Roll of Honour 2023

F OREWORD (6)

• The erection at the south end of the new cloisters of a new Science School (including laboratory). • The addition, if funds allowed, of further dormitories and classrooms ‘to facilitate the School’s expansion’. There were other further suggestions including one aimed at individual OSE who ‘wished to see the Quad completed - and who offered £1,000 in order that this may be undertaken as a War Memorial’. A committee was formed, chaired by the Warden, with the most senior masters and distinguished OSE to receive the donations, and architect Harold Rogers (OSE) was retained to design any new building designs. By 1922 the appeal had slowly worked its way up to £8,000, but over time the original aims were significantly altered. The Calvary was however erected, not where originally planned, but in the Masters’ Garden and was dedicated at Commemoration (as it was now called rather than Winter Gaudy) in 1919 by the Archdeacon of Oxford, with a OTC Guard of Honour, under CSM Merry. This is where it remained until moved slightly north to make way for the Memorial Library in 1953. With a rather disappointing reaction to the appeal, despite an encouraging start and several reminders by Wilfrid Cowell in the ‘Chronicle’, the original plans of the overall Memorial scheme had to be changed. The Science School was dropped altogether (and had to wait until 1928), the extension to the easterly cloisters abandoned. Instead, Rogers was asked to design a ‘new boarding house with music rooms attached behind, in the Gothic style’ – to be named the ‘War Memorial Buildings’ (later Tilly’s House) in the southeast corner of the Quad to abut the existing New Buildings (later Macnamara’s House). This was commenced in 1922 and completed in 1925 and would use up the remainder of the Fund. In 1924 John Millington Sing (Warden 1904-1913) funded and unveiled two commemorative stone memorials in the cloisters next to the Chapel, facing into the Quad with the names of 121 OSE and teachers, thus including every name numerically, and to confuse the later researcher, naming names of those lost after the war ended! Also, one name was spelt wrong! Meantime, throughout the war and after it ended individual plaques depicting the fallen were mounted around the wooden panels in Chapel, cardboard during wartime, and then replaced with oak later. These gave the name of the individual lost, dates and location of death, most of these being accurate but there are one or two which may need changing, if desired. By the time the war ended these plaques had reached right around the Chapel walls.