The Lanchester tradition

by G. F. Bradby

The town of Chiltern lives to a great extent upon the school, and the authorised tradesmen, who enjoy a practical monopoly, have a lively faith in the value of the goods supplied by them to “the young gentlemen”; which faith is convincingly reflected in the prices they charge. In the unauthorised trades, that is to say amongst tobacconists and dealers in motor-cycles, air-guns, and translations of the Classics, competition tends to keep prices down. Nevertheless, these illicit traders are always supposed to have done remarkably well in the palmy days of Dr. Gussy.

Notwithstanding this bond of union, there is a traditional feeling of hostility on the part of the town towards the school. This is due, in part, to the fact that the school people are supposed to look down upon the town people, but, still more, to a widely prevalent belief that, somehow or other, the school has defrauded the town of the farrier’s benefactions. As this belief is entirely without foundation, it is likely to be lasting.

The country round Chiltern is pretty if not exciting. There is a round hill (called by the masters “Soracte,” and by the natives “the Sow’s Back”) at a convenient distance from the school, which commands a view over four counties and enables such of the staff as are inclined to obesity to retain a semblance of their youthful shape. In spring the landscape is white with cherry and pear blossom, and in autumn the apples make a cheerful show. There are quiet lanes, peaceful farms, and irritable farmers, who make unreasonable complaints when “the young gentlemen” break down their hedges, tread down their young wheat, or pillage their orchards.

The climate is of the kind that is commonly called salubrious; for anæmic boys it is generally considered bracing, but it is also recommended as temperate for those who are afflicted with delicate chests. Like all schools in England, public or private, Chiltern stands on gravel, and the drains are of the most approved and up-to-date pattern. Both the gravel and the up-to-dateness of the drains are vouched for by the school porter. The school-rooms are for the most part dark, but of great historic interest, and possessed of an indefinable charm. This charm, and the sense of continuity with a remote past, are generally regarded as an adequate substitute for ventilation. Indeed, many of the senior masters at Chiltern are strongly opposed to ventilation in any form, and prefer their air with a “bouquet.”

The playing fields, locally known as Colonus, are amongst the noblest in England, and are said to have been the scene of a sanguinary battle between the Danes and the Saxons. The School Antiquarian Society occasionally indulges in feverish bouts of digging, in the hope of unearthing bones or some other memorial of the fray; but, hitherto, they have failed to discover anything but stones and the bowl of a clay pipe. A stream, which flows at the far end of the grounds, provides the school with a unique swimming-bath (vide prospectus). Under Dr. Gussy’s thoughtful régime the banks of this stream were planted thickly with rhododendrons and other flowering shrubs, which afford a reasonably secure retreat, on Sundays, for such of the scholars as wish to enjoy a quiet pipe without the fatigue of pedestrian exercise. But etiquette requires that boys who have not yet reached their fourth Term shall smoke elsewhere.

In spite, however, of its ancient school-rooms, noble grounds, and salubrious climate, Chiltern would probably never have become one of the public schools of England if it had not been for Dr. Lanchester. When Abraham Lanchester became headmaster, at the end of the eighteenth century, he found the place little more than a county grammar school; he left it an institution of National, almost Imperial, importance.

Chiltern has lived ever since on the memory of Dr. Lanchester. It is natural, therefore, that he should be worshipped as the second and greater founder of the community. John Buss is honoured for his picturesque figure and his priceless gift of antiquity, but Lanchester is the presiding deity. His statue stands in the centre of the great quadrangle, his portrait looks down from the walls of the Great Hall; the library, the workshops, and other lesser buildings, or additions to buildings, are called after his name; and every foreign preacher in the School Chapel, whether he is pleading for peace or war, for Christian unity or Church defence, for social service or Imperial expansion, closes his peroration with an appeal to the memory of Abraham Lanchester. The Lanchester tradition permeates the place like an atmosphere, invisible but stimulating. It is difficult to analyse, for, like all great truths, it states itself in different terms to different minds and has a special message for each. To the general public it stands for the Classics and faith in the educational value of Latin verse. To the masters it means a firm belief in the efficacy of the methods, or absence of method, to which they have become attached through long habit. To the Old Chilternians it embodies the social ideas and customs with which they grew up; and to the boys themselves, if it means anything more than a name, it represents a certain immutability and fixity of things, an as-it-was-in-the-beginning-is-now-and-ever-shall-be attitude towards life that appeals to their best conservative instincts. Any change in the hour of a lesson or the colour of a ribbon is regarded as an outrage on the Lanchester tradition, and is popularly supposed to make the dead hero turn in his grave.

In connection with the school tradition it should, perhaps, be mentioned that there is a life of the great man by a friend and contemporary, and that there is nothing in it to suggest that Dr. Lanchester was so acutely sensitive to change. He seems, indeed, to have impressed his biographer as a restless spirit, with new and rather daring ideas about education. Bound in the school colours and stamped with the school crest, this volume is frequently given as a prize, and figures on many a Chiltern bookshelf. But it is seldom read, except by Germans and Nonconformist ministers; for it is ponderously written, and Chiltern is more concerned with the memory than with the life of its great headmaster. In fact, the tradition is an oral rather than a written tradition, and it is perpetually renewed. Chiltern claims to receive a continuous stream of inspiration from its second founder; and the current of the stream runs strongly against change.

But a moment came in the history of the school, when the Lanchester tradition and all that it stands for was threatened with a violent overhauling, if not a complete extinction. After a reign of four-and-twenty years, to all outward appearance peaceful and prosperous, Dr. Gussy suddenly discovered that he had had enough of it and accepted a vacant Deanery. And then the Governing Body, or Council as it is properly called, in one of those fits of absent-mindedness to which governing bodies are liable, elected as his successor a comparatively young man of unorthodox views and no practical experience.

The election was one of the seven wonders of the scholastic world. There had been more than a score of candidates for the vacant post, including a successful curate and an unsuccessful army coach; but it was known that only two of them were in the running, Henry Guthridge and the Rev. Ignatius Lawrence. Mr. Guthridge was a layman and an Old Chilternian; he had served an apprenticeship of five years as assistant master at the school, and had since filled the post of Hilbert Professor and Lecturer at Oxford. Dr. Lawrence, a clergyman of advanced Anglican views, hailed from Cambridge, and had won a certain reputation as headmaster of St. Cuthbert’s, in the north of England. Mr. Guthridge was the official candidate of the staff, and it was believed that he would carry the day, in spite of the Bishop, who was known to be strongly opposed to the appointment of a layman. As for the Rev. Septimus Flaggon, whose name, to everybody’s surprise, was added as a third to the select list, nobody treated his claims seriously. Fellow of an obscure college, tutor to a foreign prince, and subsequently president of some educational institution in Wales, his youth and inexperience ruled him out of serious consideration. It transpired, moreover, that he owed his place among the select to some powerful influence in the background. Some said that he was being run by a member of the Royal family; others suspected the Prime Minister; others, again, the Russian Ambassador. But all agreed that he was, where he was, honoris causa and as a matter of form. The choice obviously lay between Guthridge and Lawrence, with the odds in favour of Guthridge, in spite of his laymanship.