The Story of a Great Schoolmaster

by H. G. Wells

The idea of a House of Vision was therefore the later of the two. Very early in the war a boy of great promise, Eric Yarrow, the son of Sir Alfred Yarrow, the great shipbuilder, was killed at Ypres, and parent and schoolmaster met at the house of the former to mourn their common loss. Sanderson and Eric Yarrow had been close friends; they had discussed and developed the idea of a creative reconstruction of industry together; Eric Yarrow was to have played a part in the industrial world similar to the part that Roy Sanderson was to have played in the educational world.

The two men sat late at night and talked of these vanished hopes. Could not something be done, they asked, to record at least the spirit of these fine intentions, and they sketched out a project for a memorial building that should be a symbol and incitement to effort for the reorganised industrial state. It should be in a sense a museum containing a record of human effort and invention in the past; a museum of the development of work and production and a statement of the economic problems before mankind. Sir Alfred produced a cheque more than sufficient to cover the building of such a memorial as they had planned, and Sanderson returned to Oundle to put the realisation of the project in hand. Probably the two of them also discussed the need for a memorial chapel and probably neither of them realised a possible clash between that older project and the new one they were now starting.

It was in the early stage when the Eric Yarrow memorial was to be nothing more than a museum of industrial history and organisation that Sanderson set afoot the building at Oundle which is now known by that name. Apparently he did not get much inspiration over to the architect, and at any rate the edifice that presently rose was a very weak and dull-looking one, more suitable for a herbarium or a minor lecture-hall than for a temple of creative dreams. It was a premature materialisation, done in the stress and under the cramping limitations of war time. Long before it was finished Sanderson's imaginations had outgrown it. I think this unconfessed architectural disappointment probably played a large part in the subsequent development of the idea of the school chapel, still to be planned, still capable of being made a spacious and beautiful building. To the latter dream he transferred more and more of the ideas that arose properly out of the germ of the Eric Yarrow memorial.

At first the House of Vision was to have been no more than an industrial museum. It was not to be used as a class-room or lecture-room. It was to be empty of chairs, desks, and the like, and clear for any one to go in to think and dream. About its walls, diagrams and charts were to display the progress of man from the sub-human to his present phase of futile power and hope. There were to be time-charts of the whole process of history, and a few of these have been made. As his idea ripened it broadened. The memorial ceased to be a symbol merely of industrial reorganisation and progress, and became a temple to the whole human adventure. He began to stress first social and then imaginative growth. The charts were to be full and accurate, everything shown was to be precisely true, but there was to be no teaching in the building, no direction beyond the form and spirit of the place.

And so while the scaffolds of the workmen rose about the commonplace little erection in the school fields, the schoolmaster in his day-dreams realised more and more the full measure of the opportunity he was missing.

The realisation of the past is the realisation of the future, and it was an easy transition to pass to the idea of this building as an expression of the creative will in man. In it the individual boy was to realise the aim of the school and of schooling and living. It was to be the eye of the school, its soul, its headlight.

The idea of this 'House of Vision' was still growing in his mind when he died. He had not yet settled upon a name for it, though he had tried over a number of names—a House of Vision, which is the name we have taken for it here, the Home of Silence, the Hall of Industry, the Anthropaeum, the Making of Man, the Life Creative, the Soul of the School. All these names converge upon the end he was seeking. This approach by trial, by leaving the idea to shape itself for a time and then taking it up again, by talking it over with this man and that, was very characteristic of his mental processes.

A member of the staff recalls a stage in the development of the idea. 'I talked with the headmaster about the Yarrow Memorial in October 1920,' he says. 'He then seemed to dally with a suggestion to name it the "Temple of the World"—he expressed his hatred of the tendency to call it the "Museum." I gathered that his idea was to fill it with charts of all things and all ages, including pictures of at least all the world's great men—then to turn a boy loose in it, thereby to realise his position in the world as a unit of its time, as opposed to the inculcation of any idea of his having a part in his nationality only. His root idea seemed to be that it should be a place for meditation—restful as well as invigorating.'

Here is a passage written by Sanderson himself a little later. The idea ripens and broadens out very manifestly.

'Every school, every locality and industry,' he writes, 'might build within their boundaries a new kind of chapel, a heritage, a temple—a beautiful building in which are gathered together and exhibited the records of man's great deeds and of man's progress, and the records of his needs. It is such a "Hall of Needs" that we regard the Yarrow Memorial, and to this end it is being equipped.'