 1911 to 1924. Formidable classicist, rider of a penny-
farthing bicycle, and Cambridge soccer blue, Rendall was a slightly
self-conscious bachelor and eccentric, much admired by pupils and staff.
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“Monty Rendall was an Old Harrovian”, a former pupil recalled, “but was
many, many years at Winchester, as College Tutor in my father’s time, and
then as Second Master, in charge of the College. He was the first layman ever
to become Headmaster, also the first Second Master ever to do so, and the
first who was not an Old Wykehamist. He was a bachelor. Winchester was his
first and only love”.
Weekly, at the close of Sunday evening chapel, Rendall read out, as war
progressed, the names on the casualty list.
“It must have cost him a great deal”, a pupil
recalled “… and I remember that his voice,
which was always strong and fearless, would
sometimes falter when it came to a name
which he felt, if there was a God above, he
should not have been called upon to utter.”
According to Shakespeare, 29 English had
died at Agincourt, hymned by Herbert
Asquith. What would be done by Rendall
500 odd years later to memorialise the 513
Winchester dead? On 17th November 1917,
Rendall hosted a dinner in Amiens for all
those OWs serving on the Western Front.
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Menu from OW Dinner, Amiens,
17th November 1917.