It gives me great pleasure to welcome our friends from Merchant
Taylors’ School to Chesham Rd this morning. Within the last few days at
Berkhamsted we have been entertaining the MTS Oxbridge applicants to a
reciprocal series of practice interviews. Some of the boys may even be playing
today. There was a time when Evelyn Waugh’s Decline
and Fall was required reading for anyone with Oxbridge pretensions, in the
confident anticipation of three years of dissolution and self-indulgence. The
book begins with the resurrection dinner of the ‘Boller Club’ at ‘Scone College,
Oxford’ after an extended ban, and progresses to the disaster that overwhelms
one of life’s innocents that evening on his return from reading a paper to the
Theological Society. The poor chap finds himself ‘sent down’ for gross moral
turpitude, with a career as a schoolmaster in Wales his only recourse.
The recently retired Headmaster of MTS and I were friends
and contemporaries at Queens’ in the late 1970s, and fellow members of a social
club of what we probably both now regard as pretentious notoriety, pale when
set against the lurid colours of the ‘Boller Club’, but the fact that we both
ended up as schoolmasters some may see as some sort of cautionary tale. ‘Mr
Pennyfeather,’ begins the Headmaster, on interviewing the ingénu,’I have been acquainted with the scholastic profession for
long enough to know that no-one ever enters it…unless he has a very good
reason…which he wishes to conceal.’ So be warned, all you thrustingly
ambitious, would-be Oxbridge scholars, reaching out for the glittering prizes:
it still could all go horribly wrong!
Since we are in the month of ‘Movember’, I thought I would
share with you a photograph of Steve and myself in a ‘Kangaroo Club’ photo of
the late 1970s. It was not a good decade for fashion, it is true, but we both
had some hair and were both a few pounds lighter.
But I digress. This is always a fiercely-contested, but
mutually respectful, fixture between long-standing opponents. Berkhamsted have
won the last couple convincingly, but the record over the last 50 years is
remarkably even. This is one of our most valued fixtures, and I trust that all
the teams will play in a manner that befits a fixture of such longevity between
two fine schools.
Our referee today is Niamh Hennessy who refereed the opening
game of the season against St Albans. I recall she had to dash off to a wedding
reception that day, so I hope she will have time today to enjoy some typical
Berkhamsted post-match hospitality.
Dick Mowbray,
Master i/c Rugby
Berkhamsted.
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