Oct 1958

COMMEMORATION, 1958 In such a summer it was perhaps inevitable that the weather should leave its watermark on the Commemoration week-end; it did, however, wait until lunch-time on Saturday to do so, and, even then, the intrepid cricketers provided two hours' entertainment on a rain-soaked pitch and the Band was able to give its usual polished performance under Drum-Major Bellwood. The full programme of boat races was carried out, and the large number of visitors were able to visit the Hobbies and Art exhibitions or to study profitably the Appeal Fund information, so attractively set out in the Hall.

At the Prize-giving in the Clifton Cinema, Sir Charles Morris, Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University, was welcomed in the traditional manner by T. D. J. Layfield, winner of the newly-awarded P. E. Lord Prize for Classics. To the admiration and surprise of most of his audience and the frankly unbelieving astonishment of many younger members of the School, Layfield received an immediate and impromptu reply from our distinguished visitor in the Latin tongue.

When the Head Master had delivered his report, Sir Charles presented the prizes and then addressed the assembly in a more generally comprehensible language.

After congratulating Layfield on his speech, Sir Charles expressed his pleasure at re-visiting the scene of his brother's triumphs and commented on the "rich and busy life" of the School, as detailed in the Head Master's report. He then took one extract from the report as his "text" : the Head Master's statement that it was now an accepted state of affairs that two thirds of the boys in Sixth forms should study the sciences and one third the arts. Whilst acknowledging that we in Britain educated our specialists as well as any other country, Sir Charles felt that the Public Schools really owed their justly great reputation to the education they had given to those men —the great majority—who did not require their specialist knowledge for their life work—in public life, industry, business, the professions or, indeed, in their own private lives. Formerly these men had mostly been educated on the arts side; if only one third of the boys now leaving school were to come from this side, most of these would require their specialist knowledge for their careers, and the great bulk of men not requiring any specialist knowledge would have to come from the other two thirds, brought up on the sciences. These would be the men who would be performing the majority of the great variety of jobs in the world, and their education needed to be "well conceived and to have a good structure". It was the Public Schools who had always provided this education "par excellence", but they were going to find it increasingly difficult to do so, as the range of modern knowledge grew steadily wider. Yet, maintained Sir Charles, it was this kind of education which "enabled us all to live together, to profit from one another's knowledge, to understand one another".

With the forgivable enthusiasm of youth, boys today wanted to know 8