Pugin family, and others. When the Baptist minister in the parish was dying, it was my father who read the Bible to him. Such was England in those days, guided by local men with strong mutual antagonisms and intimate community of feeling. This vision was one source of my interest in history, and in education.
Another influence in the same direction was the mass of archæological remains with their interest and beauty. Canterbury Cathedral with its splendour and its memories was sixteen miles distant. As I now write I can visualize the very spot where Becket fell a.d. 1170, and can recall my reconstruction of the incident in my young imagination. Also there is the tomb of Edward, The Black Prince (died a.d. 1376).
But closer to my home, within the Island or just beyond its borders, English history had left every type of relic. There stood the great walls of Richborough Castle built by the Romans, and the shores of Ebbes Fleet where the Saxons and Augustine landed. A mile or so inland was the village of Minster with its wonderful Abbey Church, retaining some touches of Roman stone-work, but dominated by its glorious Norman architecture. On this spot Augustine preached his first sermon. Indeed the Island was furnished with Norman, and other mediaeval churches, built by the Minster monks, and second only to their Abbey. My father’s church was one of them, with a Norman nave.
Just beyond Richborough is the town of Sandwich. At that time it retained the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its Flemish houses lining the streets. Its town-records state that in order to check the silting up of the harbour, the citizens invited skilful men from the Low Countries — “cunning in waterworks.” Unfortunately they failed, so that the town remained static from that period. In the last half century, it has been revived by a golf course, one of the best in England. I feel a sense of profanation amidst the relics of the Romans, of the Saxons, of Augustine, the mediæval monks, and the ships of the Tudors and the Stuarts. Golf seems rather a cheap ending to the story.
At the age of fourteen, in the year 1875, I was sent to school at Sherborne in Dorsetshire, at the opposite end of southern England. Here the relics of the past were even mote obvious. In this year (1941) the school is to celebrate its twelve-hundredth anniversary. It dates from St. Aldhelm, and claims Alfred the Great as a pupil. The school acquired the monastery buildings, and its grounds are bounded by one of the most magnificent Abbeys in existence, with tombs of Saxon princes. In my last two years there the Abbots’ room (as we believed) was my private study; and we worked under the sound of the Abbey bells, brought from the Field of The Cloth of Gold by Henry VIII.
T have written thus far in order to show by example how the imaginative life of the southern English professional class during the last half of the nineteenth century was moulded. My own experience was not in the least bit
