St Edward's 150 Years - by Nicola Hunter

St Edward’s: 150 Years

Chapter 6 / St Edward’s and the Wars

WARDEN KENDALL

‘… there is hope (of peace). From the knowledge of the quality of the service you are giving at home and overseas, by land, by sea, in the air, in prison camps, and in hospitals and far-off jungle swamps. From everywhere there comes the story of duty well done, sometimes with high reward, sometimes just a passing mention in some friend’s letter home; or a card from a prison camp.’ – Warden Kendall, in a letter to OSE in March 1944.

Left: Wartime PT c. 1942. Below: VE Day on the Quad.

Opposite: Memorial Chapel plaque to those that died in the SecondWorldWar.

many, saying, ‘it should be recorded with pride that the following were OSE: Guy Penrose Gibson VC, Arthur Banks GC (Posthumous), Edmund Goddard CGM, Charles Alfred George Cook GM, and Sam Preston Haighton GM. Haighton was a Seaman in the Royal Navy and was awarded his George Medal for ‘courage and coolness during an enemy air attack’. The end of the Second World War came at midnight on 8 May 1945 and there was a Service of Thanksgiving in the Chapel. In the evening there had been a sing-song in Big School followed by the floodlighting of the Chapel for the first time since the summer of 1939. Warden Kendall spoke saying that he felt there had been ‘no time during the war when he had called for the help of the boys when they had not responded to the call’ and he said of the OSE generally that ‘they, including those who had fallen, would be present in spirit under the reflection of the floodlit Chapel’. Commemoration in 1945 was attended by over 200 OSE, most still in uniform, many wearing their decorations and many obviously wounded. The Chronicle said ‘All that we felt found its fullest expression in Chapel on Sunday. We remembered our founders, benefactors and absent friends with a greater intensity of feeling and devotion than ever before. As we stood while the Warden read the names of the OSE who had fallen in the war, pride and sorrow were mingled in our hearts in that greatest paradox of the Christian religion, the glory of the Cross.’ Once again the School had to decide how to commemorate those who had lost their lives or been incapacitated by the

war. There was to be an apsidal wall in the Chapel, giving the names of the dead; grants were to be given to educate sons of OSE killed or incapacitated during the war at the School and lastly a building to house a library and speech hall were to be built, if possible. The ‘New Library’ was opened in 1953 at Kendall’s last Gaudy by the Bishop of Exeter, Robert Mortimer (B, 1916–21), and was used from Autumn Term 1954. The Royal Air Force gave a memorial window (now installed in the Old Library), which was dedicated in 1955. The two world wars had certainly had their effect on our School, and the Wardens of the time must have found it very hard to bear, losing men to the wars who so recently had been walking across the Quad as boys.

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